Busy busy buzz buzz week here folks. First and foremost, we have our own Todd Colbeck attending the AutoTask Community event in Orlando, so keep your eye peeled at www.smbnation.com for updates. For what it’s worth – with summer here, I found myself biking a 70-miler on Saturday around Lake Washington. That was tough. I am sore.

Show me your sticker! As you can see – I’ve affixed the Ubergeek bumper sticker to my automobile. Lemme see what you got. Email me at harryb@smbnation.com

Have a great week folks!

Cheers…harrybbb

Come On In – Windows 8 Water is FINE!

Summer is family reunion season. This morning in my home office on bucolic Bainbridge Island, I held a Windows family reunion. From left to right, you see grandfather Windows XP, father Windows 7 and son Windows 8. More importantly, at the family reunion, I happily announced that I have cut over to Windows 8 on my production laptop. So you are probably now asking yourself: “Is Harrybbb suffering an inherited case of dementia? Has he lost his mind?”

No.

In April, I wrote a blog asking: “Where were you 20 years ago during the Rodney King riots?” I shared with you that I was installing Windows 3.1 while watching the riots on CNN (yes – CNN existed back then son!). Being out front with the new-new has served my career and net worth well. It’s one of the habits of highly successful people. Yes, I am running Windows 8 in a production environment today.

Read the rest of this article here

How to Conduct a Network Assessment Remotely

By Bob Vogel of PerformanceIT

I just learned about a nifty trick from an IT service provider in Washington DC who had a client in Chicago asking him to do a complete network assessment.

The client had an internal IT resource handling a lot of the day-to-day issues, but had outsourced the monitoring, patch management and support – all of which could be done remotely -- to the service provider in DC. Now, the client had some concerns about what the internal IT guy was up to, and wanted an independent assessment of the network set-up.

Since this was an existing client, the service provider wanted to help. He could get some of what he needed remotely from his RMM Tool, but not every device had agents running on them, and there would be some big gaps in user activities, permissions, and so forth on the security side that the RMM tool couldn’t access.

Read the rest of this article here

Back To the Future!

Webinar: Announcing SMB Nation Fall 2012 – the 10th Annual. June 14 10-11am PDT

ALL Attendees GET Amazon Gift Card!!!!

Date: Thursday, June 14, 2012

Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am PDT

Speaker: Harry Brelsford, Founder of SMB Nation, Inc. and Cloud Nation

Find out why it’s “Back to the Future” for the 10th Annual SMB Nation Fall Conference.

We’re bringing back the old guard to honor and appreciate that amazing ride it’s been. But we’re keenly focused on the future and the excitement generated by unexpected opportunities in the SMB technology area. In the webinar you’ll learn about the fall conference with an overview of the content and speakers.

For more information or to register, please visit the site here

StorageCraft Launches New Recovery Zone Blog

Guest post from StorageCraft

This week we launched our Recovery Zone, which is an upgrade in every sense of the word from our old corporate blog. The StorageCraft Recovery Zone is a resource center for partners and non-partners alike, providing industry news, white papers, case studies, product info, and more. It’s growing every day and we hope that it will ultimately evolve into a community site where users can provide feedback, request content, and communicate with each other about disaster recovery, running a small business, and more.

Sites that are committed to providing valuable content are really important for the industry. As we’ve interviewed partners for various projects, we’ve learned that there are a lot of holes in the IT and DR processes that good content can fill for the average small and medium sized IT shop.

Read the rest of this article here

Geekonomics: Fry’s PASSES Stress Test!

In developing the soon-to-be released pocketMBA 2.0, I am on a tear to make it happen. That includes ramping up the education infrastructure necessary to deliver a world class curriculum to the SMB Nation community. Part of my journey involves making capital investments in IT, just like you and your clients. The following is a story about how I performed a geekonomics stress test on a major national technology retailer.

Yesterday I went to Fry’s, a well-known national technology retailer, to purchase some necessary equipment, including a pen tablet for curriculum development. Walking into its store in south Seattle, I noticed a sign, seen in the picture right, which claims it will match internet prices. Little did I know that I’d challenge Fry’s and have a geek learning/teaching moment.

Read the rest of this article here

Summer Geek Parties

Time to party folks!

NOLA. We’re getting early reports out of New Orleans that Jeff Middleton’s SBS Migration “Faith” conference was a rollicking success. This event is well-known for its party atmosphere. More importantly, many of the conference attendees are now on a weeklong cruise with no mobile phones, no laptops, no Internet café or Facebooking allowed. Bravo!

Brian Livingston. Supergeek Brian Livingston, best-selling Windows Secrets author, held a “Welcome Home” party this past weekend. Brian and his wife Margie have recently returned from extensive WW travels. I met author Burt Webb who touted his just released “Rare Earths” novel that I’ll review in a future newsletter.

Learn more about these events and our company picnic here!