e-Tech Software makes Gold Partner!

Well, we've been at this for quite awhile, and our company finally made Microsoft Gold Partner. We've achieved 4 Competencies, and when one of our customers asked Jay what that meant, the answer was "We get to order new shirts!" Yes, that is true (and new business cards).

All in all though, I'm certain it won't push us to change much of our direction. Small Business Server Implementations, Hassle Free Support, and amazing Microsoft CRM implementations will still be the core of our service offering.

As a business owner I've been toying with the idea of purchasing some other support companies so that we can grow our business. The more I learn to focus on the business, the less 'techie' I become. More on this in an upcoming post.

What to do when it all goes wrong

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been doing battle with a 2003 Small Business Server that is out to get me. It's true... Have you ever had one of those customers that just _nothing_ goes right? Well, it's their server, and it's been this way with them on everything we do since the very beginning.

In this case, I've had to join a new laptop to their domain for a new employee. The laptop just had a fit joining through the connect computer wizard. I did all of the things that one is supposed to do: I verified that the wireless NIC was disabled, etc. Eventually, by brute force, we got it joined to the domain. Something still wasn't right.

The laptop connected to exchange with no problem, but whenever this user wanted to access a shared drive, shared printer, etc., a dialog box would open up asking her to authenticate. Nothing would work to login and authenticate. Not her username, not the administrator account information, not domain\username or domain\administrator, etc.

Soooo, it looked like a group policy problem to me, and I did a net share and noticed that the sysvol wasn't there. Not good.

I started focusing my attention on the server. The more I dug into it, the more I noticed conflicting error messages, conflicting symptoms, etc. The Sysvol would show up if I typed Net Share in the command prompt, but if I went to the run menu (from the server) and typed \\servername\sysvol, I got an error. Hmm....

I ran the SBS Best Practice Analyzer and fixed the normal stuff that showed up on that (chimney stack, etc).

Here's what I finally did to solve the problem...

1) Sacrificed a small chicken...

then, I got really serious.

- Disabled RSS as per KB 936594

- Checked for SMB signing policies in gpmc.msc

- Made the changes in Default Domain Controller Policy:

- Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (always) DISABLED

- Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (if server agrees) ENABLED

- Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always) DISABLED

- Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (if client agrees) ENABLED

- Domain member: Digitally encrypt or sign secure channel data (always) DISABLED

- Domain member: Digitally encrypt secure channel data (when it is possible) ENABLED

- Domain member: Digitally sign secure channel data (when it is possible) ENABLED

- Domain member: Require strong (Windows 2000 or later) session key DISABLED

- Did gpupdate /force

- Client machines were able to access shares

I'm not sure what patch, etc changed some of these settings, but after doing this, I could see the sysvol locally. When I went back to the laptop, I rebooted, and had no problems with this user's machine accessing server resources.

I've never had this happen before, but am thankful it is finally resolved.

How do you teach people how to leverage technology for their businesses?

Ok, I've been sitting here with a three page document about blogging that I wrote to give to my customers, and I realized that none of my customers will actually read it.

Don't get me wrong, I have some very smart customers that have some of the most successful businesses in Gwinnett County, but they really aren't that interested in anything technology related. Now that I think about it, that's probably why they hired me...

The problem is that I have so many ideas that I want to get across to them about how this can help their businesses that I can't help overwhelming them. I've always been good about explaining very technical things to non technical people, but how in the world do you translate the very things that will help them catalyst their businesses easily without sounding condescending? I'm sure I'll figure it out with the help of my friends and my business coach, but any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

We moved to our new office

I've always wanted e-Tech to grow to the point that I had my own office and team. Over the past few years, we've been a 'virtual team', and all worked out of our houses. We held our meetings at our CEO Centers virtual office, where they answered the phone, etc. It sounded impressive, but for me it just never felt 'real'. Well, after 1 month of being in our new office space, I can't explain how excited I am! It's nice that we were all able to have a team meeting in our own conference room, etc. Very nice!!!!