Marketing – 8/27/2008

Can you believe its the last week of August?  Can you believe its the last week of class lecture?  Wow.

For our last foray into marketing, we are going to be talkinga about and emmersing ourselves into personal sales.  I realize that most if not all of you will be going into sales, but studying sales is still important — we will all be selling ourslves in some form or fashion.  We may be selling ourselves to a hiring manager in convincing them to hire us, or selling ourselves to our spouses trying to convince them of something (like that iPod touch that I really really need).

So on that note, we talked about a couple of sales-related topics.  First of all, we talked about ways that companies organize their salespeople.  There are four basic structures we have for sales forces:

1. Territorial – Each sales person is responsible for a given geographical area.
2. Product – Each salesperson is an expert with a particular product/product class and handles it exclusively.
3. Customer – Each sales person is responsible for a given customer or customers.
4. Complex – A hybrid of top 3.

Obviously, not many companies use a pure form of territorial, product or customer, and therefore have some mix of the three.

Despite how the salespeople are organized, there is a process that sales people go through in order to get a sale.  In fact, there are seven steps:

1. Prospecting/Qualifying – Is this person I’m going to contact even a possible customer?
2. Preapproach – Now that I know this person could potential buy from me, what are the best ways of approaching and talking to this person?
3. Approach – Actually making initial contact
4. Presentation/Demonstration – This can be the meat of the sales call.  This is where a salesperson shows their chops and lets the potential customers see the ins and outs of the product (or service) in an attempt to convince them to buy.  Depending on the product, and depending on the customer, this can take either very little time or lots of time.
5. Handling Objections – Most customers will say no.  Good salespeople know how to handle a “no” and eventually turn them around to a “yes”.  One good trick to this is to turn the “no” into a “why”, and then to answer that “why”.  For example, if I try to sell Johnny a car, and he says that it’s $10,000 too expensive — I would turn that “no, I don’t want that car it’s to expensive” into a “Why would I want to pay $10,000 more than I planned to spend just to get this car.”
6. Closing the Sale – Once I convince Johnny that he belongs in this car, I ask for the sale.  This is very hard for salespeople to do — it can feel pushy and for people-centric individuals such as myself, it feels like we might be breaking the rapport we’ve worked so hard in establishing over the last few steps.
7. Followup – Once the sale has been completed, I make a contact with the customer a few days later to see how the product/service is working, and if they have any questions.  I’m careful during this step to remind the customer that they made a good choice and, if appropriate, ask for referrals and start the whole process again!

Homework

• Chapter 16 – Company Case

Pro/Server – 8/26/2008

As we see this class start winding down (week 9!), we covered chapters 9 and 10, which meant we did a lot of talking today about File Sharing and Printing.

There are some things you guys should really make sure you hit hard when you study.  First of all, know all you can about effective permissions.  In other words, if I’m a member of two groups which have different permissions on the same folder, be able to figure out what permissions I have, as members of both groups.  If the two groups have differing NTFS Allow permissions, than I have the most open of the two.  For example if,  as a member of the Administrator group, I have Allow Full Control set, and as a member of the Teachers group, I have only the Allow Read permission set, then I do have Full Control.

If I have conflicting Sharing and NTFS permissions, then the most restrictive set applies.  So, if I have as an Administrator the NTFS Allow Full Control permission, and the Sharing Allow Read, I will only be able to Read the document, not change it or delete it, etc.

After lunch, we reviewed printing concepts.  Make sure you know about printer pooling, and know that there is a difference between printers (software) and print devices (hardware).

Homework:

• Chapter Nine – Review Questions
• Chapter Ten – Review Questions

Managing a Network Environment – 8/25/2008

Tonight we really dug in and completed Chapters 11-13 — completing the book!  Specifically what we talked about was:

- Chapter 11: Security.  We played with, among other things, security templates.
- Chapter 12: Backups.  Data backups, specifically.  Normal, Incremental and Differential — oh my.
- Chapter 13: System Backups.  Different than data backups.  We performed both nonauthoritative and authoritative restores of Active Directory.

After all was said and done, we drug our happy butts home at about 9pm.

MS Exchange – 8/25/2008

Today we conquered chapters seven – nine.  Chapter 7 covered the concept of virtual servers.  When I first started studying Exchange a couple years back, the concept of virtual servers confused me a little.  Up until that point, whenever I referred to virtual servers, I was talking about server virtualization, where an entire server installation was virtualized and ran inside another server OS.  These virtual servers are different in that they are simply instances of services that run on the server.  Traditionally, for example, we used to have a separate physical computer for each HTTP server, each mail server, etc. that we needed.  Exchange will allow us to set up multiple virtual servers so that each of these services can be run from one physical server.  It’s really nice too since we can set up one physical server to run multiple instances of the same type of service, so we can have, for example, two IMAP servers running, each with different authentication requirements.

In additon, we talked about SMTP, which is the protocol that allows us to send mail.  (IMAP and POP3 are e-mail receiving protocols).  Chapter nine dealt with security and how it interfaces with Exchange.

Homework:

• Chapter Seven: Review Questions
• Chapter Eight: Review Questions
• Chapter Nine: Review Questions

Office Ultimate For the Price of a Tank Of Gas

If you’re looking for a copy of MS Office that has EVERYTHING that Microsoft puts in each of the iterations of Office, than now is the time to act: Until September 8, you can get a copy of Office Ultimate for a cool $60.  All you need to do is prove you’re a student, which is simply providing your valid .edu e-mail address.

This is a completely good deal.  The sticker price of Office Ultimate is $680, which means if you buy office at $60, you’re getting an about 91% discount.  Pretty decent, especially since the student version of Office is $110!

The programs you get with Office Ultimate are pretty cool too: we all know about Word/Excel/Powerpoint and even Access, but Office Ultimate also includes Groove (incredible collaboration tool) and OneNote — perhaps the most underrated Office App to come down the line in a long, long time.  I love OneNote so much that I’ve considered buying it separately for around $90.

Just so everyone knows, I’m in no way affiliated with Microsoft (other than holding their certifications), and I don’t receive anything if you buy this.  I’m just trying to pass on a really good deal!

Anyway, more details can be found on this website.

It’s Been a Hard(ware) Week

Wow, what a strange set of days it has been.

As many of you know, I spent the latter part of last week and half of this week without Internet access at home.  That in and of itself wasn’t necessarily bad since my schedule last week was one of the more hectic ones in recent history.  On Tuesday, as I’ve addressed in another post, I was able to get my home back online by purchasing a shiny new Linksys 802.11g router that kind of looks like a stealth bomber.  And you’ll be proud to know I didn’t get it from Best Buy!  Ha ha!

On Wednesday, a place of business I’ve been doing some consulting work for was having connection problems as well and after doing some troubleshooting, we discovered that — lo and behold — their router was malfunctioning too.  So, back to ComputersPlus to buy the exact same router from the exact same salesperson.  Deja vu.

Thursdays are my Holy Trinity Lutheran School days, and when I arrived at 7:45 this morning, I was immediately greeted with the news that the Internet had been down for 3 days.  Ugh.  Double-ugh since what I had planned on teaching relied on Internet usage.  So, I walked down to the mechanical room where our networking hardware is located and … well, I’m sure you can guess.  Go ahead and try.

Actually, you’re wrong.  This time it was the cable modem — it was flashing green lights at me at a pretty regular pace.  I wanted to know what those green lights flashing that way meant, but since I very well couldn’t do an Internet seach on it, I was just going to have to settle on knowing that the cable modem, in general, wasn’t working.

I’m posting this from Holy Trinity now, Insight came out and promptly replaced the modem (apparently they refused to yesterday) and now the Internet has been restored to every place I work.  Woohoo!

Marketing – 8/20/2008

Today we took the incredibly interesting topic of business to business marketing by the horns and tackled it down to the proverbial dirt and kicked it twice in the hide.  Hoo-rah.  So, uhm, yeah.

Homework:

• Chapter Six: Company Case.

Pro/Server – 8/19/2008

As we forged ahead in our study of managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 uhm, server, we today explored the concepts of users and groups and, after lunch, computer accounts.

First of all, we reviewed the concepts and differences of local users and domain users — local user accounts are stored on a local machine and domain user accounts are stored on a domain controller (and can be accessed from any computer on the network).  User accounts are essential in the Windows networking world, because that’s how domain controllers know that you are who you say you are and therefore what rights and permissions to give you.  It does this by assigning these rights and permissions to a Security Identifier (SID) which is assigned to each user.

Groups are just what their names imply: groups of similar users.  For example, I might put all financial employees into a Finance group, and all managers into a Managers group.  For a company’s financial manager, I might put their user account into both the Finance and Managers groups.  See how this works?

Remember that there are two types of groups, and these types have up to three scopes available to them.  The two types are security and distribution groups.  Security groups are for us to add users to and then add security requirements to the group.  For instance, to keep all of my interns out of a Payroll folder, I might add them to an Interns group and then on the Payroll ACL, assign the Deny Read permission to the Interns group.  Ta-da.  Distribution groups are for messaging applications in the server environment to use to get messages out — much like a distribution list inside an e-mail client, except this is AD-enabled.

The three scopes refer to how far the groups reach.  They are: Domain Local, Global and Universal.  Domain Local groups typically only have Global groups as their members and are used to assign permissions to resources.  For example, I might have a Domain Local group set up for people who can use a printer, and call it (creatively) PrintUsers.  Next, I would assign the Allow Print permission to the PrintUsers group.  Then, if I want users in the Accounting, Finance and Sales group to all have access to the printer, I would add those three groups to the PrintUsers Domain Local groups.  Whew.  Domain Local groups, as their names suggest, are local to the domain in which they are created.

Global groups on the other hand are designed to hold user accounts and can reach the entire forest.  A majority of the groups you will be making will be Global Security groups.

Universal groups are groups that transcend Forest boundaries.  In order to have access to these groups, we need to raise our domain functional level to at least Windows 2000 Native mode.  Of course, a ramification of doing this is that any old NT4 PDCs still left running will be rendered useless (although they already are!  ha!), so do this with caution.

Once we arrived in the afternoon we explored the concept of computer accounts and worked our way through an incredibly short lab regarding them.

Homework:

• Chapter Six: Review Questions
• Chapter Seven: Review Questions
• Chapter Eight: Review Questions

Managing a Network Environment – 8/18/2008

Monday night’s class was all about DNS.  What it is, how to install it (heh) and what it’s used for. 

In order to fully understand it, we followed the lab in chapter nine and made our child domain controllers DNS servers.  Afterwards, we messed around with various zones and then ran into replication issues as our DCs weren’t set to the same time (argh!).  LIfe was good.  For chapter ten, we played with concepts such as zone delegation (storing a subdomain on an entirely different server) and stub zones (a zone holding only SOA and NS records, designed to easily find an authoratative zone).

Homework:

• Chapter Nine: Review Questions
• Chapter Ten: Review Questions

MS Exchange – 8/18/2008

Ok, sorry for the long delay in posting.  Long story, short: I’ve had Internet problems for about a week before I could finally sit down and work them out — my wireless router was bad.  It was a far more interesting tale than that, but alas, a new router and several trips around town, I’m back online and my withdrawal twitches have started to subside.

Waaaay back on Monday, we covered Chapters Five and Six, covering recipient objects and public folders inside exchange.  We talked about various types of recipients inside Exchange (a recipient is an object that can receive mail, such as a user or a group) and how to set them up.  Remember the differences between mail-enabled and mailbox enabled users, as well as mail-enabled groups.

Switching gears after lunch, we talked about public folders and their uses for MS Exchange.  We looked ath te different ways to make public folders and what kinds of objects we can place in them.  We also practiced setting up a public folder with an e-mail address.  This is a great feature for situations where several users need to have access to the same e-mail messages — they can all simply access the folder in which these messages appear and have immediate access to them.

Homework:

• Chapter Five: Review Questions
• Chapter Six: Review Questions