BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

For those customers that requested it, here’s a shot of our helpdesk setup.

Dual head monitors enable us to keep an eye on the call queues and make it easier to update MS CRM without flipping windows all the time.

The bars on the windows stop the guys escaping to the Indian takeaway which is right outside!

As a small company it’s great to know we have the backup of being able to call Microsoft PSS if we’re ever in a sticky situation.

Previously we have only needed to call PSS if we’ve had a “business down” situation and our internal escalation procedure hits a dead end as well. I can’t sing the praises of the guys at PSS high enough. I think the word that describes them best is tenacious. Once they have a grip on the issue they don’t let go until it’s resolved, they really do take ownership of the problem. With the possible exception (depending on who you talk to) of Sage support the PSS guys can certainly teach most other support departments a thing or two!

In this particular case we were trying to set up a site to site vpn using an IPSEC tunnel between ISA server 2004 (running on SBS2003) and a Draytek Vigor SDSL router. It turned out we had made some configuration mistakes with ISA 2004. As well as that, we weren’t entirely sure we had configured the Draytek correctly either, not that that stopped Milind (from PSS) logging on to the Draytek router and helping us out - that’s what I mean by tenacious! These guys really are something else. Milind hounded me by phone and email until we found a resolution, rather than the other way round.

As the ISA issue wasn’t really a business down situation we ended up using one of our 5 free support calls to PSS. I was impressed to see they treat these with as much importance as the business down problems we have reported previously.

Don’t forget, as a registered partner you have the ability to call PSS for business down situations. Don’t be afraid to ask for help - it is truly amazing what Microsoft PSS can do for you if your back is against the wall!

I’ve had a few issues with Vista on my laptop recently so I thought I’d take a look at the new reliability & performance monitor. It contains lots of useful information in the form of charts, graphs, diagnostic tools etc. One of the most useful is the reliability monitor which gives a good indication of system stability.

The screenshot below shows an index out of 10 for stability (mine averages 8.13 at the moment). This is due to the failures you can see listed; 1 application failure, 2 Windows failures and 1 miscellaneous). Highlighting a failure gives a breakdown of the problem including failure details and other useful information that can be used to diagnose the issue.

This is obviously a great tool for helpdesks to utilise and we are certainly going to incorporate it into our data collection procedures we use when we are diagnosing faults.

Which way to go? Kaseya? Level Platforms? Neither? Looks like Level Platforms is more switched on to the SMB space to me. Particularly as they have this offer running for Microsoft Small Business Specialists. Yes I know the offer is old news but I only just spotted it Certainly nothing to lose as you get a whole 12 months subscription worth $720.00! Now where did I put my MS Partner ID?