Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

I noticed the Service Manager beta is available for applications on the Connect site. It won't be available until May, but you can beat the crowds by signing up today.

As I've detailed a bit, I've been working on a cost justification for an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft for my company. It has been a long and somewhat arduous process, but I finally feel like we're reaching the end. I found out one major thing today. It will seem obvious after I say it. It might even be common knowledge for most of you.

The EA gets cheaper after the initial three year term. The initial contract is for licenses plus software assurance. Renewals are SA only. I told you it was obvious. I would suggest that any cost computations go at least six years, since the subsequent years are where the real value is.

I would have posted more over the last couple of days, but I've spent all of my free time playing Desktop Tower Defense. DTD is an excellent strategy game that is very simple, but a ton of fun. Essentially, the player places towers of various types around the board to stop the 'creeps' who are trying to reach the other side of the screen.

Play on medium or higher and you can submit your scores. When prompted for a group, put in MyITForum and it will add your score to the group scoreboard. If you're too ashamed of your score, don't be. I'm still getting the hang of it.

One of the most difficult things a person can ever do is prove that a company should buy something that "everyone knows" that they need. When everyone knows, it seems that no one can prove that it is a good idea. Often, it is hard to quantify very obvious benefits, like better visibility to current state for planning purposes. Usually, especially for large purchases, an ROI calculator will be used to compute the return on investment and help quantify those intangible benefits.

I spent a couple of hours today, with a group of people, plugging numbers into an ROI calculator for a project that we're working on. It was an interesting exercise that left us all feeling that we weren't any closer to making any determinations. A big problem that we had was that we didn't believe the numbers that were coming out of it. Any research organization - Gartner, Forrester, and the like - bases the calculation on the research that they have done. That's great, but an average is just that. Depending on the industry, a company could be well above or below the average.

That wasn't our biggest problem though. That was figuring out what our numbers should be. Imagine a scenario where you are tasked with figuring out how many devices you have. You need to know this number to justify buying SMS. How do you do it? You don't have a mechanism for discovering these devices, so you will probably go back to purchasing data. What if your purchasing system is hard to extract data from? In the end, you make a guess and hope it is close to correct. Imagine doing this for a large number of fields in a spreadsheet that will do calculations based on your guesses. At the end, you might as well just make up a number.

In the end, my advice is this. Spend the time. Don't set aside two hours to make those determinations. Don't wait until the last minute to start building your justifications. If you do, you might have all the time you could ever want after the project gets canceled. Return on investment is a key part of any business case. It has to be a number that is both believable and defendable. If you don't believe in the number, no one else will either.

I just got this out of office reply.

I will be out of the office April 10th through the 20th, returning April 23rd. If you need immediate assistance, please contact [the help desk].

P.S. Remember if it hasn't caught on fire it will probably be ok! :-)

Thank you

I thought I'd try out a new theme. Looks ok?

I've spent the better part of two weeks learning more than I ever wanted to know about Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement. As it turns out, there are quite a parts that have poor or little explanation on the Microsoft website. There are a few things I focused on, like Software Assurance, the desktop platform, and the CAL suites.

I originally intended this post to impart the wisdom gleaned from two weeks with the beast, but I decided to ditch that idea. I could blog about it for a while, but how productive would that be? Instead, I think I will share my mistakes with you.

Mistake 1: Scope creep. We went into this process with a couple of specific goals. We wanted to consolidate our Microsoft purchases to take advantage of all of our spending power. We are currently under a Select agreement, but we figured the EA would be more cost effective. Unfortunately, we decided we should try to replace an entire enterprise-worth of software in one fell swoop. The end result is a whirlwind tour of every product Microsoft has even thought about releasing. It it too much to look at and impossible to build a business case for.

Mistake 2: Overcomplicating the simple things. We have typically purchased Office Standard or Pro, depending on the user. The end result is something that requires a serious purchasing process to handle. The cost savings is lost in Access purchases for people who decide they need it later and the manpower to manage a clunky process. Interesting fact: it only takes about 30% of the Standard users to decide that they need Access to negate all of that cost savings. Plan farther ahead.

Mistake 3: Building a business case after the fact. We ended up in a situation that left us unable to prove we needed what we knew we needed. Why? We didn't think about how we could justify the individual pieces. If justification can't be found for a couple of the key components, the whole proposal will fail. Ask those questions up front.

Mistake 4: You can't do it all on your own. If everyone in the process isn't committed to it, it will fail.

The funny thing is that I'm not even close to done. I'm sure I'll see even more mistakes later on, but that should be enough for installment one. The most important thing is to find out where your company really stands currently and where it wants to be. If you don't have those two facts, the process is doomed to wander around in the wilderness.

I'm moving back to BellSouth. Oops, I mean AT&T. Vonage is going the way of the dodo and I don't want my home phone to be a part of it.

Vonage: no workaround, we're pretty much screwed - Engadget:
Vonage had already been granted a temporary stay, saying that they'd drum up a workaround, but this new request is much more pessimistic, saying that because Verizon's patents are so broad, such technology would take months to develop, "if even feasible."

There is a new Microsoft knowledge base article that details this error, as well as a hotfix to correct it. If you are using newer HP models that have Realtek HD audio on-board, you will probably see this after deployment. I have confirmed that the hotfix does correct the issue.

Certain third-party applications may not start, and you receive an error message when you start the computer: "Illegal System DLL Relocation":
When you start a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2, certain third-party applications may not start. Additionally, you may receive the following error message:

application_executable_name - Illegal System DLL Relocation

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

This problem occurs when the following third-party applications are installed:
• Realtek HD Audio Control Panel
• ElsterFormular 2006/2007
• TUGZip
• CD-Tag

I've been a big fan of the Service manager product since it was introduced last year at MMS. MMS 2007 was a real coming out party for the product, as there were several in-depth presentations on the current state and future of the product.

Kevin Pletcher, a Service Manager Program Manager, has posted a great introduction to self-service software provisioning in the product. The post answers many questions about how they expect it to work, as well as what Microsoft products will be required for this feature to work. The list of products is interesting, as it gives a nice peek into where the technology is headed.

Bill Anderson sent Rod a great rundown on why release dates are what they are. It is great perspective from someone who definitely knows what this kind of project is like. It is a must read for anyone who would like to know what a really goes into release dates that are posted. Very TechSexy! Yes Bill, TechSexy really does stick with you.

So, speculation. Each of you have a lot of experience in the world of managing IT projects, and you do have a good deal of expertise in thinking about how those may play out. But, I will tell you that the moving parts of an app like this is probably not something that most of you have seen before. 4.8M lines of code – managed across our team and our partner teams that we rely so heavily upon. I can tell you that it’s a WHOLE lot more than just some anecdotal feedback on bugs in determining the dates we promise to our 50,000 + enterprise customers. Remember – we PLAN on finding bugs in the release process.

from Rod Trent at myITforum.com : SCCM07 Release, when?

Mary Jo Foley has confirmed that Microsoft is still planning to release Windows XP SP3. I would be sorely disappointed if we just got a security rollup. The install base for Windows XP is huge. It should get a proper send-off instead of the Windows 2000 treatment.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was canned after all. Service Packs take more time and money than security rollups.

Thanks to David for sending this to me.

This is a repost of a review I wrote a couple of months ago. The original post is here.

I've been playing with the Blackberry 8800's built-in GPS system for a couple of days. For those of you who are not familiar with Telenav, it is a company that produces a Java-based GPS client for mobile phones, among other things.

I like the interface. It is intuitive and relatively straight-forward. It navigates nicely with the 8800's trackball interface, though it doesn't take advantage of scrolling sideways. I really like the location-based services, like the business finder and gas by gas price search function. The voice sounds pretty good, but, like most voice synthesis software, it can't handle things that do not sound out easily. That's ok until it really messes up the next turn.

I threw it off by not making turns several times and it recovered cleanly each time, though it sometimes really wants you to go the way it said, even if that doesn't seem to be the most efficient way. The 3D map works great and makes for a nice demo tool, though most people are almost as impressed with the compass and MPH reading in compass view.

I was happy to see that I could hide the application, do other things, and still get directions when appropriate. I made a few calls and they worked fine with Telenav still tracking in the background. Voice dialing didn't work consistently with the software running.

The only real disappointment for me was the fact that the maps aren't terribly up to date. My three year old street still isn't in the database. A road nearby that has been closed for more than three years is still shown as open. It would have been really bad if I didn't know how to get to my house already. I know that my area is a bit of an exception, since there have been significant changes since I have moved here, but it would be nice to see it be a bit more up to date.

All told, it is a great experience, but it is on the pricey side. Unlimited routes will set you back $9.99 on Cingular, with 10 routes monthly clocking in at $5.99. I'm not sure how the other pieces of the software fit into that pricing scheme, but they seem to be no extra charge. If you travel a lot, it's definitely worth the investment.

Technorati Tags: blackberry, gps, telenav

I documented my Airport Disk issues here a few months ago. I'm pleased to say that the issues, including the constant hard drive spinning issues, went away with the 7.1 firmware that was released today. It fixes some other bugs as well, but I'm really happy with the resolution of the hard disk detection issues.

Technorati Tags: airport disk, airport extreme, Apple

As you might have noticed, I have been off on a fairly long sabbatical from technical blogging. I had undergone a position change at work that resulted in me being more involved from a process and management perspective. As a result, I didn't have the time or inclination to blog about technical things. You might be asking yourself, "what changed?" Well, I'll tell you.

I'm much more comfortable in my new role, so I have more to say about some things that aren't touched on here much, like licensing and other Microsoft-related items. I also have a lot of projects coming up that should be of interest for a large number of people here, like BDD 2007 and Vista, which I will be spending a lot of time on. one thing that has become important to me is building a test lab for client issues, so I'll be detailing that process as well.

I'm still a Mac user. Shut up Henry. I can hear you laughing all the way down here. I'll be building a personal lab using virtual machines on a MacBook later this week, so I should have some fun stuff to talk about.

With that, here I am. I enjoyed seeing many of you at MMS again this year. It is always great talking to you. I'll be updating my blog home page over the next little bit, but you can use the contact form to reach me.