SBSC-Central Region-Midwest Area

Earlier this week, Eric Ligman posted about the upcoming Support for Windows XP SP2 Ends July, 2010 – Understand the options webcast taking place tomorrow to ensure you were aware of what this milestone means on the desktop operating system front. Another very important thing to remember about the July, 2010 timeframe is that support for Windows Server 2000 ends then as well. This means that now is a very important time be connecting with your clients still running Windows 2000 Server about plans to move to Windows Server 2008.

To help with this conversation, we are conducting an Academy Live webcast for Partners on January 15, 2010 from 8:00 – 9:00 am PST where you can learn about conversation starters, tools, and methodologies for helping your customers migrate off Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2008 R2.

Take a few moments now and register to attend the Windows 2000 Server Academy Live session. Then be sure to join us for the webcast on January 15th.

If you are a member of HTG, IAMCP or CMIT you know that last week was the deadline to participate in the Windows 7 Challenge! Obviously, with the deadline having come and went, I’m not going to encourage you to participate. Instead, I am going to CHALLENGE you!

I am a member of HTG. In fact, I facilitate the HTG19 group. I had one of my members state, “I went to the site, and it wants me to vouch for at least 50% of my PCs. I’m having a problem with that. Are you guys just going ahead with it?”

Here is my response:
“We have definitely moved ahead, and I would urge you to do the same. Forget about the contest for a minute. Why wouldn’t you move your team onto the Windows 7 platform? Suppose a large opportunity presented itself to migrate to Win7, BUT they ask you what OS you and your staff are running. Do you think that you are going to get the gig? How often do you think that “We are running Vista (or heaven forbid XP)…” is going to get you a new opportunity? XP and Vista experience is taken for granted. Our clients EXPECT us to have experience with the CURRENT operating systems available.

Don’t let the Techs take the lead here. Set the expectation and enforce it.

Let me jump back to XP for a minute. Now you can say with pride, “Sure we still run XP in a couple of instances… In XP mode on Win7.” No one has to be a tech laggard any longer.”

My good friend and SBSC community advocate, Karl Palachuk is up to somthing…. He has a Conference call scheduled for today where he claims, “Great News will be announced on Wednesday morning about a major change in the MSP community. ” BEWARE, “It will be a bit earth-shattering for some people.”

Please visit http://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2009/12/special-alert-conference-call-on.html for more details and to register for this event.