A Ford Dealership Experience Exemplifies What SMB IT _Can_ Be Like for Clients/Customers – Painful

This is a really good read:

• AUTOWEEK: How not to sell a Ford C-Max Energi

It really brings out the customer’s experience in our own industry with folks that cobble together IT “Solutions” that end up causing them more pain and grief than anything with the, “Oh, it’s Microsoft’s fault that things are broken” being the mantra from the consultant.

Microsoft, having lived with this black eye for so many years has moved very solidly in favour of eliminating the SMB IT Solution set altogether, or at least as much as possible, with the Big Cloud Push.

But, it’s not like Microsoft did not _try_ and do anything about it beforehand.

Remember the SBSC? The Small Business Specialist Community was a _huge_ investment by Microsoft in us and the solution set.

Get trained, get certified, get noticed was essentially the SBSC mantra with a lot of resources to back it up from Microsoft.

It certainly worked for us. We got trained, got certified, and received the logo and the great communication from within Microsoft and the SBSC program.

And, it did indeed differentiate the small business IT Solution Providers that were serious about providing the best solution to their clients from those that flew by the seat of their pants cobbling things together.

Going forward, the on-premises solution set will not be going away. In fact, the on-premises solution set will become all the more important to those businesses that require data ownership to be in-house among other reasons.

Our plan is to continue to get training on the Microsoft products, and certification on key products, we need to build our solution sets.

• Windows Server 2012
• Active Directory and Group Policy (a Jeremy Moskowitz Course would be awesome)
• Hyper-V
• Standalone and Cluster
• Remote Desktop Services Infrastructure
• System Center 2012
• Microsoft Private Cloud
• Microsoft Exchange 2013
• E-mail infrastructure.
• Building highly available Exchange environments.
• SharePoint Server 2013
• SharePoint Foundation 2013
• SQL Server

Those clients/customers that have had an IT experience similar the Ford dealership provided to their customer are ripe for the Cloud. And, quite frankly who could blame them?

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Windows Live Writer