Silicon Shecky

So Cisco has gotten tired of being thought of as a big business solution only. They bought Linksys a few years ago, and now have come up with Cisco Small Business.

It is an interesting prospect. The have taken the Linksys business line, some of their Cisco brand offerings, and some new products, given them special SKUs, and wrapped them up in a nice package along with a special small business support line. Yep, most of the SMB offerings no longer will get smartnet, but will have the SMB Support, which is supposed to be people who understand integration and troubleshooting in a small business environment. Sounds like a nice neat series of products.

The offerings are nice, but as usual there is a small catch. To get the best deals there are 2 tests to pass to become a Cisco Select Partner, one step up from the Registered Partner. The problem is finding study material easily for these 2 tests. Don’t worry, they are only $65 per test and you can have one person take one test and someone else take the other.

Being a Select Partner seems to be where the value really shines. That amount of access you get to Cisco increases, the kickbacks become worth while, and you can sell their Unified Communication System, which integrates most anything you could want.

The products themselves are typical Cisco, and while some are real good values, most seem to be upper level stuff with some of the functionality stripped out.

Still, it is nice to see Cisco realizing that they have missed a huge market out there on price points.

It is being reported that Symantec is coming out with a new SMB version of Endpoint Protection. Pardon me if I don’t start jumping for joy.

I do install a lot of Symantec for clients, and I have dealt with their current Endpoint SMB solution. It does work, but at a very high cost. The management system in it is anything but intuitive, adding desktops to the management console and managing them through the console is not simple. The database for the Management system continuously grows to the point where I have had to make sure it is installed only on a data drive, and not to install the Endpoint Manager on an OS partition.

Other odd things I’ve run across is the way it comes out of the box, you need to go in and tell it not to scan your backup drive, especially if it is an SSD drive. I’ve had many issues with Symantec’s own BackupExec because the drive is in use due to Endpoint scanning it all. Then there is the firewall and the way on a server it starts blocking ports that you tell it to leave open. Some software packages do use special ports for legitimate communication purposes. As far as support goes, don’t get me started on the poor support resources Symantec has for all of its products.

Since Endpoint now does allow back reving to the older 10.2 AV solution, I tend to put 10.2 on because it causes less problems.  Less overhead, easier to manage, and it just works.

I know I’ll wind up having to deal with the new version, I just hope that the upcoming beta testing is open so I can place it on my test box and see whether it is worth it, or should I start recommending a different SMB solution. I know that my clients need the protection one way or another.

I figure what a decent way to start off the week with some links to some tips, tricks, and news.

First off is the news that Microsoft’s Free E-book Offer is back. Starting this Wednesday, April 15 and going through April 22, you can download 2 books from Microsoft Press, completely free. The more interesting one to myself is the Windows 2008 Small Business Administrator’s Companion.

Keeping on the Windows 2008 track Microsoft’s Technet Blogs have decided that this months weekly tip series is on Windows Server 2008. Week 1 and Week 2 have been posted and I have to admit, this is some real good information. Some of it seems quite simple, but as I’ve said before, how many times have you stupidly overlooked like the simple? I know I do quite often.

Finally it seems that the economy has hit the SMB Summit this year. Susan Bradley has more information at her blog, or you can just go to the SMBTN Blog. I say go and check out Susan’s blog anyways as she always has interesting posts with some good information.

And that is it for this Monday morning. More to come during the week, as I get to delve into the idea of 1:1 computing for schools.