TechPublishing Now MS Certified

TechPublishing Now MS Certified
Professor Robert McMillen, MBA Microsoft Certified Trainer and Solutions Expert

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

We recorded our radio show today and anyone can watch it by going to ustream.com and typing in All Tech Radio in the search. We record on video and audio.
Of course the podcast is available on iTunes and pretty much every other podcasting site. You can also go to http://alltechradio.com

Turning in two more papers tonight for my masters degree. These are on leadership. This is a lot of work but it feels good when I get a paper written and I get a good grade.

Friday, July 27, 2012

PCI compliance is a weird animal. Depending on who does the scanning, a company can have a lot of work to do or very little. PCI compliance in a nutshell is required by credit card processing companies to scan any business that holds credit cards on file in house. If they don't pass the penetration test they won't be able to process the cards internally.

Today I dealt with a company who is required to have two form factor authentication with a company called Truetwave for their VPN connections. I have tons of customers that get scanned for PCI compliance and no one has had this requirement. It makes me wonder if they are in cahoots with these vendors to force them in a certain direction to spend more money. It's way too random to be logical.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I had a great time on OPB's Think Out Loud today talking about hacking. The staff and host are really great. We talked about all kinds of things and of course some people had to pick apart everything I said online.
It's difficult to explain every detail about a subject in just 15 minutes when we cover so much ground. Some listeners decided to take what I said about free antivirus and SCADA systems and just let the negative comments fly. But that's okay. I tried to complete my thoughts about those items for them so hopefully it will all die down.
After all there are plenty of other things to complain about right?
Stop going to weird sites and take care of your computers. Don't open email attachments from people you don't know and without scnaning them for viruses. Don't click on ads without a content filter to protect you.
Or just go back to paper and pen.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Very weird Comcast problem going around. Their business class service has these power spikes or power brown outs out of no where around noon every 2-4 weeks. It clears up in a few minutes but of course a million phone calls from people who have to be online every second of every day start poring in.
I'm hoping they figure it out. They have a new fiber based service for about 3 times the price where they swear nothing will go down. It actually has Comcasts first SLA to go with it. Hard to justify the cost when Frontier will do the same speed for 90% less, but has no customer service or SLAs.

"What a world, what a world." Wicked witch of the West.
Had an interesting outbound email isse in Exchange 2003. I don't see as many of these anymore since Exchange 2007 and 2010 have come out. Email to a couple of domains outbound wouldn't work.
I went into the DNS manager and then to the properties and found the forwarders were using opendns.org for content filtering.
After discussing it, the customer wanted to keep those IPs where they were. I went into the Exchange manager and the SMTP properties under protocol. Instead of using the DNS forwarders I had to specify Exchange to only use a specific DNS IP instead and I put in the Verizon servers. Email then flowed as it should, and I didn't have to change their content filtering IPs.

I'm on lots of shows this week. Besides the All Tech Radio show, I did the Jeff Kropf show yesterday as usual, and I'm doing the Think Out Loud show on OPB tomorrow. This weekend I'm doing some sort of live question and answer at the Washington County Fair. Should be fun.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

I've been working on my MBA in IT Management for the past month and a half. This is way harder than my bachelors degree. The main reason for doing so is because I really enjoy teaching at PCC part time, and they said I needed to complete it.
I have to say I am pleasantly surprised by how much I'm learning.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Recorded our latest radio show today. You can watch us on video by going to ustream.com and typing in alltechradio. Some stuff that happens on ustream doesn't make it to radio so it's pretty funny, but probably not to the FCC.

Monday, July 16, 2012

It has been a while since I regularly updated the blog. In the past year I started teaching college. I'm teaching both online and on campus and it is a ton of fun. The class is on managing Windows servers. Of course the business continues to operate and we had 20% growth last year.

All Tech Radio is getting email from fans all over the world and we love hearing from them.

We have added a lot of Cloud Services to the business and we look forward to that being our strongest area of growth.

I will have lots of great stories here so check back when you can.