If you have a SBS 2003 server running Intelligent Message Filtering, and you're using ORDB as one of your Real Time Block lists, some time around January 7th, your SBS server may have stopped routing inbound faxes to an email recipient.  The official SBS Blog wrote this post on the issue a couple days ago, but we started experiencing the problem about a week ago, before we could find any information on it.

We resolved the problem by using the Custom Weighting feature in Exchange.  This is a feature that allows you to specify key words or phrases that if IMF finds in an email message, will cause it to allow the message through.  You can find this discussed about half way down the page here:  http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/5/fb5c54af-fe5c-48e9-be97-f9e8207325ab/Ex_2003_SP2_RelNotes.htm

We added a line like this:

<CustomWeightEntry Type="SUBJECT" Change="MIN" Text="FAX"/>

Admittedly, this isn't the best solution for the problem, but the custom weighting feature is still something that should be enabled on SBS if you're using IMF.  We likely won't remove the line, and we can quickly add more strings any time.

When we began seeing errors on our SBS 2003 Server several days ago warning that space on the C drive was running low, we began to plan an intensive (and scary) operation to upgrade it.  The plan WAS going to look something like this:

• shut down server
• remove system drive and install it in a second machine
• install bigger drive in second machine
• install disk cloning software on second machine
• copy old drive to new drive
• put new drive (cloned) in server
• be happy

There are many esoteric little things involved in these steps, especially when we're talking about SCSI and Dynamic NTFS disks. The whole process was a little daunting.

BUT, much of this worry goes away with Paragon Partition Manager Server Edition.  Hallelujah!  I installed a new 70 gig SCSI drive to replace a 16 gig drive (required a server restart). Then I ran Partition Manager to copy the system disk to the new disk (this needed another restart), and Ka-ching!... shut down the server one more time to remove the old drive and we were back in business.

Brilliant. Thank you Paragon!

Much has been written about business process analysis.  There are articles about Use Cases, Sequence Diagrams, and more.  It's my opinion that most small businesses can avoid this level of complexity when they're trying to understand their business processes, and can instead focus on understanding the roles and responsibilities of people as a start.

One tool that I like to use is a high level diagram that correlates responsibilities with individual people (or small teams), and can then be used to deconstruct the responsibilities to tasks and process flows.  I call it a responsibility diagram.  If you work in a small business, you likely have many jobs to do-- understanding these jobs is a great place to begin.  Here's an example from a small business that sells sewing project kits online:

Admittedly, this is a bit of a hybrid of several UML diagrams, but what it's really designed to do is get a small business owner (decision maker) thinking about the high level processes and lead them into decomposing them into more manageable workflows.  Once we've got this diagram, we can rename the person to a role, in this case, a suitable role name might be "Order Taker".  This will help to separate the tasks from a person, and may make it easier to identify responsibilities that should more naturally fall on other people.  In this example, why wouldn't the Inventory Adjustment be done by Kelly.

I call the rectangular box the responsibility boundary, and once the responsibility changes, the flow would be illustrated in another box.  Similarities to Use Case Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams are obvious to the initiated, but to the business owner, it's still a simple diagram that portrays the work their people do in an easy to understand way.

In Part 3, we'll talk about what happens when a responsibility crosses boundaries to another role.

Our city (and province) finds itself in a unique situation.  The local economy is booming thanks to high global oil prices, and the proximity of the Fort McMurray oil-sands, one of the largest oil deposits in the world.

Property values are up, retail sales are up, unemployment is way down, people from coast to coast are coming here to find work. Unfortunately, this leaves many small businesses scrambling to find staff.  It seems that everywhere you look in the city, you'll see a "Now Hiring" or "Help Wanted" sign.  In fact, the MacDonald's restaurants have taken to posting their pay rates on those portable roadside signs, and they're pretty competitive.  Our business is no stranger to this--- we're recruiting aggressively, advertising in numerous mediums.

One thing that a small business can do to be more efficient with what staff they do have is something the big guys have been doing for a while now--- Business Process Analysis.  Understanding what your company does and how it does it, and then documenting it in detail is the first step to improving efficiencies.

This series of posts will highlight some simple techniques that a small business can use to analyze, understand, and improve its business processes.  Please stay tuned.

On October 16th, Bell will begin selling the Q.  The great news is that it's shipping with MSFP (Messaging and Security Feature Pack).  This is an important component that allows the devices to receive direct push email, as well as to be wiped remotely in case they're lost (see my message from yesterday).

This phone will level the playing field for small businesses, allowing them to have enterprise "blackberry like" service on the powerful Windows Mobile platform.  For example, imagine the same device being used for a custom designed field application that allows remote data collection, reference, and collaboration.  Check out the sample application "TaskVision" to understand what I mean.  It's a task management application that uses web services to allow various types of smart clients (a Windows Mobile app included) to authenticate and synchronize remotely.  I suspect with some work, it could be designed to allow "push" distribution as well.

Small business people can drown in paper. We see it here in our office. Every day, we get paper from all directions and we're never sure what do do with some of it. Seems like the day after you throw something away or shred it, you find you needed it.

 Solutions to scan to PDF have existed for some time, but Fujitsu has done a great job of making it affordable for small businesses.The ScanSnap S500 sells for less than $500 bucks Canadian, and has terrific output. It's as easy as pushing one button and a text searchable ("OCR-ed") PDF document gets saved into a folder of your choice.

Weaknesses? At first glance, there's little control over this thing programmatically, or beyond the out-of-the-box "ScanSnap Organizer". For example, on our Small Business Server network, our SBS server has network fax enabled. Wouldn't it be nice if this thing could be used to scan directly to this service without having to open up the document and "Print to Fax"?

Furthermore, with Windows SharePoint Services, and a PDF iFilter installed, these searchable documents can live in a document library whose contents can be indexed... that piece of paper can now be found by anyone in the company using SharePoint search. It would sure be nice if this thing had support for WSS out of the box...