N.B. - Watch out for Wiresoft

In case this may be of some use to you.

I was contacted by a ‘sales representative’ from a company called Wiresoft.  They told me they have a hardware firewall device they sell AND they are located right here in Cincinnati.  I said thank you but I am satisfied with the firewalls that I already represent for my customers.  This was probably about 6 months ago.

Since then I have gotten additional phone calls every couple of weeks that treat me like someone they never spoke to before.  Each time I jump right in (because I happened to remember their name) and cut them off and tell them not to call me any more!

Today I got a call in the morning from this outfit again.  I was angered by this treatment and I once again told them not to call me anymore.

Guess what.  This afternoon I got another call from the same outfit.  I just asked the guy for the headquarters telephone number which he gave me.

I called the 800 number – got voice menu – and chose to go to Technical Support.  Don’t ask me why.  I think maybe I thought I would do better talking to a tech when I asked for the company presidents name.  I just got voice mail.  I checked the website and found the name of the president – Tom Schram.  I then called back and the voice menus only let you choose 1) Sales, 2) Tech Supt. Or 3) Cust. Service.  No other extensions.  I selected Sales.  The guy I spoke to, Steve Korbel(?) asked if he could help me.  I said sure – he could connect me to Tom Schram.  He asked what it was about.  I told him it was about a matter that I wanted to discuss with Tom (a friend later advised that I should have said it was about a matter dealing with Tom and my wife <g>).  He said he would need more information so I told him I wanted to talk about their sales practices.  He told me again that he was in sales and I could talk to him about it. I told him I knew that he was in sales and I did not want to talk to him I wanted to talk to someone senior.  He wound up taking my phone number and closed by saying “we’ll see if he calls you”.  (nice salesmanship)

I almost never sign in to my LinkedIn page but that was where I went next.  I found Tom Schram, president of Wiresoft, and didn’t friend him but I did send him a direct message.  The content of the message is included here:

Hi Tom,

I tried reaching you on the telephone today via the Wiresoft 866 telephone number. It is kind of difficult. I spoke to a sales guy, I think his name is Steve Korbel. He didn't want to put me through to you but took my name and telephone number and closed by saying 'we'll see if he calls you'.

The reason for my call is that I am getting fairly annoyed by your company's sales practices. I have an IT Consulting business right here in Cincinnati and I have asked your telemarketers many, many times to stop calling me. I have not said this in any vague, unclear manner, by the way. This morning I received yet another of these interrupting telephone calls and told the guy to take me off the list and DO NOT CALL anymore. That was just this morning. Now, this afternoon I received another one of these calls. I am, by the way, holding to my practice of not using profanity, but you should know that this situation does call for the use of it.

I would think that a person and company invested in technology as much as you and your company are, could do a better job of not making people in your market so angry. Is that the picture you would want me to paint amongst our IT community?

Regards,

Allen Miller

To their small credit – I did get an email fairly quickly from Tom Schram apologizing and telling me they would take me off their call list.  A little later I got a telephone call from one of their field sales people also apologizing and telling me they would take me off their call list.  He asked me who had called me – like which person had called me.  I told him that when I am telling people not to call me I don’t always get personal and ask their name.  Then he asked if it was a ‘telemarketer’.  I said it was and that they were blocking their caller ID.

Google Voice - I love it

So, one of my pet peeves is uninvited/unwelcome people that feel they have the right to intrude into the solitude of our home via the telephone line.

Caller ID was a big help in this regard.  Since Joyce and I are pretty much connected to our cell phones almost everyone of our friends and contacts use our mobile devices to reach us.  We still maintain the age old land line, perhaps an anachronism, but nevertheless, we do.  It may be the E911 thing, or some safety issue like that.  We don't answer the phone unless the caller is someone we want to talk to.  HOWEVER, we have to go to the phone and look at the Caller ID to make this determination.

Anyway, the point of this post is GOOGLE VOICE.  This is one terrific service - and FREE from Google.  It's still only available in Beta format and on a limited invitation basis.  There are a number of aspects to this service - it gives you a telephone number (in your area if you wish),  You can access the system by calling your GV number, giving your password, and then you are able to call anywhere in the US with no long distance charges.  You also get voice mail and can connect as many phones (mobile, home, office, etc.) to this account.  When a call comes in to your GV number, it will ring all of your connected phones.  The first one to be answered gets the call.  You can screen incoming calls to decide if you want to take the call or send it to voice mail.  AND, the voice mails can be sent to your email box as a sound file attachment and you can get a transcription of the call too.

What I did with this is fantastic.  At no additional charge, my local telephone (land line) service lets me forward my calls to another number AND I can get a distinctive ring number for my home.  So, I forward my home phone number to my GV number.  GV can screen and route calls based on Caller ID.  If the call is from one of our legitimate callers (like my sister-in-law) then I forward it to the home phone distinctive ring number, my wifes mobile and my mobile.  If the call is from anyone not on the preferred caller list, I send the call directly to voice mail.  The net result of this is that unless a caller is one of a very few desired callers - all calls go to voice mail and our home phones almost NEVER RING!

Also, for the callers that I identify from the logs as being solicitors, I can customize a voice mail 'greeting' for them or just send them to a 'dead letter drop'.

Response Point Administrator install problems - o/s Certificate issue

This past week I rebuilt my office desktop pc.  I went from Windows 7 Ultimate (RC) to Windows 7 Ultimate (RTM).  I did a clean install and everything when well until I tried to run the Response Point Administrator program after installing it.  The initial running of the program normally wants to install the Base Unit certificate to your workstation.  The screen where you view the certificate details ordinarily has a button to Install the certificate.  In my case - there was NO BUTTON.  I tried using mmc.exe with the certificate add-in.  I would go through the steps to install the certificate, I received a message upon completion telling me THE IMPORT WAS SUCCESSFUL.  However, when I viewed the list of certificates in the data store - there was no certificate for Response Point!

I suspected this was an issue with the O/S but could not find any helpful tech notes when I did my searches.  Since I encountered this with the RP Admin program - I asked the Microsoft Response Point

team for help.  They came to my rescue.  Many Thanks to Doug King and team.  This was an O/S issue.  They found a KP article 932156.  This article has a hotfix for Vista but since I was running Windows 7 I used the included instructions to change a permission in the registry.

I've got a few visual aids I collected during this trouble shooting.  In the event that they might help someone else - I include here for reference.

First is a video that illustrates the problems that I observed.  If you want to see the video in larger format, you will probably need to go to http://drop.io/allenmiller and download it.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Next are some images that illustrate the fix.

 

   

SMB Nation - LV NV

Changed my mind - now I am going to go to SMB Nation in October in Las Vegas.  I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there.  Drop me an email if you are going to be there - let's get together.

Outlook Anywhere Woes are now Fixed

I recently updated my server from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008.  I also updated my laptop to Windows 7.  When I went to configure my Outlook 2007 of the laptop for RPC over HTTP, now called Outlook Anywhere - I was not able to do it!  And the reason I was not able to do it was that the option and checkbox to enable Outlook Anywhere were NOT THERE in the GUI.  Here's a screen shot of what I had and one of what I should have had.

My actual configuration screen:

And now here is a screen shot of what it SHOULD have looked like:

I looked all over and did a lot of internet searches but could not find any clues on this.  Finally I went to the Microsoft Partner private newsgroups and Wind Ying provided a quick response that did the trick.

There is a registry key that for me on Windows 7 was:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC
EnableRPCTunnelingUI - was set to 0 - should have been set to 1

I made the change to 1 and voila - fixed. 

Thank you Wind