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.

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'.

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.

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

I will just accept the award here - and forego the opportunity to contact the committee so that I can send them MONEY to pay for the processing of the rest of the award!

I can hardly contain myself. Isn't it a beauty?

Following is the content of my notification email -

Earlier this year, I sent a notification email to you recognizing that Miller Allen Computer Consulting had been selected for the 2009 Best of Cincinnati Award in the Custom Computer Software Analysis category.

In recognition of your achievement, a 2009 Best of Cincinnati Award has been designed for display at your place of business. You may arrange to have your award sent directly to Miller Allen Computer Consulting by following the simple steps on the 2009 Best of Cincinnati Award order form. Simply copy and paste this link into your browser to receive your award:
https://www.us-ca.org/xxxx-xxxx

Each year, the US Commerce Association (USCA) identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Also, a copy of the press release publicizing the selection of Miller Allen Computer Consulting has been posted on our website. The USCA hereby grants Miller Allen Computer Consulting a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, distribute, and display this press release in any media formats and through any media channels.

An Award Code has been assigned to your company that can be used on our website for quick access to your award information and press release.

Your Award Code is: xxxx-xxxx

Sincerely,

Ashley Carter
Selection Committee Chair
US Commerce Association

The intended recipient of this notification is the Marketing Director for Miller Allen Computer Consulting. If you have received this email in error please forward it to the intended recipient. If you do not wish to receive further advertisements from Best of Cincinnati Award Program, please mail a written request to: us-ca.org, 2020 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC 20006 or simply click to opt-out.

We could login from his worksation using a different username without any problem.  We could login with his username at a different workstation with no problem.  Initially I thought that his user profile was corrupted.

When I looked a little further I found that his user account was locked out at the server.  If I reset the account - it would get locked out again immediately after he logged in. So, it was evident that something on his computer was causing just his account to get locked out.

Fortunately, my friend Mark C. called me to say he had thought of something that might be helpful.  He told me about the Microsoft Account Lockout Tools - something I had never heard of.  I used one of these tools to log all authentication traffic between the workstation and the server.  After doing this - it was easy to find the process/services that were causing the problem.  On reflection - it makes no sense to me that a service related to his Ricoh copier/printer/fax was the culprit - but when I disabled a couple services of Ricoh - the problem went away - and somewhat surprising also, none of the functionality of the Ricoh printer was lost.

Thanks Mark.

I finally made the switch - installed my NGT SIP service for Response Point.  The installation was a breeze - Justin at NGT got me all squared away.

A couple things that NGT provides that my previous service did not:

1. E911 support
2. What I call 'spoofing' of outbound Caller ID #.  So when outgong calls are made over any of the non-primary lines - the callee will see my primary line Caller ID information - instead of some weird DID number
3. A Disaster Mode where, if my network or phone system is off-line, incoming calls will be automatically routed to a pre-designated non-SIP phone number.
   
   and last but not least
4. Professional, quality customer service

Now I will give up my analog lines and be on a total SIP basis.

Have fun.

Customer had a hard time logging in to the server - the password was not being accepted.  The username that had been filled in was Administrator.  Notice the small blue square with the letters RU in the lower left area.  Then look at the username field and see what happened when we tried to reenter the username - looks like Russian!

Basically you install the new version of Virtual PC and install your
application in the virtual machine. If you make sure your launching
shortcut is in the All Users area of the start menu - then - magically -
these application shortcuts will ALSO appear in your All Programs menu
of your Windows 7 host o/s. Pretty cool. Once you have this set up you
exit the virtual machine. When you want to run your application that is
in the virtual pc, just use the shortcut in the menu of the host o/s.
This will launch both the virtual pc and the application but they will
appear as if it was just the application running in Windows 7.

As I think about this, I remember Tim Barrett (Louisville)doing a live
demo for our user group of just this very thing. At the time I didn't
have a need so it didn't sink in very deep but it did make an
impression.

There are pretty good step-by-step instructions for this at
http://lifehacker.com/5245396/set-up-and-use-xp-mode-in-windows-7