December 12th Meeting ~ Board Elections, DNS, Favorite Tools

Our next Technology Wizards meeting will be Wednesday, December 12th, 12:00pm – 3:00pm at the Microsoft PacWest office located at 1414 Northrup (in the Pearl district).

Technology Wizards Board Elections

We will begin our monthly Technology Wizards meeting on Wednesday with our annual Board Elections.  We will be electing the 5 members who will serve on the Board beginning in January 2019.  Only current members present in the room will be allowed to participate in the elections.

According to our Bylaws, annually the membership selects the 5 people who will serve on the Board from Jan – Dec.  At the January Board Meeting, the 5 people elected then hold an election to determine what positions within the Board they will each fill for the year.  Our Bylaws further stipulate that the President must have served on the Board the previous year.

After we have concluded our Board Elections, we’ll move on to our featured discussions and presentation.

DNS – What’s New, What’s Changed and How You and Your Clients May Be Impacted – Matt Wilson, Brightstar Consulting

Matt will update us on some DNS-related uses, concerns and best practices.  (Matt may provide some additional details in a separate e-mail.)

3 of Your Favorite System Administration Tools

Come prepared to tell us about 3 Tools that you use while wearing your “System Administrator” hat, including why/how you use them.  Please include an actual detailed scenario or two where you have used the tool and how it helped you to solve a problem, create a solution, make a task easier, demonstrate added value to your clients, etc.,

I’d like to encourage you to think a bit outside the box of the traditional PSA/RMM/CRM and related tools, and plan to share in much more detail than my examples below as I’m keeping them VERY brief in this e-mail. Please also be ready and willing to answer some questions from other members.

Here are some very, very brief examples:

(NOTE: Please don’t use these as the ones you talk about, even if you do in fact use them. I’m sure you can come up with 3 others.)

Snipping Tool – Capture portions of screen shots for documentation and problem solving. I keep it pinned on the taskbar and also use every opportunity to introduce my clients to the tool.  It’s simple to use, simple to demonstrate and provides a quick value-add as I’ve found most people don’t know about it.  It’s free with Windows!

ForensiT User Profile Wizard – A great workstation migration tool that will join your machine to a domain, and migrate your original user profile to your new domain logon, keeping your existing data and settings.

FilePathChecker – A VB Script-based tool used for locating long FilePath Names. Especially helpful when issues arise due to users creating extremely long paths and/or file names and can’t figure out what is causing the problems.

NOTE: If you are absolutely unable to attend the meeting, please send me (directly) your 3 Tools with detailed descriptions (hopefully much more than what I typed above as samples) and we’ll be sure to read them on your behalf during this partition of our meeting.

Please do everything possible to attend this final meeting of 2018 as we need your input and participation!! 

(And we’d like to see you one more time in 2018 J)

Ken Shafer
Technology Wizards

Reminder: Technology Wizards meetings are intended for current Technology Wizards members or potential members.  Potential members must be owners or employees of a/an IT services business whose main purpose is to support small business using Microsoft products and services in some capacity.

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