Jim leaves behind his wife Marilyn and son Brian. Following Jim’s vision that Brian go to college, SMBTN has set up a fund to allow Jim’s SMB community friends to contribute to Brian’s college fund. To learn more, go to http://www.smbtn.org/JimLocke.htm

Below are some moments in Jim’s life which we captured on tape. Please join us in remembering Jim.

Pat Dolan of Varvid.com speaks with Ed Laprade of Adnet Technologies Inc. of Windsor Connecticut, a CPLS authorized Microsoft Training Center at the ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando.

Adnet utilizes Quosal, a quote/proposal generation application that integrates with ConnectWise, and Laprade really appreciates the seemlessness and productivity this affords Adnet.

Aaron Booker from Varvid interviews Sean Daniel, Senior Program Manager SBS 2008. He’s been seeing people back up their most important client PCs inside their business with Windows Home Server. If the computer crashes, you can bring back up in 15-20 minutes. Its a great solution for backing up clients. The Windows Small Business Server has been on the market since November 2008, and they are no longer selling SBS 2003, so now is the time to upgrade.

Aaron Booker from Varvid interviews w/ Dean Calvert, the Managing Director of Calvert Technologies. Calvert is a Gold-Certified Microsoft Partner Small Business Specialist based in Adelaide, Australia. Facilitates the user group there as well.

Aaron Booker from Varvid interviews David Fabritius, the Technical Product Manager for SBS & EBS. There are lot of issues that pop up that will not stop day to day tasks, but you will need to uncover. The Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner tool they have developed allows you to identify issues and get prescriptive guidance on how to correct them.

Praerit and his team have built an amazing product – a “Coop” Cloud Storage Company. Only sold through the Channel – flat fee – and your clients get 2/3 of the storage they share. Wow! I think this could be brilliant for Managed Services Providers – I’ll be trying it out in my Hardlines Company practice.

Really intriguing
stuff – learn about them at: http://www.symform.com

David spoke to us about some of the products that he is responsible for training partners on at Microsoft. They include SBS & EBS, but also the tools around them like the Best Practice Analyzer for SBS and the Preparation Tools for EBS. These tools are phenomenally useful in our practice as we evaluate a new client environment. David is also responsible for the newly updated Business and Technical Assessment.

We interviewed Harry Brelsford about the first full day of SMB Nation 2008. Busy keynote and good sessions on SBS 2008. Interesting to see new vendors at the vendor hall entering our SMB Space – from NetEnrich to ClearOne to Calyptix. Lots more too… Harry and I had fun talking about how the first day went and what to look forward to tomorrow with EBS 2008.

Aidan Delaney (what an accent!) led the technical portion of the first stop (Redmond) of the SBS 2008 Partner Tour.  As a VAR/VAP, I highly recommend attending – both the business conversation and the technical presentation were valuable.  Aidan owns several facets of SBS 2008, including User Management and the Admin Console.  A good guy to talk to!

You can see all the cities where the tour is visiting and sign up at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2008/08/20/8881511.aspx