By request, the June event will be focused on working with recruiters.  We’re arranging to have a number of recruiters on hand as an informal panel.

Robert Half Technologies will also be presenting their annual salary survey.

Date: Wednesday, June 22 @ 5:30.  Presentation starts at 6.

Location: TBA – You must be a member to attend.

Recruiters: We have space for a limited number of recruiters to join us for this event.  Please contact me if you’re interested.

Questions for the Panel: Please post some of your questions for the panel in the discussion thread for this event.

RSVPs are required. Attendance is limited to members of the Vancouver Technology Leaders group on Linkedin.  Want to join?  Click here.

UPDATE:  The Canucks Stanley Cup Finals schedule has been released.  If there is a game 7, we will be rescheduling this event to June 22nd! – DONE!

I’ve been touched by stories about people who struggle to live with MS, a challenging and infuriating disease that hits relatively young adults. This disease has hit my circle of friends twice – and needs to stop there. My own health challenges – a rare adrenal disorder – only increases my motivation to help find a cure.

Once again this year we will be raising money to help meet their medical and financial needs, and to increase research funding to help find better treatment, and a cure. Team Hale & Hearty has been in the top 10 fundraising teams (despite us being as small as 2 members some years) every year we’ve ridden.

The ride is a 60km “Scenic” tour of Vancouver, happening on Sunday August 7th. This is my second year doing this great ride with team Hale & Hearty. Last year, we were very successful in raising funds to help fight MS. With your help, this year will be equally successful.

Please support MS research. I greatly appreciate any support you give! To donate, click here to go to my fund raising page.

Interested in joining us for the ride?

Team Hale & Hearty would be happy to have you join us. We’re (mostly) casual riders with a range of abilities. We’ll be doing regular rides over the summer to prepare for this (and some other) rides, so there’s lots of time to get used to the saddle. If you’re interested, let me know!

Last weeks’ Vancouver Technology Leaders meeting with John Hughes was a huge success.  Over a dozen attendees attendees spent the evening discussing successful leadership strategies with John. If you haven’t done so already, go grab yourself a copy of John’s book, Haunting the CEO, and follow him on Twitter (@CIO2CEO).

Watching the way the group interacted was especially important for me.  Everyone, from the newest leader to the most senior, was involved in the conversation and clearly had many takeaways.  The meeting highlighted the value of our group and the importance of peer mentoring.

I can’t wait for our future meetings and to continue to broaden our group.  New or emerging leaders – don’t be afraid to join us!

Thank you all.

Has it really been 7 months since I last posted?  Amazing how time flies.

A good portion of that time was spent deep in a very hurried ISO 27001 implementation.  Basically, I lived, breathed and dreamed ISO for the entire summer.

Having lost the summer completely to this project, I made things up to my wife with a long trip through Turkey and the Greek Islands.  This was a great opportunity to re-energize and clear my mind (of ISO).

I have tons of lessons learned from this overwhelming project, some of which I hope to share over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned!

Welcome to the new Knapp & Associates website!

A year ago Knapp & Associates made a major transition.  We moved out of the IT Support / Managed Services space to focus on IT management consulting for small-to-medium business.  Our mandate is to help companies maximize the value of their technology investment, through technology leadership, alignment with management, and process improvement.  In short, we find ways to save your company money or make more money using technology.

We’re very excited about launching this new website.  It took significant effort, both in terms of design and content creation. While I knew (conceptually) how hard it was to create content, I wasn’t prepared for how hard it really is.  I have even more respect for writers and designers now. If you like the site, I’m very happy to refer the designer!

Over the coming months you’ll find this blog will have a greater focus on IT strategy and management for small to medium business.  Of course, since I’m still a techie there will still be the odd geek article.

Enjoy the site.  If you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

Be careful if you’re running TinyTwitter on your Blackberry.  Once you’ve started the program, it continues to connect to the data network in the background, even if you aren’t updating.  I ran into something like 20 megs/day of data usage, just because TinyTwitter was running in the background (and not even being used!). 

This sounds like a pretty serious bug.  Even more serious if you’re not on an unlimited data plan!

I have been setting up Exchange Server 2007 for a client this weekend. Everything has been proceeding fairly smoothly, until I tried to test out Outlook Web Access. When going to the server from my browser, I would receive a “Service Unavailable” message.

Event Log gave much more information, thankfully:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC-WP
Event Category: None
Event ID: 2274
Date: 3/2/2008
Time: 3:18:41 PM
User: N/A
Computer: xxxxxxxxxx
Description:
ISAPI Filter ‘c:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727aspnet_filter.dll’ could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for a AMD64 processor architecture. The data field contains the error number. To learn more about this issue, including how to troubleshooting this kind of processor architecture mismatch error, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=29349.

The link didn’t help at all. Searching for “W3SVC-WP 2274″ on Microsoft’s support site also didn’t help. Thankfully, Google saves the day.

The fix is quite simple. Follow the directions in this link and OWA should start to work properly again.

Update:  This is a known issue when Blackberry Enterprise Server is installed on the same box.  See this link.

Microsoft’s recently released KB934525 (SharePoint 3.0 security update) installed with other updates on one of our sites this past weekend. Of course, it caused nothing but problems. Also of course, the client uses SharePoint 3.0 has a critical business tool.

I was informed of the problem this morning. After some searching of the Internet, I discovered that many people are having problems with this update.

Part of the problem is that there are necessary post-installation processes that need to run on the server. If you don’t, your configuration and content databases are not updated and SharePoint simply doesn’t work right.

My troubleshooting steps should not be taken as a real process, as some things seemed to work by magic. I didn’t even sacrifice a chicken – magic without poultry (or a reasonable facsimile) always bothers me. (more…)

Our team always recommends that clients purchase their PCs, laptops and servers from 1st tier manufacturers such as Dell, HP or IBM/Lenovo.  We do this for one reason:  support. 

Many people will lecture that extended warranties are a tax on the stupid.  I disagree completely.  Especially on laptops and servers.  $100 per year is a small price to pay for the insurance that should anything break, the vendor will replace the parts. (more…)

So I’ve taken the plunge back into programming.  I haven’t had the time I was hoping for, but I’ve made some progress. 

Over the last month I’ve dug into C# a bit.  Worked through some tutorials, built some basic little silly apps to continue learning.  Installed SQL Server (Express and full) to play with some database connectivity. 

The learning curve hasn’t been as steep as I was expecting.  I did some Access/VBA programming a couple years back and do have a programming background (BCIT grad!).  This is my first real foray into true object oriented programming.  It’s neat.  Of course, I’m not actually trying to design and build anything from scratch yet. 

I have this idea that’s been percolating in my head for the past few years and I’m seriously considering starting to build it.  I wouldn’t expect it to be THAT tough .. but the challenge is where to start.  It’s web-based, and would be well suited to all the fancy web 2.0 / AJAX type stuff. 

Of course, learning more about CSS (I know the basics) and ASP.NET is a requirement.  But do I need to learn dHTML?  AJAX?  Does it really matter?  I’m sure hoping I can take a layered approach – start with the basics and improve as I go along.

At the very least, my bookshelf is getting full again!