Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Some, sure. And I assume nearly all do. But even predicting what things clients will need is often very hard. If you are a traditional MSP with a pre-defined service offering this gets "easy." If you are not, it is nearly impossible.
Sure, and NTG is trying to no live in a pre-defined service offering.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Again, you're right, NTG is a rare case that has a real lab. But if you calling yourself a MSP, you should have at least some resources so you can keep learning new things and testing simple processes like this outside of your customers environment.
Some, sure. And I assume nearly all do. But even predicting what things clients will need is often very hard. If you are a traditional MSP with a pre-defined service offering this gets "easy." If you are not, it is nearly impossible.
Sure, and NTG is trying to no live in a pre-defined service offering.
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
And this would explain the direction you tend to look. Customers of yours understand your need to learn at their expense the solutions they choose to deploy. I would say that until you have a relationship with a customer this would not be the norm.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not entirely, we have some MSP offerings, like hosted PBX for example. But our core focus is as an IT department, so just like internal IT, very custom to the customer and not making customers conform to us in order to work.
And this would explain the direction you tend to look. Customers of yours understand your need to learn at their expense the solutions they choose to deploy. I would say that until you have a relationship with a customer this would not be the norm.
It makes initial conversations harder because we are more like a fancy restaurant than a McDonald's. They rarely can just pick a combo meal or a Prix Fixe but need to look at the menu and figure out the appetizer, entree, salad and dessert that they want.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It makes initial conversations harder because we are more like a fancy restaurant than a McDonald's. They rarely can just pick a combo meal or a Prix Fixe but need to look at the menu and figure out the appetizer, entree, salad and dessert that they want.
We just had this same internal discussion. We are working on changing our marketing and this was the largest part of our discussion. How to market a service that is not commodity. I did not think about the fast food comparison. Going to email some new thoughts on that shortly.
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I have some sympathy with my vendor, and I guess you're in the same boat. Although they've done a lot of work for me in the past, they don't own my environment in the way that they own the environment of most of their managed clients. For most of their clients, they'd have provided and installed all the printers. In my case, they're walking into an environment that they are fairly unfamiliar with. That creates risks on their part.
Having said, I generally pay on a time and materials basis, so the risk is mostly mine, not theirs. But I suspect they have made massive provisions for "unexpected snags" on quoting for this project.
It makes outsourcing a problem for me. It is easy to go the whole managed service route, and doing that eliminates many of the risks for the vendor and the client - they provide the environment and the hardware so they don't have any surprises on site.
It is easy to do everything in-house, for the same reason, I provide the environment so don't have any surprises. But finding a middle ground, where I'm working in collaboration with the vendor - that is tricky and something I clearly haven't succeeded in based on a 4 day quote for a stupid effing print server upgrade!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
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I'll be following these instructions:
http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/77664-so-you-need-to-deploy-printers-with-group-policy-windows-2012-r2 -
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred by having as many questions posted as possible.
And of course, we want to help.
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@Dashrender said:
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred
It doesn't if your answers are crap
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred
It doesn't if your answers are crap
Love the faith man, love the faith... lol
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@Dashrender Thank you for the help. I truly appreciate it!
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@Minion-Queen said:
@Dashrender Thank you for the help. I truly appreciate it!
Thanks - I do want to see this community grow into something like where most of us came from. Well the same in respects to all of the technical questions and answers.
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Well it is appreciated. This has not been an easy process for us and we want to see it grow but slowly so we try not to make mistakes. Try being the operative word
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
I'll ping him. He's been pretty busy as of late.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
I'll ping him. He's been pretty busy as of late.
Better busy, than bored, right?
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I did reach out to him. Hopefully he sees it.
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I haven't read all the posts, so forgive me if this is a repeat...
For fifteen printers, assuming most printers you can get the drivers for pretty easily, you're looking at 10 minutes/printer to get the printer setup, shared and the drivers added. That's a bit generous too, but assumes you have decent bandwidth for downloads, etc.
To setup the actual print server, that's pretty quick and I don't even think the roles being added require a reboot. Half an hour? An hour tops. That's assuming the base server is already setup. Most people add this kind of role to a DC, etc.
Lastly, coordinating what users/groups get what printers means coordinating with you. They can get all the IPs and models from the old server pretty easily. I would say, being generous in case you have some printers whose drivers are tough to track down and if they run into any issues, 10 hours tops. The biggest pain is going to be removing the old printers from the computers so you can make sure people aren't printing to old shares.
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I should add that I'm not dead, I'm sorry I'm late to the game, and I hope what I posted helps.
