Strategic Technology

I had a hallway conversation with the owner of a small business that provides outsourced IT support and technical services for other small businesses.

As old techies are wont to do, we were swapping war stories (in other words, technical issues we had fought and beaten in the past!) when he mentioned a problem that he was having at one of his small business clients. For this particular client he had installed a Microsoft Small Business Server product to give his client basic email, file storage, and printer services.

Now this Microsoft small business product also contained a basic version of a collaboration tool called Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services. First, I must say that this next part is incredibly unusual, but his client had found this Sharepoint collaboration software by themselves and were actually using it.

I made that incredibly unusual comment as some tongue in cheek humor! And that is because many companies explicitly invest money and time into these types of collaboration products and then attempt to drag their staff kicking and screaming into using them. And here was a small business that found it by accident and just dove in – head first.

My friend described how his client was using this Sharepoint collaboration tool for various types of documents and had placed huge amounts of data into the software. And this is where his problem was found, his client was experiencing software crashes, corrupted documents and various other problems. I had previously mentioned that I had implemented a 10 thousand document ISO 9000 PMF repository using that same Sharepoint collaboration tool, so he asked if I had any idea on the issue.

I had the privilege to tell him that I had a really good guess.

The ‘Express’ version versus the ‘Full’ version

For many years Microsoft Corporation has fairly successfully given some basic products away for free, but to get more advanced functionality commonly used in our businesses, you needed to pay for the full version of the software.

As an example, for years you were able to use a free copy of Microsoft Outlook Express  for your basic email needs, in fact it was installed by default on many computers when you purchased them. But for shared calendars and other more advanced functionality, you needed to pay for it and purchase a full copy Microsoft Outlook.

And Microsoft has done the same thing with this Sharepoint product. Sharepoint Team Services itself is a a freely available download for licensed Microsoft Servers, and when you install it? It  uses the Microsoft SQL Server Express database engine. Notice the word ’Express‘ again. It works, and is also freely available.

But similar to my Outlook example, these freely available Express versions of these tools have some limitations that do not exist in the full featured ‘pay for it’ versions of the same software. The full featured ‘pay for’ products are Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server, and the full Microsoft SQL Server product.

And my guess about his clients issues was based on these limitations. Because one of the limitations in the Express version is the physical amount of data that you can place in the SQL Server Express database. If you reread the above paragraphs, note that this small business owner said that his client had put ‘huge amounts of data in it’.

I suggested he take a look and see if they had put enough data into the software to be running up against the limit of what that Express version of the database software could handle.

As a note, a couple of weeks later he told me they had.

The SMB Takeaway

I give this small business credit for their head first dive into the software, although they should have told their IT Services provider, as he did not know they were using it – it was not being backed up! Think what they could have lost…….

However it brings up a lesson that in ITIL terms we call Capacity Management. (My first post on ITIL for small to medium business is here)

Capacity Management is defined as meeting current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. In English, it basically means purchasing IT assets based on your expected usage not just today, but next year. As a bad analogy - if you have decided that next year you and your spouse are going to have a baby, buying the two seat sports car right now would be poor future planning or poor Capacity Management.

My friends client found the software by accident, but this goes beyond the one software tool shown above, if you are looking at purchasing any type of IT software or hardware, consider where you will be next year, and the year after that. Buying a new server just big enough to hold all your office productivity documents and spreadsheets today, what about the new document or spreadsheet you create tomorrow?