Active Directory mISV

Marketing Plan

2006-04-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

Now that I've release Active Last Logon I can just sit back and watch the cash roll in. Or not. I had a couple of days of sitting around with that now what feeling, so this morning I sat down and wrote the outline of a marketing plan. It isn't long, but I urge anyone who hasn't done so yet to write it down. Even if you have it all planned out in your head. I've come up with several ideas I wouldn't have had I left my marketing ideas in my head. I'll be blogging about some of parts of this plan as I start to implement them and give progress reports as I go along. So here is the outline of the plan. You might note that some of the things on this list may not be marketing strictly speaking, but they all relate back to it for me so they made the list.

1. Continue to improve the look of the website - A good looking website should be a journey not a destination, however at some point you need to move on and work on other things. I plan to bring in outside design help in the near future as well.

2. Continue to improve copy on the website - Same as above journey not destination.

3. Send out press release - This is done. Well the copy is written and it will be released May 1 through www.prweb.com. I'm still learning the process and hopefully future press releases will have a wider distribution.

4. Reviews, Reviews, Reviews - I really think this is the biggest key to the success of Active Last Logon. Right now I'm building a list of online and offline sites and magazines to submit copies of Active Last Logon to for review. I'm also looking for any information anyone has about how to get the best response from the editors(ie them deciding to review, not some trick to get a good review).

5. Google AdWords - Can't beat the price, but I just don't think my keywords get enough impressions to help significantly. I started running ads last week and I typically averaged 38 impressions and one click per day.

6. SEO - Currently my site www.desertwillowtech.com comes up on the second page of results for my key words, and every once in a while the last result on the first page. Currently on the first page on msn, but virtually non existent on yahoo.

7. Free tools - I have ideas for a few Active Directory utilities that I'm going to release for free hoping to bring traffic to the site.

8. Articles - I'm planning to write some Active Directory articles. Mostly topics that relate to Active Last Logon, but some general Active Directory.

9. Become active in the Active Directory blogging, mailing list and newsgroups communities. Not spamming or astroturfing just joining in the conversation and giving a few tidbits about my product/articles/free tools in my sig.

10. Possibly run some banner ads on a few sites. The pricing is pretty good and sites are really targeted so it may be worth it.

I didn't really intend to have a list of 10, guess I've been reading Guy Kawasaki too much. :)

Active Last Logon Released

2006-04-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but it has been a busy month getting Active Last Logon out the door. It is now available for purchase. For those of you who missed earlier posts Active Last Logon adds another tab to Active Directory Users and Computers to display last logon information. For more information visit the product page or read this previous post.

Thanks to all who have given advice or tried out the beta.

When is a bug a bug

2006-03-13T22:28:00.000-08:00

I've had a handful of downloads on the Active Last Logon beta, but so far not feedback. From what I hear that's typical. It's hard to get good beta feedback.

I have found one bug so far during testing, but is it really a bug? Let me explain, I was testing the case when a domain controller is offline. I've tested this case in previous builds and it has worked exactly as expected. This time it crashed. I was surprised since I believed I'd tested this case already.

Then I found the problem. Turns out that I found two bugs. The first was a bug in my testing protocol. Instead of taking a domain controller offline, I just manually edited Active Directory to add a fake one. Well the bug was I added the fake domain controller wrong. I neglected to create all the objects that should exist for a domain controller.

The second bug was that Active Last Logon crashes when there is a improperly added fake domain controller. :) So is this really a bug. I decided that yes it is. I don't want there to be any cases were things "just crash". Even though there is very little chance this would happen in the real world I decided to mark it as a bug and fix it. I can imagine a weird case were someone's domain gets messed up and could cause this crash.

So what am I saying with this post?

1. Automate or at least document the steps to your testing
2. A bug is a bug. If you can imagine it happening and it crashes the whole app fix it!

The beta is now available

2006-03-08T01:48:00.000-08:00

Well it is late(the time and the beta) so here it is. I'll post more about it tommorow. Active Last Logon beta

All about Active Last Logon

2006-02-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

I'm sure many of you who see this blog aren't necessarily that familiar with Active Directory so I decided to post more about what Active Last Logon does and how the decision to create this product came about.

So in brief words Active Directory is a database of users, resources and ACL's giving access to the resources. It also handles Authentication and Authorization. Now there is plenty more to it such as workstation management, but for our purposes today that is enough.

Administrators typically use a tool called "Active Directory Users and Computers"(ADUC) to manage users, groups, workstations, etc. When you look at the properties of a user's account using ADUC you see mostly static data. The user's full name, group memberships, login script, etc.

Active Directory however does store some data that is more dynamic. One of these things is the last time the user logged on to Active Directory updated each time the user logs on. The catch is the "Last Logon Time" attribute stored in Active Directory is a non-replicated property meaning each domain controller has it's own copy of this property that only applies to itself. So the end result is a different value for the last logon time on each domain controller.

For the purposes of this post just consider a domain controller to be a server with a copy of the Active Directory DB and can authenticate users.

So to get the an accurate value for the last time the user logged on each domain controller must be checked. Here is were my product Active Last Logon comes in. It adds a tab to ADUC called Last Logon that polls all the domain controllers and displays the most recent.

The idea to create this product came about because of my background as an administrator on Novell eDirectory networks. In that environment the last logon time is displayed by the management tools by default. This is because the last logon attribute in eDirectory is a replicated attribute. I then found myself working on Active Directory networks and wanted to see this value, thus giving me the idea to create this product.

The differing philosophies regarding Active Directory vs. eDirectory is the subject for a later post.

I hope this post has helped some of you who may be reading this and aren't familiar with Active Directory to understand my product a bit.

Thanks for reading.

First Screenshot

2006-02-22T01:37:00.000-08:00

I finally got the first screenshot up on the website. The website is really ugly at this point, but I'm concentrating on the getting the beta done. The beta is complete including the installer, except for some internal testing.

On another note if anyone knows if this is a bad idea, the way the website is setup right now is dotnetnuke is installed to a subdirectory, then I put a default page at the root that does a redirect to the dotnetnuke directory. Is this a bad idea, I'm mostly thinking of in relation to search engines/crawlers.

I'm redirecting like this:

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "/dnndirectory"

Since I'm assuming most people reading this are not Active Directory admins, I'm going to have to start casting a wider net for beta testers, so if you know anyone who may be interested...

www.desertwillowtech.com

Active Last Logon

2006-02-19T16:05:00.000-08:00

So it is time to announce my first product. It is named "Active Last Logon". It adds an additional tab to Active Directory Users and Computers to view last logon information for a user. It polls all Domain Controllers in a domain and get the last logon info from each one then displays the most recent on the new tab.

I intended to have a screenshot to accompany this post, but I'm not blogging this from home so hopefully I'll get screenshots posted later tonight.

The company website is also running although it still needs to beaten with a pretty stick. www.desertwillowtech.com I need to add the screenshots there also. The website is a work in progress and will be changing quite a bit over the next week or two.

Thanks to those who posted comments spurring me to get this announcement out since I had originally intended to post it last Friday.

What's the product?

2006-02-12T14:51:00.000-08:00

I will be announcing my first product on Friday February 17. I'm now officially looking for beta testers. The product is really lightweight and takes about 2 minutes to configure and install. Potential testers are any Active Directory administrators, you do need Enterprise Admin rights to install, but there are NO schema extensions involved. Of course I expect most people to wait until I announce the product before volunteering. I'm thinking of offering a 20% discount to active beta testers. Seem fair?

I'm also planning to have the new company website up on Friday also, although it may be fairly ugly for a week or so while I shift most my efforts onto it.

Exciting times ahead!

What I really meant

2006-01-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

So if any of you even remember my blog, I haven't posted since mid December, and my micro-ISV efforts in general have followed the same pattern. To use the analogy from my last post most of the "dirty laundry" has actually been new tasks I've discovered or realized I need to do. So I've had less time and more things and got completely demotivated. My micro-ISV became a dream instead of a goal. So tonight and tomorrow while when I have some time to work I won't be coding, designing my website/researching hosts, my two previous highest priority tasks. I'll be writing up a complete list of tasks to accomplish my goal then tackling them one at a time.

The one thing I have decided for sure is a wider beta program not huge, but better than the couple of friends I had originally planned to use. I'm really tempted to give a prediction on the beta, but I'll resist until after tonight and tomorrow's task/goal setting efforts.

The Dirty Laundry Effect

2006-01-31T21:37:00.000-08:00

Or more accurately the pile of dirty laundry effect. My micro-ISV effort has become a pile of dirty laundry. It started as a pair of socks, then a shirt, some jeans. It wasn't a full load yet so I skipped washing it. Over the next couple of weeks the pile grew. Was there time to make a dent? Yes, but with the holidays I told myself it was more important to spend time with family. It was, but in reality I could have fit a load in here or there. Then a mountain of dirty laundry appeared and I started to daydream about cleaning up the ever mounting pile, but it had just gotten too big.

So I guess I'll just start by sorting the pile. Funny thing is over time stuff showed up in the pile I didn't even know I owned. So I'm off to start sorting and hope to be posting here much more often.

Focus

2005-12-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

So my head has been bursting with ideas. New product ideas, new marketing ideas, little tweaks I want to make to the product I'm currently working on, new personal projects. The result has been small progress on a lot of projects. So now I have to refocus. Repeat after me:(sorry I'm typing to myself for a minute...Please stand by...) Finish the installer, Finish the installer, Finish the installer. Okay now that I go that out of my system. I have a new plan for my morning work. The night before I am writing down my goals for the next morning. This way I will be totally focused on the task at hand and not tempted to work on other things. Don't get me wrong all the other things are important and need to get done, but I need to finish that pesky installer first so I can get the beta copies out and announce the product.

In the spirit of being unfocused. :) I claimed the lense for Active Directory on www.squidoo.com last night. I've started modifying it the way I want it, but haven't published any of the changes yet. So if you have any favorite Active Directory resources for developers or admins let me know.

Comments

The Transform part of my MSI plan

2005-12-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

Since I decided to use a msi based installer I've been thinking about how to handle the transform file I wanted to make available to the user. Since the installer is pretty simple, ie only two choices to make, I decided I'd just use the Windows Installer API to write a little utility to allow the user to input their responses and generate the transform file. I'm planning to distribute this utility embedded in the msi, so it will have to be installed once manually to get the utility, which isn't a big deal since I decided to not allow the network portion of the install to happen when using the transform file.

I finished the last custom action dll today, now all that is left for the installer is to add some nice text, a EULA, and test the install on all the supported platforms. Oh, and don't forget to test the uninstall and rollback functionality. I hate installers that mess that part up.

The Day Job

2005-12-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

Well I didn't do any work on this microisv on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. At 4:45 pm on Monday, the email server at work died. So I got to stay until 2 am fixing it, then came back in at 6 am to make sure the early users didn't have any problems. I'll spare you all the blow by blow of fixing the problem unless you ask for it.

In more cheery news, I'm about half done with the last component of the installer a custom action to make some changes to Active Directory. It is the only part of the product or installer that makes any changes to Active Directory so I'm being extra careful with it. It looks like I'll stay on target for having the installer done by the 15th. It is quite frustrating to only have 90 minutes of coding time a day.

Comments

Dumb time wasters

2005-12-04T20:14:00.000-08:00

So, I had some free time earlier this afternoon and decided to work on a dll I need for a custom action for a MSI install package. In the past I've created spaghetti code because I was learning an interface and coding it for production at the same time. Then I had to go back and try to refactor the mess later. So this time I decided to only add the new code as a separate project just to learn from then I would write the production code afterward.

I fired up my code editor and started coding the test code. The first function was a very simple bit of code to get the RootDSE information from a domain. It is standard code that I've used dozens on times. So I compile the code and upload it to my test platform where...It crashes Hmm. That's weird, so I spent the next hour staring at these few lines of code. "Maybe my test platform has a problem," I thought. So I then wrote equivalent code in VBScript. It worked perfectly. So out of frustration I started looking on the web at the possibility of using a VBScript as a custom action in an MSI package. Turns out it is doable, but not advisable. That was a nice time wasting diversion. Back to staring at the C++ code. Now after an hour the problem jumps out at me. It was dumb. ADSI(The interface for talking to active directory) is COM based and I had forgotten to call CoIntialize. Now I can actually start working on the code I want to work on, but oops times up. I have other weekend obligations to got take care, so I just wasted all my development time this afternoon.

No one else was in the room, but it didn't stop me from being embarrassed.

Why I'm using a MSI install package

2005-11-30T23:29:00.000-08:00

Early on I decided I would use a MSI based installer for my product. Many would argue(and possibly rightly so) that there are easier/better installer technologies out there. However since the whole point of my company is to make life easier for Active Directory/Windows Administrators I felt I had to go with MSI. MSI packages are the easiest way to distribute applications in an Active Directory environment without add on packages such as Microsoft's SMS. I flirted with the idea of ditching MSI after a couple of hours of wading through some MSI tables in Orca, but then I thought back to all the times as a network administrator when I would think, "If only they had given me an MSI based installer this would be so much easier." Besides I had that aha moment with MSI and it doesn't seem so bad now. There will be some more MSI posts coming as it is the part of the project I'm currently working on.

I guess what I'm getting at with this post is that I need to remember who and why I'm really developing this product. I was a Network Administrator first. I must make sure I don't forget my old pain as I move forward. As a quick note my new day job is in a NDS(my older friend) environment, so forgetting some of my old Active Directory based pain is a danger I'll need to watch out for.

So until next time as you work on your projects, "Remember the pain!"

Deadlines and Milestones

2005-11-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

So here is the entry where I talk about the deadlines and milestones I'm setting for myself. They are all realistic, but pretty much self imposed just to get things off the ground. My work schedule for my mishap is from 5:00 am until 6:30 am every morning. Well it is supposed to be every morning, but things happen. So as punishment for myself I'll be added an entry to the blog letting everyone know anytime I fail to get up and work. I also get a little time between 10:00 pm and 12:00 am most days, but not on my development machine so I mostly work on the webpage layout and content during that time. So with that time schedule things have been moving pretty slowly so far, I'm hoping to kick things into a higher gear so here is my schedule let us see if I stick to it.

I'll provide more detail for these milestones in the future

December 15 - Installer completed and tested on all supported platforms.
December 23 - Send out beta copies of product
December 31 - Website design and content complete. This includes a free article or two on various Active Directory topics.
January 7 - Setup webhosting and upload site. Submit to search engines
January 13 - 1.0 done including any bug fixes or changes from the beta
January 15 - Setup Credit Card processor. I'm planning on using plimus.com right now
January 23 - Launch!!!!
January 30 - Setup Google AdWords campaign

That's the schedule right now. I'm sure it will change, but at least I now have something to judge my progress.

Let's get started

2005-11-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Active Directory mISV. You may have noticed that I don't mention my company or product name in my profile. Since I haven't registered the domain names yet, and like the stereotypical startup I'm paranoid. I will announce the names when I register the domains. This should happen very soon(more on this in my next post).

So what kind of products am I developing? Well from the title of the blog I'm guessing you have figured out it has something to do with Microsoft's Active Directory. The first product(to be revealed soon) is just a small little utility that I have encountered a need for in my consulting work. This first product is feature complete and just needs a little more testing, plus completion of an installer. I'll talk about my timeline and milestones for the next 3 months in my next post.

If I bore you with any posts in this blog let me know through the comments and I'll try and modify the content a bit. I'm hoping this blog can help keep me on track with my effort as well as help others by watching the successes(hopefully) and mistakes(I'm sure there will be some) I make along the way.

I do plan to move this blog to my own site once my hosting is up and running, so keep an eye out for that.

Thanks in advance for all your "constructive" comments.