So today I had the great privilege of meeting up with Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation, while he was in London on the way to South Africa. Being a South African my self I was particularly interested in his trip to Cape Town where he will ride the Argus Cycle Tour . Good Luck Harry..

Whilst I was with Harry this afternoon, we discussed the UK SMB market and what a great opportunity there is for small businesses to thrive by providing SBS2008 to their customers, even during this down turned economy. We also discussed how groups like HTG can really help small businesses grow in this economy by leveraging the skills of their peers and learning best practises from each other. For more information on HTG, why not visit www.htgmembers.com or contact me and I will make sure that you get in touch with the right person.

The main reason for my meeting with Harry was to pick up my personally signed copy of his new book, Small Business Server 2008, Blueprint which has now finally been released. This book is available at http://smbnation.com/Publications/Books/SBS2008Blueprint/tabid/88/Default.aspx. Having just read the first few pages of this book, I can see that it will be another brilliant book to add to my ever expanding collection of SMBNation Press Books.

Today was the SMB Nation Europe Event at Microsoft’s London office. The legendary Harrybbb (Harry Brelsford) and Jeff Middleton, came out to present at the event.

The format of the day was slightly different to the main SMB Nation events held stateside, as this was only a 1 day event, whereas the US events are 2 days.

Harry Started the day with a very interesting talk on Blue Ocean /Red Ocean, entitled “How SBS 2008 Saved the Economy”.

After Lunch was another very interesting talk about Essential Business Server (EBS) Deployment and Migration which was provided by Robert Adie, MCSE, MCTS : LCS, OCS, EBS, Hyper-V, CCNA is IT Director for leading Scottish IT and telecommunications solution provider Digital IP. With 10 years experience working with SmallBusiness Server and involvement in EBS for over two years, Robert bringsa breadth and depth of knowledge on both the technical and businesschallenges surrounding SME IT. Having implemented the first productionEBS deployment outside the US and two others since, Robert will sharehis hints and tips for a successful deployment and discuss some of thepitfalls.

Robert provided an overview of the new Essential Business Serverproduct, discussed planning and hardware selection and then discussed ind etail the unique EBS installation process. Migration and deployments were also covered, along with some insights from his experience in the field with real world deployments.

Up next was Jeff Middleton, who did 2 sessions around Swing Migration, as ever the sessions were delivered brilliantly !!! If you would like to know more about Jeffs Swing Migration, why not head over to www.sbsmigration.com

After all the presentations for the day, we all headed to the PUB, to consume copious amounts of alcohol. After the drinking at the pub was over, and all the part-timers went thier own seperate ways, a few of us went out for dinner, those present were Vijay, Richard, Linda (aka GG), and Raja, of course a lot more alchol was consumed .. if you would like to see some pictures of evening, why not head over to Richard Tubb’s blog at http://www.tubblog.co.uk/