tap tap tap
Suddenly things got very busy. I returned to work after my Las Vegas honeymoon last Tuesday. What a great trip but now I'm back to reality.
Aside from the usual email pileup, there were a couple of important meetings last week:
- Meeting to review TAP Program Description and Requirements
- Lunch with some folks from Softel, one of our partners
- First Selection Meeting for TAP Nominations
We have 25 (woo hoo!) TAP nominations submitted, with more expected. I'm thrilled at the level of interest. I did put some effort into "advertising" the program. Last week we were included in the "Monday Memo" that goes out to all Premier staff (consultants, account managers, etc.). I'm hoping that will generate a few more nominations.
Teresa in Marketing suggested moving the TAP deadline out to July 15, as many companies end their fiscal year on June 30 and wouldn't have time to think about participating in TAP until after that closing is over. In addition, our own Sales folks are heads down trying to close out the year, so we're hoping the extra 2 weeks will help get us a few more enterprise customer participants. So the new deadline for submitting a nomination form is July 15. Contact me if you're interested.
Our TAP Selection Committee is composed of a representative from Development, Test, Marketing, Business Development, our Product Unit Manager, my manager, and several Program Managers. We reviewed and agreed on the official requirements (both of us and of our participants) for the program. My next step is to revise this doc, allow for a final look-over and then work with our Legal team to get it approved in that magic Legal way so I can post it as "final" on the Microsoft TAP site. This description will be reviewed and signed by our participants as well. We also began reviewing the nominations. We have 40+ criteria we evaluate against, trying to select a diverse range of participants across industry vertical, enterprise vs partner, technology and hardware, language, and application type. Since we have so many nominations and expect even more, I've scheduled 2 more long meetings to review these. Then we'll make our final decisions and begin notifying the applicants.
We do have a managed Beta coming up in early 2006, so TAP nominees who aren't chosen will have first dibs on participating in our Beta. The Beta's objectives are two-fold: Marketing wants to get some customers building applications on the new platform that they may be able to use as samples or for case studies, and the Product Group wants to get more customer feedback on building (and hopefully deploying) applications on our platforms. Participants in the Beta will have newsgroup support and will also be able to file bugs and product suggestions, which will be greatly appreciated. More details on that to come.
My Computer Programming II class at UW starts today. My schedule will be a little crazy - work half a day in the morning, go to class in Seattle, and then work as long as it takes to get stuff done when I return. It's only for 2 months, though, and I'm really looking forward to the class. It's in Java (am I allowed to speak of that on a Microsoft blog?) and I will have 8 or 9 programming assignments to complete. I guess I know what I'll be doing on weekends!
