Where has 2009 gone so far?  I can still remember Christmas lunch looking at the Easter Eggs on the supermarket shelves. Bad news for the waist line as I still haven’t lost the extra weight from having the baby… unlike my wife.

Just before Christmas, I accepted a new job in the Partner Technology Specialist (PTS) team and started mid-January.  I’m focusing on our Information Worker technology, such as SharePoint and Unified Communications. Another new chap to Microsoft, Jason Clarke is responsible for our Core Infrastructure products & solutions.  Together we cover the “North” with our main remit being to help mid-market customers understand our respective technology set as well as helping making Partners more successful.

I really enjoyed my time as an ISV Marketing Manager and in many ways will be really sorry to leave it.  This new role though will allow me to closely with customer and partners though which I’m really excited about.

Top 10 things I’ll miss:

1. Working with our agencies – together we created a new brand for ISV communications, to help make it stand out from the crowd.  We still had to use Partner Program orange though in some of our work. Small steps…
2. Partner-TV – our partner video blog which I’m still going to be dabbling with…
3. ISV Royalty Licensing – we signed up many new partners to the program this year allowing ISVs to integrate our technology into theirs and really saw some success. 
4. Communities, including the .NET Clusters.  Huge thanks to Ellen, Alastair, Eddie, Faith, Ian and Martin for their support :)
5. Innovation Day Tour across Australia – I did two of these and saw most of the country’s capital cities.  Huge thanks to the DPE boys for the comedy… you know who you are. The team used Mesh to pull our presentations together and for backups… Mr Kordahi though used the power of Mesh against me. I didn’t appreciate that with Mesh you give other people the power to make changes and during the last presentation, an ‘extra’ slide was added to my deck.  As I turned to look at Michael & Andrew, I was faced with a camera. A great end to a successful road show.
6. Australia Partner Conference as the ISV track owner… although I’ll still be involved this year from a PTS angle.
7. Web Agencies and Partners – Silverlight is still on my radar though as it integrates with MOSS :)
8. Software + Services – I still get the play with our online services which is great for demonstrations.
9. BizSpark for startups – working with David Sajfar providing tools + software to start up companies.
10. Working with the various virtual teams, including the other Partner Marketeers, DPE, Hosting guys; Partner Account Managers, the Regional teams, Corporate and many, many others.

Prep for the new role:

It’s been fun developing my knowledge which a month ago was about the 100 level for most of our stuff.  I’m going deeper and should be around 250 by the end of the month… our partners are truly the experts though as they make all this stuff work.

1. I attended the electronic version of our technical training event in Seattle
2. The day before I officially started, I delivered a 3 hour presentation on what is SharePoint to the Large Account Resellers… poor guys
3. I have been involved in a number of partner and customer workshops articulating the value of our business productivity stack
4. I’ve been playing with the “Demo show case” which I remember my old colleague, Chris Parkes, was a huge fan of.  Pretty cool resource of virtual PCs for partners, rather having to create your own
5. UC learning paths to learn more about the latest release of our unified communications offering
6. What’s coming in the future: Office 14
7. I’ve learnt so much about customer’s really opinion is of us, which is really refreshing and eye opening

It’s been great fun so far learning about this new side of the business and I look forward to working with you with my new hat on.

Finally, a huge thanks to Julia; Nick; Sarah; Sarah; Sarah; Mike and Kim (save the best to last) for their advice; support; humour and leadership.