The best Partner Conf wrap up I've seen so far...

Mike Snyder's Partner conference wrap up is a good read for anyone following Microsoft developer and business product lines. My favs follow:

• During that same Kevin Turner keynote, Microsoft did something I NEVER thought I would see. Microsoft announced HARD dates for when they will ship products...and I'm talking about major products here. Kevin said they will ship Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and BizTalk Server 2008 all on February 27th, 2008. I almost fell out of my chair when he said that. Usually they will say stuff like "later this year" or "first half 2008", so for them to give a very specific date is really shocking. And really exciting too I might add. On a side note, I asked one of the Microsoft CRM developers what he thought of this hard date announcement and his response was "I am glad I am not on that team" so I am sure there will be lots of long nights and cases of Red Bull for those developers over the next six months.
• The big news of the conference was that Microsoft announced its Live CRM pricing. There is so much to talk about on this topic, I am working on a separate dedicated blog post just to cover this news in detail.
• In addition to the pricing announcement, Microsoft released information about the Live Customer Early Access Program. If your company is interested in getting on board with Titan before it goes live to the public, please contact us and we'll try our best to get you into the program.  You can also try to apply at http://www.crmlive.com.

Read the whole article at: http://blog.sonomapartners.com/