News & Views for Australian SBSCs

See guest post #1 here. Thanks, Robbie As the Australian SBS User Groups are changing focus, direction and names into the SMB IT Professionals groups, we need to ensure that we're not only changing our names, but living up to them. Microsoft has really...

We're in serious feedback gathering mode at moment & my colleague Vaughn Gourlie in the partner website team is looking for your input. It'd be great if you can spare a few minutes to let us know the top 5 things you go to the Partner Portal to do...

As promised when summarising the feedback from the last series of SBSC roundtables (apologies for the delay), we would like to share our response to the questions & concerns that were raised. You can download the document here that shows the issue...

Great to see some media coverage coming through for SBS MVP Stu Applegate & the team at Business Computing Australia , Microsoft's SBSC Partner of the year . Check it out in the weekend's Courier Mail . Robbie

Welcome to the first of our guest blogs from Hilton Travis , the Australian Small Business Specialist Partner Area lead . Enjoy. :-) Robbie   With the release of SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 just around the corner, now is the time to start looking at what...

Given that Small Business Server 2008 & Essential Business Server 2008 have now been released to manufacturing, I'm happy to report that both will be included in the next release of the Microsoft Action Pack. Check out the full listing of contents...

Great pick-up from Nick Mayhew's blog around the upcoming Partner-to-Partner networking nights. Open to Gold, Certified & SBSC partners. This round will focus on Local Government & whilst there's no specific focus on SMB per se, it could still...

One of the consistent pieces of feedback we receive is that there's not enough training around Volume Licensing. So in conjunction with Ingram Micro, here you go:  register your attendance . Cheers, Robbie Volume Licensing Boot Camps Want to build...

There must be something in the water up north as another Qld SBSC partner picked up an award at the recent Australian Partner Conference held in Port Douglas. Congratulations to Productiv , Partner of the Year for Information Worker Solutions, Portals...

Big congratulations to Stuart Applegate & the team from Business Computing Australia after they picked-up the SBSC Partner of the Year award at the recent Australian Partner Conference in Port Douglas. In the words of Inese Kingsmill, Microsoft Australia...

Straight from the official SBS product team blog , Small Business Server 2008 has 'released to manufacturing' - which means the code is baked and moves to escrow etc. The product will be generally available within a few weeks and the worldwide launch...

Well done to you all and here's to an exciting conference next week ! Good luck at the award ceremony. Nick Mayhew

And the nominations for 2008 Small Business Specialist of the Year are: Business Computing Australia Calvert Technologies Comcity Technology Evolve IT Australia We had a record number of entries this year with consistently high quality, so even being...

http://hiltont.blogspot.com/2008/07/wpc-08-summary.html Good summary & whilst I perhaps had a slightly different take on some of the sessions, I agree that one of the most useful part of any conference such as this is in the networking. The chance...

New Australian SBSC newsletter out today. Please let me know if you haven't received yours. We're working on a way to allow more than one recipient per company - stay tuned. Robbie

I'm a big fan of show & tell & never is this more important than when trying to translate technology wow into business needs. How do you explain the benefits of Remote Web Workplace to someone with no concept of accessing their info from out of...

Both the Small Business Server 2008 & Essential Business Server 2008 betas are proving very popular in Australia & so if you haven't already, now's the time to get started with them. We're currently ranking fourth worldwide & accounting for...

I've just posted this note on my blog and I know from talking to Robbie that there are already some concerns and questions arising in the SBSC community around the announcements last week on BPOS and S+S at Worldwide Partner Conference. So here is my...

We announced over on the SBS blog last night the long-awaited sign-up incentive for the SMB Servers TechEd 2008 pre-day - a free copy of Small Business Server 2008 Std for all attendees. Register here: https://www.infosalons.com.au/teched2008/s1p1.asp...

Good collection of the main WW Partner Conference Presentations from Nick Mayhew, Australia's Group Manager of all things Partner. The Australian Partner Conference is just over 3 weeks away & there are still one or two places left if you act fast...

Microsoft's VP of SMB, Michael Risse, gave the keynote in yesterday's SMB Partner Forum at the WW Partner Conference in Houston - check here for details. Whilst the deck is obviously designed to be presented live (ie there's space for a demo), I've kept...

Good to see the Australian Small Business Specialist PALs past & present together & distributing a little bit of Aussie cheer at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. Noice. Dean & Hilton have made personally sure that all 12,000 attendees...

Loads of good content coming out of the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, but if you couldn't make it then it might be worthwhile checking out the Digital WPC instead. All the keynotes, breakouts, discussion forums & selected webcasts will...

Today is July 1st & that means the official handover of Australian Small Business Specialist PAL duties from Dean Calvert to Hilton Travis. I want to take the time to officially thank Dean for his continuing contributions to the Microsoft partner...

First up in an ad-hoc series of guest authors on the Australian SBSC Blog is the newest member of our Breadth Partner team - Julia Askin . You may have already spoken with Julia as the main organising force behind the recent SBSC Roundtables & I'm...