Want to hear us talking about security and our roadmap?

Every year, we get lots of feedback from our customers, through a variety of different routes:

• we conduct an annual customer satisfaction survey, which gives an overall picture
• we deal with individual customers through our support, customer care and partner management teams
• we see literally millions of product reports (every time you hit the “send to Microsoft” button)
• personally, I get plenty of useful feedback from blog readers like you, as well as comments and discussions via my @rayfleming Twitter account

It means that we can use that feedback to improve things around here (and also in many ways that you’ll notice in products and services we deliver). This year we thought we’d go a step further for all of our customers, and run some specialised events around the country. The events are for our largest IT customers. Although they aren’t specifically aimed at customers in education, all of the content except the licensing workshops will be useful for education customers.

The Microsoft experts are hitting the road across the UK in the coming months to deliver half-day briefings on a range of topics including our software roadmap and security.

These briefings are packed with information, delivered by presenters who know the topics inside out and each session is limited to a small group of customers to provide the maximum time for interaction and engagement with the experts delivering the content.

The topics covered in the current programme of briefings are:

• Future (Microsoft) vision and product roadmap
• Making the most of Software Assurance (SA) benefits
• Trustworthy Computing and Security
• Understanding Software Asset Management
• Licensing 101 – this will cover commercial licensing, and not education licensing
• Licensing products – this will cover commercial licensing, and not education licensing

The briefings are taking place in the following cities between August and November.

• Birmingham – 21st October – 28th October
• Bristol – 3rd November
• Edinburgh – 28th October
• Leeds – 18th November –24th November
• London – 25th August - 30th September – 27th October – 23rd November
• Manchester – 22nd September
• Reading – 24th August – 30th September – 26th October  - 24th November

All the dates above exclude the licensing events. Unless you plan a career in big-business-IT, then you won’t want to attend any of the licensing events, as they will only focus on our commercial software licensing schemes.

You will find much more information about the where, when and what of these Microsoft briefings here together with instructions on how to register to participate in any of the briefings.