Office Live at WPC Day 0
Day zero of the Worldwide Parnter Conference is now behind us. Several of us from the Office Live team showed up early at Small Business Symposium to meet with solution providers about how Office Live could help them better serve their customers.
We had the great fortune to be joined by one of our Pilot Partners from NPower Charlotte, Michael Gray, who demoed a very early version of an application that they are developing on our vNext release to the attendees. John Christensen, our Solution Developer Channel Manager, also presented the v1.0 Beta of Office Live.
NPower specializes in bringing technology to nonprofit organizations. They are creating a constituent and gift management application built on Office Live. We’re working with them closely to understand what kind of needs they have, what problems they hit, and how well Office Live is able to satisfy those requirements. It’s great to feel like Office Live can help lower the barrier of entry for nonprofits by removing the need for the organizations to have their own IT department on staff, expensive equipment and version upgrades.
We fielded a lot of questions after the session, mostly to do with the business model for partners that want to use Office Live as a solution platform. Some partners were nodding their heads in agreement throughout, and of course we had some skeptics that wisely pushed us to think through all of the implications. Ultimately, I think we have a great story in response, and NPower is a great example of why. They can pitch solutions to customers that don’t include the cost for servers or specter of maintenance overhead, lowering the barrier to entry.
We also announced the existence of our new Office Live Developer Center on MSDN and “preview” version of our Developer Guide on the Microsoft Partner Program. So, all in all, it was a very action packed day… and the conference hadn’t even started yet!
