WPC Day 1
Day one of Worldwide Partner Conference was great and very busy. All 3 of our Pilot Partners were at the conference today: Michael from NPower, Shiraz from Qdabra and Carl from DinerWare. We demoed their apps at the Office Live booth, and had lots of great questions and interactions with other partners about the partner opportunity in our vNext release, currently slated for late this year.
I spent most of the day on the floor of the conference, explaining our main scenarios and learning more about partner scenarios. The key points I think we made over and over again are:
- Office Live is targeted at small businesses, approximately 5-10 person organizations. Larger orgs can definitely use it, but that’s the market we’re trying to serve best.
- Office Live does not include any Office Client apps such as Excel, Access or Infopath.
- Office Live vNext is being built on Windows Sharepoint Services v3. We are not on Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS). We will have many of the great things that are included in WSS v3 such as wikis and blogs, but will not, for example, have MOSS’s Forms server or Excel server.
- Some partners are confused whether Office Live is right for their customers or if Small Business Server is better. It’s really a customer-by-customer question, and Microsoft Partners need to look at this closely to figure out what the right relationship should be.
- Unified billing is not something that Office Live is going to tackle in the short-term for Microsoft Partners. Office Live will have a subscription billing relationship with the customer, and the Partner would need to devise their own billing relationship for their services and tools. Long-term, we will look at this more to figure out what the right plan is for both partners and customers.
