August 2007 - Posts
We announced live on stage this morning this exciting new communications initiative - Partner TV. www.partnertv.com.au We've posted three videos so far: Pip Marlow, SMSP Director: http://blogs.msdn.com/ozpartnertv/archive/2007/08/20/partner-tv-introducing-pip-marlow.aspx
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Did you know that the portal has information on our free pre-sales support service - this is available to all certified and gold partners - free of charge, unlimited and accessible by phone and by the web: You will get a response within one business day:
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http://www.microsoft.com/australia/findapartner/ We've just put this live - a visual geography-based searching tool for customers to find partners - using Virtual Earth. I love it - particularly great for our SBSC community I think as their customers
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https://partner.microsoft.com/Australia/salesmarketing/competitiveselling We have sales resources by competitor for you to leverage in competitive selling situations. There is also online competitive selling training.
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" Windows Live™ Quickstart is your one-stop-shop for training, resources, up to date information, news, and pre-release cool stuff! As a member you will be eligible for all of the Windows Live™ commercial offers. Sign In to participate! " You can register
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http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare "Informing Decision-Making for Customers at the Crossroads in Their Server-Purchasing Choices Announced today, the Windows Server/Compare site provides customers with in-depth resources and comparative information
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Preparing my keynote slides for partner conference, I have a slot for our blogging strategy and what's available for partners. Below I summarise the list of Australian partner-focussed blogs we have available to help our partners get and stay informed,
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Just arrived today for the conference - such an awesome location and we have an exciting week ahead of us. The team has worked very hard - this is a big event - 620 partners, 150 Microsoft staff, numerous executive visitors, pre-days etc etc but the week
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We've added some more nice showcase entries to the Silverlight site in the last few days: Omnicom's media preview NETiKA's WinForms MSDN Whirly Thing ((! Yes really !!) Tafiti Search front end (blogged last week) Windows Vista Simulator Enjoy !
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Wow - there is a serious amount of training for partners coming out around the Forefront product line. This is targetted at sales and technical people in numerous partner types like infrastructure, security, and even Sharepoint partners (with our Sharepoint-attach
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This just came out - a new experimental front end for Live Search - FAQ Here . The introduction of the 'shelf' is quite novel - here is how you use it: Step 1. Go to www.tafiti.com Step 2: Enter your search term (I am going to search for Tafiti itself):
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http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2007/08/22/partner-tv-licensing-101.aspx "Patrick Voss and Aileen Hannah from the Partner Team discuss the sometimes sticky subject of licensing Microsoft products - sticky because its sometimes quite complicated to
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One of my US colleagues asked me to post this - would love to see some of our Australian ISVs getting involved in this (if you do, please let me know through the contact email on this blog, and I will give you a name check !): "We’re looking around the
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Via Mike's Marketing for Partners Blog : "Our marketing consultantcy, Carpe Diem recently undertook a survey of over 50 Australian Partners , obtaining feedback relating to their thoughts on what sales and marketing readiness training they would like.
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We've just announced the Microsoft Australia 2007 Partner award finalists publically - winners to be announced at the gala dinner at the partner conference . Many congrats to all those listed below and thanks also to all partners that submitted solutions
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http://www.microsoft.com/technet/try/vhd/default.mspx
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Upcoming Partner Readiness training on Windows Server 2008 1. Windows Server 2008 : IT Pro https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=669348&linvitation This 2 day Windows Server 2008 Essentials is intended for IT
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This is the 4th post in the series of Partner Portal Nuggets - highlighting some of the useful and interesting resources that partners might not be aware of on the portal - including both the global content and the local Australian content. This time
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This one caught my eye: http://www.flowers-for-you.com.my/catalog2.aspx A Malaysian e-commerce site - nice use of Silverlight for a more interactive and engaging user experience. I quite liked the thumbnail navigator for example...
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We hit our target attendees a while ago but managed to get a little more capacity - but now we are definitely full ! You can join the waitlist if you like as the main constraint is accommodation (and of course more could be released to us at any time)
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Here on the portal is the section all about helping your business succeed financially. This includes the Profitability Assessment Tool where you can benchmark your financial performance against like partners - I've sat with a few partner CEOs and done
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As part of our continued efforts to improve partner & customer satisfaction we are sponsoring the Global Relationship Study. This is designed to directly shape Microsoft’s products and services, which in turn will help us meet your needs and help
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Ryan Donovan announces the roadmap for our ecommerce platform - it's a great plan and a good posting: http://blogs.msdn.com/rdonovan/archive/2007/08/08/in-depth-commerce-server-product-roadmap-information-desk-program-announcement.aspx
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Christian gave me 100 DVDs for my blog subscribers (partners only I am afraid) to give away - you can order them on the portal but you have to pay postage. If you contact me, and can prove you are a subscriber (RSS feed etc), I will send you one for free.
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Hardly going to build you a pipeline on its own, but nevertheless this may prove useful for your marketing teams/people/you. You can customise logos with your own competencies. Step 1: choose your competencies (I choose 3 at random to illustrate) Step
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I got the final email from the 'Early Start' for the Unified Communications Early Start today. Copied here below - now that the specialisation is live, you'll begin to see additional focus and targetted resources to help you gain this specialisation if
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Not yet available in its beta form in Australia but good to see that it's coming down the line: So this is a name change (formerly Windows Live Folders) and with some feature enhancements: · An upgraded look and feel – new graphics to go along with your
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My colleague David Dembo, our Health and Human Services Industry Manager, is just about to give a presentation at TechEd, around knowledge-driven health. As part of the presentation there are some useful links and info that are generally of interest -
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I am at TechEd today on the Gold Coast. Great to see a number of partners exhibiting - so far I've spoken with OBS/Nintex , K2 , Advanced Training , Excom , and Readify amongst others. Some awesome sessions going on - going to go to user experience one
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The Partner Learning Center is a comprehensive online store of training and related resources - both sales, marketing and technical. You can keep your team focussed on billable work and still allow them to upskill - at no cost. It will help you find suitable
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I used to run a Gold partner and often found the portal just too complex and unwieldy to be useful. No surprise to many of the readers of this blog ! However there is some really useful content in there, so I've decided to kickstart a little series of
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http://www.messenger-emoticons.com.au/
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" REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 5, 2007 — For the first time, people around the world can view 3-D images of the space shuttle Endeavour and surrounding buildings at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before it launches into space, through a collaboration between
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"I sit down with Dan Fernandez and he takes us through Popfly. Popfly is about building content without having to write code. In just a couple of seconds you can snap things together like gadgets and cool web content. You can even rip content from other
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Download the API document then ..
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I have some important news for those of you who are Action Pack subscribers! Beginning November 30, 2007 partners either renewing or subscribing to Action Pack will be required to take an online course from the Partner Learning Center and pass the associated
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Next week of course is TechEd - I am going up on the Thursday and hope to meet some partners there. We have a big presence and focus on learning for partners and customers at this event - here is a summary. Do make sure you check out the offerings, visit
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This was announced yesterday - but good news on a friday is just that much more pleasing :-) After a relatively fixed focus on the ODF standard only, Massachusetts has decided to support the Open XML standard. This is good news for all Microsoft partners
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An interesting Q&A session with Steve Guggenheimer, our general manager of App Plat Marketing: Includes questions on SOA, BI and next-gen applications. " REDMOND, Wash., Aug. 2, 2007 -- People are at the heart of every successful business. They make
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http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/07/27/three-new-features-in-live-search-images.aspx Now that is a great idea - we've all spent ages scrolling through pages of images looking for something - at least now you can narrow a search for someone
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Spotted via Frank . Great piece of innovation from Readify here: www.tfsnow.com The concept ? Hosted, managed Visual Studio Team Foundation Server offering - first in the world apparently. Very cool. Software Plus Services in action !
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