Yesterday it was the snow that kept your humble blogger home. Today, an icepocalypse has displaced the snowpocalypse that kept Pacific Northwest folks stranded these last 36 hours. To capitalize once more on the added bandwidth a “work@home” day offers, I thought I’d continue our ongoing “Spotlight on...

First off, I’d like to wish all of you a very belated happy New Year! May your 2012 be a year of filled with good health, lots of happiness and plenty of business prosperity! I fully realize that I’ve been a bit behind on my blogging thanks to the post-holiday dig out. But, as luck would have it, the...

Happy holidays everyone! While I may be out of the office (or "OOF" as we blue badgers like say in our Exchange automatic replies emails), I didn't want you to miss out on some important updates to our Gold Messaging competency . More specifically, we've made some great progress on the new technical...

Continuing our series that spotlights fellow Exchange partners who are spotlighting the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your businesses, this edition focuses on Voicemail. Voicemail (a/k/a Voicemail with Exchange Unified Messaging ) can truly save your customers both money and time...

Earlier in October, we kicked off a new series to spotlight the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your business. One of the objectives of these “Spotlight on" Partner Opportunity” posts, is to demonstrate how the advanced capabilities--or what I like to call the “Hero Workloads...

Earlier this morning, I had the opportunity to swing by Building 40 to welcome a number of Exchange SMEs (the subject matter expert variety) who will spend the next five days developing the questions that will ended up in our new Messaging competency technical assessments. You’d be very impressed with...

Yes, I know. It’s been a while since I focused a post on some news for our Exchange ISV partners. Well, you can consider those days over, as I have some Friday Fun Facts on what we’ve been up to on the Microsoft Platform Ready front! If you’re not already familiar with MPR--and you haven’t already click...

Fresh on the heels of this morning’s announcement , I couldn’t wait to share with you these bright, shiny and brand smackin’ new Messaging competency logos: These are fairly “hot off the presses” and I think they’ll look real good on you! And, as part of this “Mid-Monday Momentum” treat, we also launched...

While it may seem more prevalent than I’ll make it out to be, it’s not everyday you get to launch something. So, when you get to start off your Monday morning with the fantastic news that something you and your team has been working on for a better part of a year is now live and launched, you feel a...

We received a lot of fantastic feedback (via this blog and face-to-face at events like WPC and Partner MS101 ) about what kinds of resources would be most useful for you as you build and grow your businesses with Exchange . One of the common themes of late has been “yeah, I get you want us to invest...

What a week for the blog, eh? It’s a blog post three-peat week for me! I must admit, I do feel a bit like my beloved Seattle Sounders FC (our local Major League Soccer franchise), who just a few weeks back won their third Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup in a row (a three-peat feat that had not been witnessed...

Sadly, I cannot remember which comedian who’s bit it was—although I suspect it was something the great George Carlin once said—but it goes something like this: saying "it’s always the last place you look” after someone shares they’ve located a missing item (like car keys or a wallet) after a long...

Okay. You can officially call off the search parties, because I have not gone missing trying to locate the mythical “ Building 7 ” on our Redmond campus or some other mishap that has resulted in my going dark on the blog for the past month. Actually, I just took a few weeks off and, now, I have successfully...

No surprise, right? You’re probably saying, “Yeah, Ian. I get it. Exchange 2010 is a solid release and customers are clamoring for it , like you’ve mentioned many times before.” Okay, fair point. And, following all of the energy coming out of this year’s edition of WPC around killer products you can...

WPC is certainly a gift that keeps on giving! Align these lines, I am pleased to share with you the video replay from Julia White’s Exchange general session (a/k/a BP04 – Dollars, Euros or Yen: How Exchange Brings You Growth Opportunities from On-Premises to the Cloud) is now available. Just swing by...

When I first kicked off this Exchange partner blog, about five months ago, I opened with a seemly innocent comment about how there were “only 159 days until WPC11.” Not surprising, those 5+ months just flew by, and before we realized it, we were all in L.A. for a week chock full of keynotes, sessions...

Great news! Earlier this week, we officially launched a brand new customer facing partner page on our microsoft.com/exchange site!! As you may recall, this site was previously a mishmash of a static list of ISV partners we stood up around the Exchange 2010 launch in November 2009 , and a link off to...

My good friends from the Exchange technical product management team (and close neighbors around the hollowed hallways of Building 31 ) have just launched a fantastic new “Exchange Technical Video Series” up on TechNet’s Exchange Server TechCenter . These videos afford you an awesome opportunity—especially...

Believe it or not, this month I celebrated my one year anniversary in my role leading the Exchange partner marketing team . Man, a year can go fast when you’re having fun! While I’ve been working in the Exchange product management group for nearly 4 years, these last 12 months have afforded me some amazing...