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...

Hopefully by now you’ve all heard the news that Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 (or “SP2” as it is better known around the the halls of Buildings 31 and 32) is available for download . As Kevin Allison, general manager of the Exchange customer experience team, shared in the aforementioned EHLO Blog...

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...

Pop quiz : How many of you--especially those of you who have a PSP (a/k/a Partner Solution Plan ) with Microsoft--were aware we publish a great set of content and tools to help solutions partners (like SIs) deliver on our joint go-to-market objectives? Good to see all those hands raised! Now, for the...

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...

Having /hosting in the title of this post may look cryptic (or potentially a HTML goof), but to many of our hosting service providers (a/k/a hosters), this is a well understood setup switch to enable you to deploy Exchange Server 2010 in a multi-tenant fashion. In the words of our TechNet article on...

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...

The “Partner of the Year” awards are perhaps one of my most favorite parts of the run up to each year’s WPC . “Why’s that, Ian?” you may ask. It’s pretty simple, yet so rewarding (no pun intended). Each year, I get the chance to review a batch of award submissions and get a glimpse into the amazing things...

Happy Monday (not to be confused with the Happy Mondays of the Madchester music movement in the 1980s and 1990s, as featured in a great movie called “ 24 Hour Party People ”…perhaps now is a good time to mention I logged a bunch of hours at our recent Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) this last...

A few months ago, I read a great article by Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson , about how video is the next (or, perhaps, the current) big engine to share ideas and fuel innovation versus other mediums like the written word. This article really resonated with me, including the examples...

Who doesn’t like videos? One only needs to take a look at the stats from comScore’s recent online video rankings to confirm this as fact. They shared that “171 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in January for an average of 14.5 hours per viewer.”   Dang, that’s a lot of small...

The recently disclosed HP E5000 Messaging System for Exchange Server 2010 (or, as we call it around the hallowed hallways of building 31: “The E5000”) is one of the really cool projects my team gets to work on this year. Taking the best of what our two companies do–delivering the hardware and software...

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to present the Exchange Server session at the latest Redmond edition of Microsoft Partner 101 . Since I had only 30 minutes to speak on a number of potential topics around the Exchange business, I decided to prioritized my pitch to cover the considerable partner...