Ian Hameroff | Exchange Partner Community

It’s Alive! BlackBerry for Support for Office 365 Goes GA

2012-01-30T22:09:00Z

A short while back, in October 2011, I shared an update on a new cloud service that RIM had launched to provide BlackBerry support for Office 365.

To avoid you having to step into the Wayback Machine, here’s that post: Hot Off the Presses: BlackBerry Support for Office 365 in Beta

Well, this morning at 8:00 a.m. Eastern, our friends in Waterloo announced the official launch of their BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365.

Woo-hoo!

So, what does this mean for you?

One may consider this a bit of a cheat, but I’ve decided to just cut and paste from my previous posting on the subject (with some tweaks) what you can/should do now that the service is generally available:

As for your call to action, it’s pretty simple: If you have customers evaluating Office 365 (or Exchange Online) and seeking guidance around how BlackBerry fits into our mobility story, just point them to http://www.blackberry.com/cloudservices to learn more about BBCS.

You can even let them kick the tires (and I encourage you to do the same) by signing up for an Office 365 trial (NOTE: This needs to be an Enterprise Plan Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan E3)) and enabling the service under “Setting up email on mobile phones” in the Admin console (see right for a screenshot from my tenant).

It’s really that simple to drive a dialogue with your customers who want both Office 365 and support for their BlackBerry devices.

I’d also recommend you take a look at some of these other links for additional details/conversation starters:

Once again, checkout http://www.blackberry.com/cloudservices for the rest of the details on this new RIM service for Office 365!

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Happy New Content to Kick Start a Happy New Year!

2012-01-27T23:42:40Z

Remember that post I did a short while back about the Messaging PSP Activation Kit?

Good! (If not, I’ll give you a few minutes to click the above link and get up to speed).

In the spirit of a more predictable and frequent cadence of content updates to the kit, we kicked off 2012 with another refresh of this fantastic tool set for you.

The theme for this wave of updates can be best summed up as “Help customers experience the full benefit of Exchange 2010” and to make that possible we made two major additions:

First, we are now featuring content and tools around complementary solutions from partners like TransVault (who offer tools to help get archived data into an Exchange 2010 archive), and AudioCodes (providers of gateways to enable Exchange Unified Messaging)
Second, there are some new training resources to help you get boned up on technologies like Forefront. Great examples of this include videos on Information Protection and Control with Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) and Exchange and Advanced Routing Scenarios with Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Notes Migrations

2012-01-19T20:35:35Z

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 Partner Opportunity” series with a look at the opportunities around Lotus Notes Migration.

I don’t believe I need to reiterate the business opportunity or the resources Microsoft provides to help you win and deliver a Notes to Exchange 2010 or Office 365 deal, however I think it is useful to share with you an example of how partners are tapping into this business opportunity made possible by a super hungry Notes customer base seeking a rescue.

Okay.

Maybe just one more datapoint?

This time, here’s a look from the perspective of the “Exchange-to-Notes” business opportunity.

In a blog post by Gartner’s Tom Austin, he shared that in a 10 month period, “no Microsoft e-mail customers called us for advice on whether to migrate to Notes/Domino for e-mail.”

So, it’s pretty clear there’s work to be done on the Notes-to-Exchange front. Now, back to the partner spotlight on some real opportunity: migration tools.

For some time now, we’ve turned to our ISV partners to build migration tools to meet the specific needs and requirements our customers demand when moving from a legacy platform to Exchange or Exchange Online.

“Why is that, Ian?” you ask.

Considering that most customers moving away from a legacy platform—like Notes or GroupWise—have likely used this infrastructure for some time, there’s high probability there is a lot of important data housed in these aging investments. Therefore, we work with partners like Quest Software who have the expertise to know exactly what customers need when planning for email and calendaring migration and (many cases) coexistence during the transition.

Here’s what partners like Quest have to say about tapping into this opportunity:

“More and more, organizations of all sizes are faced with the question: ‘to cloud or not to cloud?’ But what customers are really asking for, though, is flexibility. Customers don’t want to be locked into a rigid, antiquated platform not extensible to other forms of unified communications, like Lotus Domino/Notes. Because of its inability to keep up with the latest market trends, we see a drastic drop off in its market share. Customers want their strategic communications to be flexible and adaptable to their businesses. Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online are the gold standard for enterprise messaging, offering the most flexibility for customers to make that decision. Quest is proud to be a leading Microsoft partner, having migrated more than 10 million mailboxes to Exchange and Exchange Online from Domino/Notes, as well migrating over 350,000 Notes applications to SharePoint using our proven methodology of preparation, migration, coexistence and management.”

- Michael Tweddle, Sr. Director Product Management, Quest Software

So what’s next?

Use one of the many customer cases of the proven cost savings and productivity boosting results they achieved after moving from Notes to the Microsoft productivity stack and start a conversation with your customers. For example, Godiva Chocolatier saves $250,000 annually by moving off Lotus Notes and they utilized a migration toolset (from Binary Tree) to make that happen.
Share links to the customer ready content we post to Why Microsoft? and the Microsoft Partner Network portal. As an example, this whitepaper on Migrating IBM Lotus Notes and Domino to the Cloud: Selecting Microsoft vs Google.
Investigate the third party migration tools provided by partners like Quest, including their Notes Migration for Exchange, Coexistence Manager for Notes, and Notes Migrator for SharePoint
Earn the new Messaging competency, and demonstrate your expertise to your to prospective Exchange customers.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Doing the Math: Reflections on Lotusphere 2012, Seattle Snow, et al

2012-01-19T00:50:26Z

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 Pacific Northwest is currently in the throws of a large snowstorm which has afforded me the opportunity to work from home (thank you Lync and Exchange!) and the time to catch up.

It dawned on me—while on a break from reviewing Messaging competency plans, presenting to ISVs and general emailin’—that this is the week of IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference. Considering the event, in recent years, has been described by some as “pretty depressing”, I was very curious about what IBM would be using this year’s confab to promote.

Not surprising, IBM continues to push “social” as the high order bit, as evidence by their event tagline: “Business. Made Social.”

Now, I am not claiming that Microsoft (nor any company focused on productivity offerings) thinks social is a bunch of malarkey, but clearly we’ve been thinking about this in the scope of the Future of Productivity and not just a bolt-on message to breath new life into a legacy platform.

But, that wasn’t what really caught my attention.

It was this formula that IBM posted on their Lotusphere webpage:

Again, I don’t disagree that social, mobile or the cloud all offer opportunity—you can easily say the very same about SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365—but the “opportunity³” just sounds way too high-level to be meaningful.

So, in effort to help out here, I thought I would share some more useful information about the opportunity³ (or, opportunity triple play) around migrating (or rescuing, as we like to say) customers from their Lotus Notes infrastructure to Exchange 2010 and/or Office 365.

Here goes:

Opportunity #1: We know that customers want to move to off of Notes.

You don’t need to look far to see this validated.

As I shared a short while back, our annual product satisfaction survey revealed that “nearly a third of Lotus Notes users” are looking to make the switch over the next 12 months, with nearly 20% of the remaining base is “strongly considering” making the change.

But, just don’t take our word for it: take a look at some of the recent industry analyst reports where leading pundits (like Matt Cain of Gartner) have said that “We continue to see widespread interest in the Domino base in migrating to alternative platforms.” (You can read the whole MarketScope for Email Systems, 2011 via our website).

So, strike while the iron remains hot! Show your ~~costumers~~ customers what Exchange and the rest of the stack can do for them, and then help them get there once you’ve convinced them!

Opportunity #2: You’ve got plenty of evidence that can help start this conversation with your customers.

Before I provide you the “laundry list”, nothing makes life easier than references. Heck, nothing makes life easier than a ton of customer cases studies highlighting how the move from Notes to Exchange has paid off.

For example, Adrian Steel, Head of Infrastructure Management of the Royal Mail Group happens to mention that they “believe that the Microsoft business productivity suite—compared to Lotus Notes with the same capabilities—will save more than £1 million over the four-year duration of this deal.” And, with 165,000 employees, saving some dough on critical infrastructure is, well, critical.

Here are a few more examples to help strengthen your pitch with customers:

Toshiba Corporation - Toshiba estimates that in the first four years of ACS’s operation, Toshiba will save over US$21.5 million in server hardware operation costs, software licensing costs and personnel costs for operation and maintenance. Indirect savings from the consolidation of its information-sharing infrastructure amount to US$42 million, netting total projected savings of about US$63 million over a four-year period.
Grupo Romero - “With Microsoft Online Services, we have eliminated the $400,000 annual cost of maintaining Notes, as well as the cost of Notes servers and storage. When you subtract our Microsoft Online Services licensing costs, we are saving at least $50,000 annually on email costs, and we are also getting far more for our money than we got with Notes.” Jose Torres, Chief Information Officer for Priox, a Grupo Romero company
National Association of Realtors - The National Association of Realtors has seen messaging reliability and productivity go up, and average meeting time go down, with its move to Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook. Employees have better mobile support and the freedom to choose their own phones. And, when its migration of Notes applications is complete in a couple of years, the association will likely save U.S.$900,000 in annual IT spending—funds that it will be able to reinvest in member services.

I could share more, but I want to get to opportunity #3.

Opportunity #3: You can benefit from the long list of tools, services, and support we provide to help you rescue Notes customers.

Just head to the Microsoft Partner Network, and grab one of many, many, many resources we offer and keep up-to-date to help you win these customers.

For example, you can find:

Training resources, like the How to sell into an IBM Lotus Notes Customer course
Even more case studies
Sales tools and collateral like the Comparing IBM Lotus Domino and Notes with Exchange Server 2010 sales guide
Best practices and tested methodologies
and, much more

We also have Why Microsoft? which is the first link I send to any customer to give them an opportunity to see it for themselves.

In short, I hope this is a little more productive than a high-level formula that equates to opportunity.

Oh, if you didn’t think this was enough, how about another triple play?

Exchange Server 2010 + Exchange Online + Hybrid Deployment = The Most Choice available for email services delivered your way (and not a mash-up of different solutions from different sources).

Happy selling!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Getting Ready for the Gold Rush (Messaging Competency Gold, That Is)!

2011-12-22T15:56:09Z

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 assessments we're standing up as part of the requirements to achieve the Gold-level of the (still kind of new) Messaging competency.

As you likely recall, I shared with you that we had a bunch of the top Exchange SMEs (or subject matter experts) from our partner community in town last November to help us pen some brand spanking new technical assessments that will be required to attain the Gold Messaging competency. These new assessments focus on our "hero workloads" of Exchange, such as security, archiving, and voicemail, as well as advanced deployment scenarios for Exchange Online. For example, the latter assessment tests for your Exchange technical prowess--or what I like to call, your mad ninja skillz--around implementing a Hybrid Deployment with Office 365 and Exchange Server 2010 on-prem.

Good stuff, eh?

I certainly think so (although I'm likely biased, but I'm 100% in your camp).

Okay, you're probably wondering when these new assessments will be live and when you'll be required to pass them in order to "go for the gold".

When we first unveiled our plans for the new Messaging competency, we had hoped to make these new assessments available in late 2011/early 2012, and then require them for Gold in May 2012.

Well, based on your feedback and kind requests, we've decided to give these new exams a little more soak time and you the opportunity to prep a bit more for these new requirements.

This means these two new assessments will be live and ready for action (albeit in English-only) in February 2012. We'll add additional languages--including Japanese, Chinese, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese--later this spring (March or April for those of you in the southern hemisphere).

Adding to this good news: new training modules for these assessments are planned for availability before May 2012. These will be great companions for your preparation activities, and we can't wait to share them with you (once they are done, that is).

Finally, the new technical assessments will become a required requirement starting in October 2012. This gives you a little more than six months to get you and your team fully prepared to fulfill this forthcoming requirement for Gold.

With many of you approaching your MPN anniversary dates, this is a great time to get familiar with and ready for these new requirements in order to successfully re-enroll in any competencies your business may have already earned. Why not carve a little of your holiday break (when you're not carving the turkey or tofurkey) to do a quick review of these for the Messaging competency by visiting the MPN portal site here.

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Happy Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program Day!

2011-12-15T17:46:07Z

While I may not have the authority or even the ability to formally declare a certain day of the year in the honor of a particular cause, program, person, etc., all of this holiday cheer going around—and the prospect of a long vacation just a few days away—has given me the confidence to declare today (December 15, 2011) Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program Day!

That’s right!

Happy Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program Day 2011!

Oh, before I go on to why we have things to celebrate today vis-à-vis the EAS Logo Program, it’s important to note that your humble Exchange partner community blogger has not confused EAS for Esperanto. So, those of you who are celebrating Zamenhof Day today, I think there’s enough room for the two.

Gaja Esperanto tago!

Alright, on to the good stuff for you, the Exchange Partner ecosystem that makes this business of ours hum.

Just a little more than eight months ago, we unveiled the Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program in an effort to better help you help our mutual customers identify which EAS devices will deliver the best possible mobile experience. Effectively, we sought out to partner closely with handset manufacturers and mobile operators to establish a baseline of critical EAS functionality and then over time expand the expected level of capabilities for (again) the best possible mobile email experience.

To give you the latest and greatest on the program, I’ve asked Jim Lucey from my team, who looks after this program as part of his focus on Exchange ISV and hardware partners to fill us in:

I can’t believe it’s already been eight months since we started the Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program. A number of new devices have just been added to the program, including Nokia OS devices, as well as Windows Phone 7.5 devices. And there are even a number of Android OS devices beginning the certification process.

For those of you just learning about this, the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) Logo Program was designed to test mobile email devices using the EAS protocol, to ensure that customers and IT Pro’s have a seamless experience with setup, support and use of qualified devices. We have heard from you the increasing diversity of mobile devices your employees use to access company resources, is one of your top concerns. Many of these devices use Exchange ActiveSync for mobile email, but they are not all implemented the same. As such, it is difficult to find out what is supported on each device. The EAS Logo Program is intended to provide a baseline for EAS functionality on these mobile devices.

“So, what is new?”, you may ask… Well, we’ve recently added the following new qualified devices to the program website and are excited to share the growing list of EAS Logo devices for customers:

Nokia 600, 700, 701 running on Symbian Belle

Nokia N8, C6-01, C7-00, E6-00, X7-00 running on Symbian Anna

Devices running on Windows Phone 7.5 (like the new Nokia Lumia, and other Windows Phones specific to your region)

And, beyond this, we have a number of Android devices we will be adding to this page in the coming weeks. Please check back regularly!

Thanks,

Jim Lucey
Sr. Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Dankojn por la updates, Jim!

And, Happy Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program Day!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

New Business Opportunities Now Available for Download

2011-12-06T22:43:39Z

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 post, this update includes a bunch of commonly requested fixes and a handful of new capabilities. A few of these are worth highlighting here, as they offer you some new and improved opportunities to connect with customers and drive new business.

“What are they, Ian?” you ask?

Let’s start with perhaps the most obvious, yet ever so important: Exchange 2010 SP2 gives you a chance to call on your on-prem customers and help get them upgraded to the latest and greatest release.

Many of you likely already have standing support contracts with your customers, so while this may not necessarily generate new revenue, it does keep Exchange top of mind. SP2 also adds to your proof points that Microsoft continually adds value to Exchange (whether on-prem or online) and that it’s no accident this happens on a fairly regular rhythm.

And, if your customer still happens to be stuck on a previous release--like that strong workhorse of email servers Exchange Server 2003, which was released 8 years, 6 months, and 5 days back, but who’s counting--why not use this latest SP release as a chance to rekindle the conversation about upgrading to Exchange 2010 (or migration to Exchange Online where you can keep your customers on the latest and greatest release all the time, and spend your engagements helping them get more out of the software they license/subscribe to)?

Next, there’s the new Hybrid Configuration Wizard which is aimed at making it easier for you to help customers deploy and support hybrid scenarios with Office 365 and Exchange Server. As an Exchange partner, this is a new tool in your tool chest that gives you the ability to better plan and execute a large scale migration from on-prem to online, or even for those customers who will make a hybrid deployment (you know, some of their users in the cloud with Exchange Online and others on-prem with Exchange Server) a permanent fixture. You can learn more about this tool (and what a hybrid deployment is all about) by checking out this recently published TechNet article “Understanding the Hybrid Configuration Wizard”.

After you read through that bit, you can then (drumroll please) checkout the new Address Book Policies feature. I know this is something that will excite partners, as many of you, some in person, have asked me in the past, “hey, Ian, when are you going to have something like address book segmentation in Exchange 2010?”

Good news: the wait is over and just like the HCW, there’s a fantastic TechNet article for you to learn more: “Understanding Address Book Policies”.

Now this last one also has special significance for our hosting partners. In fact, you likely recall the post we did a few months back that shared our future plans around the “/hosting” deployment mode for Exchange 2010, and how Address Book Policies are a key component to the evolution. One of the things we promised in that October post, was some new guidance on how to use SP2 (and Address Book Policies) to configure and deploy a multitenant Exchange infrastructure.

Well, that guidance is also available for download via a post that went out on the EHLO Blog earlier today: “Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 and Hosting”

And, as Greg writes in the above posting, there’s even a brand new TechNet page dedicated to this topic with a list of third-party control panel and hosting automation vendors that have been validated by our team in Building 32 for this new hosted model with SP2.

So, in conclusion, there’s a lot more in those 535.2 MB of bits than just new features and fixes. There’s a ton of opportunity for you, our great Exchange partner ecosystem, to connect with customers, deliver new value, or even remind them of the great value they already have in both the software from us and the services you provide to help them realize the full potential of productivity it can offer.

Got more ideas or thoughts on SP2?

Share them here!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Voicemail

2011-11-21T22:22:55Z

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, and perhaps more importantly, save them from that aging, legacy hardware solution they have today for voicemail. You know the one; the one that may be from a vendor that no longer even exists!

To further support this point, we know from some fairly recent research from folks like the "Voice Report”, over 50% of customers will need to replace their primary PBX before the year 2014. What does this means for your business? Easy. There’s not only an opportunity to position a solution like Lync, but also swoop in and win the voicemail socket with Exchange!

But, PBX replacement time doesn’t need to be the only compelling event that can drive a good conversation about Voicemail with Exchange. We’ve found in a number of cases that partners are just making the deployment of Exchange-powered Voicemail a default aspect of any SOW they pitch to customers. Basically, they are saying that every customer should think of a well planned, designed and deployed Exchange 2010 solution includes Voicemail, and this has not only been a very successful upsell opportunity, they have also witness cases where a Lync deployment was a natural pull through.

Voicemail: the gift that can keep on giving!

As with other “Spotlight” posts, you don’t just have to take my word for it!

Here’s what partners like The VIA Group have to say about tapping into these additional services opportunities:

"Microsoft's unified messaging capability inherent in Exchange 2010 is such a natural fit for The VIA Group and the services we deliver to our clients. VIA was one of the very first system integrators worldwide to embrace third party unified messaging technologies for Exchange 5.5 in the mid 1990's and over the past 14 years, we have delivered millions of unified messaging mailboxes to our clients. When Microsoft first introduced its own unified messaging functionality with the release of Exchange 2007, we were very excited! Since then, VIA has become experts with Exchange UM on-premises as well as Exchange UM online with Office 365. Exchange 2010 has become a big part of our services delivery for our clients and specifically with our deep knowledge around these technologies, we are able to seamlessly integrate Lync and other telephony manufactures systems with the robust capabilities that both the on-premises and Office3 65 versions of Exchange 2010 UM deliver for our customers."

- Kevin Carswell, CEO The VIA Group

So what’s next?

Use Exchange Voicemail to run your business. Nothing is cooler to demo to a customer than a real-time text preview of a message you just left yourself. This is always a staple of my customer pitches and should be in your sellers’ arsenal as well!
Deploy what your customers might already have the rights to. No kidding! There are many customers that have the software and license rights via the Exchange ECAL, but need you to go and deploy it. This is why the “Voicemail included by default” technique for SOWs is a winner. And, just ask partners like Dimension Data’s Brian Walshe who has one of my most favorite quotes of all time, saying with Exchange voicemail “your ROI on [Unified Messaging] is probably six weeks. It’s ridiculously good.”
Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.

Are you seeing great opportunities to with Exchange Voicemail?

Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Email Security

2011-11-10T19:03:52Z

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”--we’ve delivered in Exchange 2010 offer you the opportunity to develop specialized, high-value practices to your customers, which in turn, should translate to higher services revenue.

We kicked off the series by sharing how Dimension Data continues to see new opportunities with archiving in their Exchange engagements. This blog post brings you the next installment of our series and focuses on the opportunities email security can bring your business.

So, without further ado:

Taking a macro-level view, email anti-virus/anti-spam (AV/AS) is projected to be a $4B market by 2012 per IDC.

To pile on, in a study this year, Forrester Research surveyed ITDMs (IT Decision Makers) and BDMs (Business Decision Makers) at 400 North American companies and found that integration with email security is a top evaluation criteria for purchasing email.

No surprise, right?

And, if you take into account the momentous demand we are seeing from customers to get to the latest release, the fact customers love the release, and bear in mind that anti-virus/anti-spam is one of the most compelling features customers are looking for, this creates a great opportunity for you to position, consult and deploy email security capabilities in Exchange 2010.

Partners like Avtex recognize this customer demand and are taking advantage of these additional services opportunities:

"Companies are faced with many challenges of how to provide consistent and quality real-time and non-real-time communications to their employees, partners, and customers. More and more, the standard for communications has been expanded to a multitude of devices. With this explosion of multiple interfaces, it is critically important to protect sensitive corporate information. Exchange 2010's advanced email security features provide integrated, controlled, and manageable ways to deliver world-class messaging. Avtex continues to see growth in our business as it relates to securing the foundation for UC deployments, specifically Exchange 2010 projects."

- Khai Tran, Vice President of UC Solutions at Avtex

It’s a win-win when you upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. Delivering email security requires specialization that leads to higher-touch customer engagements with the opportunity for more services dollars for your organization. Customers in turn can reduce costs or complexity while benefiting from the Forefront functionality that earned Microsoft a Leader position in the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways.

So what’s next?

Use the technology to protect your own businesses (like Forefront Online Protection for Exchange)
Upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. You can use things like the recent Gartner MQ I referenced just above to help start that conversation.
Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.

Are you seeing great opportunities to with email security?

New Messaging Competency Gets Its Test On

2011-11-07T22:59:35Z

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 the team we’ve assembled, who’s industry credentials include Exchange MCMs (Microsoft Certified Masters), MVPs (Most Value Professionals), owners of consulting businesses, holders of MPN competencies, and even a Blue Badger (the Microsoft FTE variety). We also have a some nice representation from around the globe, even with a few folks joining from parts like Italy via Lync.

One of favorite takeaways of my short chat with the question crew: while all of them have taken a range of certification exams, tests, assessments, etc., many of them are writing questions for the first time.

I think this is great news, because it is always good to have a fresh perspective--especially one that is backed with a ton of experience and product expertise.

These guys will be working this week with some of the big guns of psychometric consultation and test development from another partner of ours to make sure we translate these expertise into quality assessments for you to demonstrate your Exchange skillz (that’s right, skillz!).

Just a quick reminder: this work is contributing to part of the new requirements for attaining the Gold Messaging competency. More specifically, we’ll be adding new assessments to test your abilities to deliver the advanced workloads (like security and archiving) of Exchange as well as implementing Exchange Online. These new assessments are a key part of our goal to differentiate partners who’ve achieved the Gold level of our new competency.

I can’t wait to check in throughout the week to see how the question writing is going and watch these new assessments come to life right before my eyes. And, don’t worry, I’ll keep you all updated along the way!

Happy Monday!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Hey ISVs, Are you MPR for O365?

2011-11-04T22:36:20Z

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 on the link above—Microsoft Platform Ready “is designed to give you what you need to plan, build, test and take your solution to market.”

While we’ve had good stuff up there on microsoftplatformready.com for Exchange 2010 for some time now, we just recently refreshed the bits around the “Test” stage of the MPR process. More specifically, we have updated our Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool which enables you to assess your applications for compliance with Microsoft-recommended requirements and test cases.

More specifically, specifically, we’ve updated the Exchange Server 2010 MPR test to:

Align with our brand spanking new Messaging competency to enable our ISVs to obtain either the Silver or Gold to show off your skills making Exchange even better
Assess applications written for either Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Online with Office 365

Neat, right?

“So, why is this important?”

At it’s essence, the MPR test will help you identify possible compatibility and readiness issues when building your apps for Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Online with Office 365. However, while you may wish to test non-complete versions of your software as it’s being developed, only released version tests can be submitted and/or used for earning the Messaging competency as an ISV.

Nonetheless, you’ll want to visit our MPR site a bunch because we will continue to refine the Exchange MPR test tool as we learn best practices for ISV partner applications working with Exchange or Exchange Online. In fact, Jim Lucey (my ISV partner lead on the Exchange partner team) thinks non-stop about how partners like you can best utilize our modern extensibility interfaces (like Exchange Web Services) to build your solutions to add value to both the on-prem and online flavors of Exchange. We’ll certainly keep you updated as new guidance is made available and tweaks to the MPR test tool go live.

“Sounds great! How do I get started?” you ask.

It’s super (and not just a normal Microspeak “super”) easy to get going:

Sign in to Microsoft Platform Ready and register your application to access the Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool.
To begin using the Test Tool, click on the Test My Apps navigation tab. Details about the criteria requirements and individual product test cases are available in the test tool

Go ahead and give the MPR test tool a whirl and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and feedback. In fact, Jim is so passionate about this opportunity he wanted me to share some recent examples of fellow great partners of yours who have already engineer their offerings to (in this case) run with EWS for (again, in this case) Exchange Online. For example, I already spoke about the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services support for Office 365, but there’s also Quest OnDemand Migration for Email, LiveOffice Discovery Archive, and Binary Tree Solutions for migrating to Office 365 just to name a few.

Happy testing!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Mid-Monday Messaging Competency Momentum

2011-10-31T19:52:38Z

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 a brand new “Become a Partner” page off of microsoft.com/exchange:

My favorite part?

Click on the video link and watch what I like to call our “Greatest Hits” reel of partners telling partners about how they have grown their business with Microsoft Exchange.

Good stuff!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Welcome to Your New Messaging Competency!

2011-10-31T16:31:58Z

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 little extra special.

As I mentioned in one of my posts last week, we were moments away from the upcoming launch of your new Messaging competency.

This fine Monday morning, I am thrilled to announce it is finally here!

Welcome to your New Messaging Competency!

This week the Microsoft Partner Network celebrates its one year anniversary since launching broad programmatic changes to bring more value to partners like you. In an ever-evolving industry, we recognize it’s necessary to evolve programs to meet new marketplace trends and business needs. Responding to your feedback, last May we announced we were evolving the Unified Communications (UC) competency to better enable your organization to differentiate expertise in the marketplace and compete more effectively.

Today, the UC competency has been officially retired and we officially launch the Messaging and Communications competencies.

Earning the Microsoft Messaging competency helps give your organization a competitive advantage to increase your revenue opportunities with Microsoft Exchange. As I mentioned last week, we are extremely bullish that the new Messaging competency will give you a competitive advantage through such benefits as access to Exchange training resources, even more Internal Use Rights for Exchange Server 2010, exclusive access to compete resources, the distinguished Messaging competency logo, and much more. Unlocking these benefits can expand your customer opportunities and strengthen your Exchange expertise that can lead to shorter sales cycles.

The Silver Messaging competency recognizes your expertise in implementation, design, deployment, and support of Microsoft Exchange Server.

And, the Gold Messaging competency highlights your deeper investment in archiving, security, and voicemail, along with your ability to help customers with their journeys to the cloud with Microsoft Exchange Online.

If your organization was enrolled in the UC competency and meets the new requirements of Messaging and/or Communications competencies, you will be migrated automatically as appropriate. For other UC competency partners, migrations will be complete by November 11. Thank you for your patience as we complete these migrations. Also, I encourage you to check out the “Evolution of the UC Competency” guide for a comprehensive FAQ section.

It is fantastic to offer you the opportunity to ENROLL in the Messaging competency.

Grab more details on the value and benefits of the Messaging competency here.

Then check out the requirements to enroll in the competency here.

Again, welcome to your new competency!

Before I close, I wanted to recognize all the hard work that Kristin Murray (Exchange) and Caroline Chung (Lync), as well as our partners (no pun intended) over in the Worldwide Partner Group (like Dan Truax and Katie Larson) for making today possible. Thanks for all you have done to help make our partners even more successful!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

New Series: Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Archiving

2011-10-27T15:34:58Z

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 in the advanced workloads of Exchange, but show me what success looks like!”

That was a really good piece of feedback, and the team and I spent some time on how to best deliver such a “partner success story” case study. So here goes: starting today, we are launching a new series on the blog called “Spotlight on Partner Opportunity”.

We hope this will help shed some light on how others in Exchange ecosystem are capitalizing on a range of partner opportunities Exchange can afford your business, and how things like our very, very, very (super), very soon to be launched Gold Messaging competency will enable you to get trained up and noticed for your competency and capability to deliver on the “more than messaging” benefits of Exchange Server and Exchange Online.

Okay, so here’s the very first one for you and please keep the feedback coming!!

---

Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Archiving

Exchange offers your business more opportunities to provide services beyond email infrastructure upgrades or migrations. Thanks to the advanced capabilities we’ve delivered in Exchange 2010 (such as email archiving and discovery, security and voicemail) you have the opportunity to build specialized, high value practices which should equate to more services revenues that go above and beyond traditional email server deployment and configuration.

We continue to see momentous customer demand for Exchange 2010 in the marketplace. And, this demand only grows stronger if we take into account a thought provoking figure from our research findings: 81% of organizations worldwide do not have an adequate archiving solution today. This means there’s plenty of green field opportunity for you to position, consult and deploy email archiving capabilities in Exchange 2010.

Partners like Dimension Data recognize this customer demand and are taking advantage of these additional services opportunities:

“Dimension Data has seen strong and steady adoption of Exchange 2010 across all sectors since its release. The new features in Exchange 2010 are greatly compelling for our clients. Interestingly enough, the new native archiving functionality has been a great conversation starter for us. Most all of our clients have some level of archiving requirement making this is top of mind for them. In fact we see an increasing number of our clients making the choice to upgrade now specifically because of the new archiving capabilities offered in the [Exchange] 2010 release, and expect to see more as time goes by.”

- Anne Greenwald, Global Business Development Director
Microsoft Solutions at Dimension Data

Delivering email archiving requires specialization that leads to higher-touch customer engagements with the opportunity for more services dollars for your organization. And it’s a win for customers, too, who can meet their archiving needs with Exchange 2010 and avoid paying for third party solutions.

So what’s next?

Upsell your customers on the email archiving capabilities in Exchange 2010. Remember there’s low hanging fruit considering 81% of organizations are without an adequate archiving solution today.
Enroll in the Gold Messaging competency, launching just next week, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers. We have designed the Silver Messaging competency to highlight your capabilities around deploying and configuring a traditional messaging environment, and the Gold Messaging competency recognizes your investment and specialization in delivering email archiving (in addition to security and voicemail and your ability to help customers with their journeys to the cloud).

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Messaging Competency Update: We’re Getting Close!

2011-10-27T00:17:22Z

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 since the 1967-69 Greek American AA last snatched the silverware hat trick).

Okay, that may have been a longwinded and deliberate way of mentioning my Sounders in an Exchange partner community facing blog, but it worked, though, right?

Nevertheless…on to business!

I’m not sure you noticed this or not, but we’re all over the Microsoft Partner Network’s portal’s homepage this week:

More specifically, our two recent UC Partner of the Year award winners (InfoWAN and Polycom) are featured on the main stage as part of our ramp to next week’s official launch of our two new competencies: Messaging (for Exchange partners) and Communications (for Lync partners). And, as you’ve likely gathered the current Unified Communications competency (known around these parts as the UC competency) is set to retire at the same time.

Now, I’m not just sharing this with you because we’re impressed with our own graphic design, but that we also have a new (and pretty neat) page for you to learn the latest about how these two new competencies will help you “Broaden your business portfolio and meet customer demand.”

You can check that out by visiting: http://mpncompetencies.com/unifiedcomms/

As you’ll learn by clicking on the aforementioned link, we are extremely bullish that the new Messaging competency will give you a competitive advantage through such benefits as access to Exchange training resources, even more Internal Use Rights for Exchange Server 2010, exclusive access to compete resources, and much more.

Doing the math here, we also believe this means you’ll experience increased opportunities with shorten sales cycles thanks to the brand, resources and support you’ll gain after attaining the Messaging competency.

BUT WAIT!

There’s more!

Even though the Messaging competency isn’t live just yet, there’s a really good call to action for you.

It’s simple: just read up on the changes that are coming through this great “Evolution of the UC Competency” guide the team has put together.

It’s a good read and something that will keep you busy until my next post. Well, at least it will get you ready for next week’s launch.

I can’t wait, can you?

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Hot Off the Presses: BlackBerry Support for Office 365 in Beta

2011-10-25T17:53:58Z

Great news, Office 365 fans!

Earlier this morning--very early for your humble blogger based here in Redmond, WA--Research in Motion (RIM) announced that an Open Beta (a/k/a public beta) has been launched for their new BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365.

Can I get a “Woo-hoo!”?

This is great news for you, as I suspect you may have customers currently interested in moving to our cloud for business productivity yet they were curious about how they can get BlackBerry to access email, calendar, contacts, etc. with Office 365.

As we shared back in March, RIM and Microsoft have been working together to deliver a new type of services offering, that moved the “connective tissue” between Exchange Online and the world of BlackBerry wireless synchronization to a new RIM-hosted cloud service.

That new RIM-hosted cloud service is called RIM BlackBerry Business Cloud Services (or RIM BBCS to keep things simple). BBCS is “is available at no additional cost to current enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online. The service works with BlackBerry smartphones on business or consumer data plans. The service offers BlackBerry access to Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar, and contacts. And IT administrators can provision, manage, and secure their organization’s BlackBerry phones from a convenient web-based console.”

As the partner guy, I am pretty excited about the approach RIM has taken. It certainly serves as a great role model for other partners that wish to deliver value add enhancements to Office 365 while preserving the cost and business agility benefits the cloud offers. More specifically, RIM is delivering BlackBerry Enterprise Server capabilities without having to have those servers installed in our datacenter. Instead, RIM is tapping into the scale and cost efficiencies the cloud enables and has built this new service utilizing familiar underlying RIM technology enhanced to connect via “cloud-ready” interfaces into Exchange Online (i.e., Exchange Web Services) to extend Exchange Online goodness to BlackBerry smartphones.

Good stuff.

Now, you can find more info about this new service by visiting our Microsoft Office 365 Blog and the new Office 365 Wiki article we posted right after the RIM open beta announcement. There’s also a new comparison chart RIM posted to help you understand how the feature set of BBCS stacks up to BES, BES Express or just good ol’ BlackBerry service from your Wireless Provider.

As for your call to action, it’s pretty simple: If you have customers evaluating Office 365 (or Exchange Online) and seeking guidance around how BlackBerry fits into our mobility story, just point them to http://www.blackberry.com/cloudservices to learn more about BBCS.

You can even let them kick the tires (and I encourage you to do the same) by signing up for an Office 365 trial (NOTE: This needs to be an Enterprise Plan Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan E3)) and enabling the service under “Setting up email on mobile phones” in the Admin console (see right for a screenshot from my tenant).

And, you should also have your customers sign-up for the BlackBerry Beta Zone to ensure they get access to all of the additional resources RIM is providing, and perhaps more importantly, your customers can provide valuable feedback into RIM on how to get this from open beta to general availability.

Stay tuned for more details as we progress from today’s open beta (which is available in “over 30 countries” starting today) to the expected general availability milestone planned for January 2012.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Introducing Your Messaging PSP Activation Kit: Now with Even More Partner Readiness Goodness!

2011-10-24T22:06:01Z

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 rest of you, I’d like to share a pointer to and an update on our latest rev of the Messaging PSP Activation Kit.

“What’s a PSP Activation Kit?” you ask.

Put simply: “PSP Activation Kits are the perfect companion to PSPs! These kits can help you (our great Exchange partners) achieve your FY12 targets by providing important sales, marketing, readiness and compete resources in a single, easy to use location.”

Good stuff, right?

I completely agree!

And, that’s why we’ve committed to not only do a better job making you aware of excellent partner resources like this one, but we’re also going to keep these key tools updated on a regular basis. For example, the Messaging PSP Activation Kit is on a quarterly update cadence and just a few days ago we published the Q1 (Microsoft fiscal year) release.

“Neat, So what’s in the Q1 update of the Messaging PSP Activation Kit?” would be your next questions, right?

Good stuff like several pieces of new content which I’ve summarized below. In addition, we added a new feature which highlights the new stuff in the kit. You can find this right on the (well) right side of each page making it even easier for you to locate the content you really need.

Here goes, the new content featured in the Q1 update includes:

Spotlights on featured third party solutions from our Exchange ISV/IHV ecosystem that can help you drive your business. For example, we’ve included info on migration solutions from Quest and Binary Tree, as well as details on offerings like the HP E5000 Messaging System for Exchange.
Updated compete materials, including links to the latest case studies on Why Microsoft and the latest GroupWise and LotusLive Sales Cards .
Tools to help you sell Office 365, such as demos and sales discussion videos
New readiness content to help you deploy Office 365

And, I’ve just scratched the surface of what we have for you today in the Messaging PSP Activation Kit, and what we’ll add over the next year. Without a doubt, you are going to want to bookmark this site and keep an eye on this very blog for alerts when updates are published.

All good stuff and (as always) do let me know if you have feedback or suggestions on what else we could do for you!

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

It’s Always the Last Place You Look…

2011-10-18T17:17:02Z

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 search is just plain silly.

Why?

Well, of course you’d find the missing thing in the last place you looked, because after you find it, you (should) stop looking.

Right?

Perhaps that was a long winded way to intro today’s post, but it was the first thing that came to mind after I’ve spent the last few weeks with a number of partners across a few big events, like our recent edition of Partner MS101 here in Redmond.

More specifically, there was a common theme each time we asked questions around the types, quality, and usefulness of the to- and through-partner content we produced to help support your Exchange businesses. Basically, we heard “it’s great stuff, when we can find it.”

Now, I am a big fan of giving you what you need to be successful and a big part of this strategy is our desire to treat our great partners like a true extension of our field. To do that, we need a centralized location and some controls in place to enable us to share a wide range of collateral.

Sounds straight forward, right?

Yes and no.

While we do have the infrastructure around our MPN competency (today that’s the Unified Communications competency, yet very shortly that one retires in favor of our new Messaging competency), I don’t believe we’ve done the best job at keeping you abreast of all the great stuff we’ve put up there.

I did try to get a little more color from the partners I was with about the best way to keep you informed. In some cases there was a desire for regular email newsletter updates. Others would like something akin to a SharePoint alert. Just a small number liked Tweets. RSS feeds were also mentioned.

At one point, I suggested we could use this blog, and I laughed when one of the partners in the room said, “why don’t you then just email us a link to the blog posting.”

As an Exchange guy, I love that email is the preferred mode of transportation here, however it can face some scale challenges in such a large eco-system of Exchange partners, i.e., my team doesn’t have all of your email addresses. Be that as it may, we are working with our partners in WPG to see how we can better integrate into the rhythm of weekly, monthly, and regionalized email blasts they drive.

However, we do own this blog and we can scale out more effectively (and you can subscribe to the blog via an RSS feed through Outlook – see, there’s an email-esque connection!).

As such, we are going to start a more regular cadence of blog posts around new content as it becomes available.

I see this helping meet two goals:

it seeks to improve the discoverability of the stuff we have on our portal page (and I am an equally huge fan of improving discoverability across the board), and
as evidenced by the examples I shall highlight below, some of this content is “locked” so that only holders of our competency (again that’s UC Competency today, and Messaging Competency in the near future – woo-hoo!) can access it, which means there’s yet another meaningful benefit for you to attain our competency.

Thoughts?

Before you answer, here is this week’s “featured content” plug. Thanks to great partnership with our Exchange market insights guru, we now have two new Sales Cards posted on Novell GroupWise and IBM LotusLive.

In both cases, these Sales Cards offer you insights around the competitive solution, how Exchange stacks up, and some great guidance on addressing objections with best practices on how to start a conversation with these accounts. And, as you likely recall from our discussions at WPC, migrating customers off of legacy platforms (like GroupWise and Notes) to Exchange or Exchange Online (part of the Office 365 suite) is a big area of focus and opportunity for you this fiscal year.

Check out the new items above (and note you will need to be a current UC competency holder to access), and if you’re looking for more you can find a whole bunch on our MPN portal page dedicated to Exchange 2010.

See, it really will be the last place you look.

More importantly, I’m also hoping you’ll make this first place you look.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

The Future of Exchange /hosting Mode

2011-10-13T19:05:59Z

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 this SP1 capability, “multi-tenant support provides the core feature-set of Exchange Server in a manner that can be deployed to multiple customers in a single installation.”

However, as we learned from an earlier post by Michael van Dijken (my hosting partner guru and main advocate for Exchange hosters on the Exchange Partner Marketing team), while this option was welcomed it also presented some limitations (like not having support for Exchange Unified Messaging). As he covered in both the blog posting referenced above and his interactive session at WPC2011, there area a few things you can take under consideration when thinking about hosting Exchange in a multi-tenant fashion.

Since sharing this guidance, Michael has worked closely with our engineering team, members of the Operator Channel group, and even a bunch of partners to formulate the best strategy for hosters to host Exchange 2010 moving forward. Today, we shared these details via “The Exchange Team Blog”, and I’ve (once again) asked Michael to provide his thoughts and perspective on the changes we are making:

This morning, Kevin Allison (general manager of Exchange Customer Experience) published a blog post this morning regarding the future of the /hosting mode switch in Exchange. If you are a hoster, or work with hosters, I highly encourage you to give this a read. From my perspective, this change represents excellent news for hosters in the long run.

In summary, the blog post articulates the evolution of our thinking around how hosters should host Exchange going forward. With Exchange 2010 SP1, we recommended that hosters use the /hosting mode switch when hosting multi-tenant Exchange. In fact, we required this for hosters to be supported by Microsoft. With the availability of Exchange 2010 SP2, this will change, and our recommendation to hosters will be to use the on-premises configuration when hosting multi-tenant Exchange. Hosters will be supported using this approach provided the Hosting Guidelines have been followed.

In my previous post on this topic, I outlined the fact that customers upgrading to Exchange 2010 are looking for many of the advanced features offered with Exchange. This was consistent with feedback we have heard from hosters, which made it clear to us that we needed to address concerns with /hosting mode, and do so quickly. Taking this new approach enables hosters to offer a wider set of features to their customers while streamlining deployment and ongoing management of their Exchange 2010 infrastructure – all good news for our partners.

As a result of this change, no further investment in /hosting mode will take place, and it will not be carried into the next version of Exchange. Reinforcing some important points from Kevin’s blog post, here are a few critical things you’ll need to know:

/hosting mode will be supported through the standard support lifecycle for Exchange 2010. It will still be available in SP2 and any future service packs or roll-ups.

Multi-tenant hosting on the next version of Exchange will be supported, in a similar fashion to the approach we will take with Exchange 2010 SP2.

Microsoft will publish guidelines for hosting a multi-tenant environment using the on-premises configuration of Exchange. Microsoft will also publish a step-by-step process for upgrading from Exchange 2007 HMC or migrating from Exchange 2010 SP1 /hosting to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration.

For hosters who are currently on Exchange 2007 using HMC, upgrading to Exchange 2010 will be a lot easier. You’ll want to do the following:

Wait until Exchange 2010 SP2 ships

Review the Hosting Guidelines and step-by-step upgrade guidance

Plan your upgrade to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration as per the Hosting Guidelines. Engage with a control panel vendor for hosting automation software as you choose.

Deploy Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration.

For hosters on Exchange 2010 SP1 using the unsupported on-premises configuration, simply upgrade to SP2 following the Hosting Guidelines. The biggest change to your approach will be to use Address Book Policies to segment your GAL.

For hosters on Exchange 2010 /hosting mode, you have a choice. You could migrate to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration, or you could continue to use /hosting mode throughout the product lifecycle of Exchange 2010. While migrating will have some impact to your business, it does mean that you can offer features like Exchange UM and Public Folders. It also means that you will not need to deploy Lync into a separate forest if you have plans to offer a hosted Lync solution. If you choose to migrate, you’d take the same steps I outlined above.

As part of this new approach, the Exchange team has partnered closely with many of the control panel vendors to ensure that their solutions support Exchange 2010 SP2. In the near future, the team will publish a list of validated solutions – solutions that follow the Hosting Guidelines and are therefore supported by Microsoft. Deploying a hosting automation solution or control panel can dramatically decrease your time to market, and is worth considering.

After careful considering, we found this to be the best approach to addressing the feedback we heard, and putting hosters on a path to success with Exchange. More information as it relates to the specifics will be forthcoming, so please do track both the Exchange Team and this blog.

Thanks
Michael van Dijken
Senior Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Now Available: Updated Evolution of the UC Competency Guide

2011-09-22T17:31:52Z

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 resurfaced from a healthy inbox backlog (thank you Conversation View!) and can reconnect with my most favorite part of my job: helping you out with vital information on what’s new in the wide world of the Exchange partner eco-system.

Along these very lines, I’d like to share with you some updates regarding our progress with the evolution of the UC Competency.

While your humble Exchange partner marketing team lead (and your personal advocate here at corporate) was off on holiday, my team and our partners over in the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group (famous for great programs like MPN and WPC) continued to hash through the details to get the new Messaging competency up and running for later this fall.

To help keep you abreast of how those changes are going impact you (especially those existing UC competency partners), we’ve posted an updated rev of the “Evolution of the UC Competency Guide” to our MPN portal page.

Since I’ve been off, I asked Kristin Murray (famous for such things as the great Exchange and Lync presence we had at WPC11 earlier this year and for driving the planning behind the new Messaging competency) to share with you some details on what’s coming up next regarding the retirement of the UC competency in October, and the launch of the new Messaging (for Exchange) and Communications (for Lync) competencies:

If you are a partner currently enrolled in the UC competency, I encourage you to download the updated Evolution of the UC Competency Guide published this week on the MPN website. In this latest edition, you will find new information on the benefits and requirements of the new competencies, details on where your organization will transition when the UC competency splits and a refreshed FAQ section.

While the updated guide is chockfull of details, I’ll highlight some of the new benefits in the competencies we’re most excited about:

Partners enrolled in the Messaging competency will enjoy access to the highest quantity of Exchange Server licenses (as a part of your Internal Use Rights benefits). In addition, partners enrolled in the UC competency will have exclusive access to resources like battlecards to help you win against key Exchange competitors such as Google, VMware, IBM and Novell. And featuring the Silver Messaging competency logo in your marketing materials showcases your expertise in implementation design, deployment, and support of Microsoft Exchange Server. In addition, the Gold Messaging competency recognizes your additional investment and specialization in archiving, security, and voicemail, as well as your ability to help customers with their journey to the cloud to Exchange Online.

Partners in the Communications competency are eligible for the Lync Solution Incentive Program (SIP). Additionally, partners enrolled in the Gold Communications competency are also eligible to enroll in Premier Support for Lync Partners. The Communications competency logo highlights your expertise in implementation design, deployment, and support of Microsoft Lync. The Silver Communications competency highlights your investment and capabilities around IM/Presence and Conferencing workloads, and the Gold Communications competency demonstrates further expertise in enterprise voice and video, PBX integration and Lync Online.

As we have more updates to the MPN website, I’ll be sure to share them here. In the meantime, check out the Evolution of the UC Competency Guide for hot off the press updates!

Thanks, Kristin!

I am personally psyched by the new IUR benefits that Kristin outlined above. You’ll get all you need to run your business on the best email and collaboration platform out there, which will make it so much easier for you to land the value prop with your customers.

Again, thanks for your patience as I was out and then catching up.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Fun Fact: Customers Just Love Exchange 2010

2011-08-15T18:21:35Z

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 bet your businesses on—like Lync, Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and (of course) Exchange—you probably heard this message from few other Redmondites.

For example, several Microsoft execs (including Kurt Delbene and Kirk Koenigsbauer) said as such by highlighting that you’ve helped us collectively “Exchange” more than 22 million Lotus Notes seats over the past five years. This trend has only accelerated due to the fact Exchange 2010 offers such a clear cut and powerful business value prop over Notes.

Or, how about the fact that sales of Exchange 2010 have outpaced previous releases?

I even have a personal favorite from WPC11: customers are extremely satisfied with Exchange 2010.

Wait!

“What was that last one?” you ask.

As Julia White shared in her breakout at the big show in July, “customer satisfaction is at an all-time high” and “Exchange 2010 is well ahead of previous versions of Exchange.”

Following WPC—and Julia’s session—I got a bunch of questions from you asking about where this particular fun fact originated. Well, your timing couldn’t have been better since we (your humble Exchange product management team here in Redmond) have just finished reviewing the results of our annual product satisfaction survey.

Cue the big grins!

Here’s the background: for a number of years now, Microsoft has contracted a third-party research firm to independently survey our customer base to garner insights on their true feelings about our products and whether or not we’re really delivering across a number of dimensions: value, quality, performance, ease of use, security, etc. We traditionally get the final report in the summer, around the start of our new fiscal year.

We could not be more excited (note: I avoided the “super” adjective) by the fact the report starts with a statement like “Exchange 2010 establishes a new high watermark for overall customer satisfaction and outperforms prior Exchange versions and Lotus Notes on quality and value.”

Powerful stuff, right?

So, if I were you, I’d be asking: “Great, but how can I use this to grow my business, Ian?”

Simple: Get your customers to Exchange 2010, and they will love you for it.

And, they so want to go there!

We continue to hear, this time from the aforementioned annual survey, that “an overwhelming majority of existing Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 customers are considering upgrading to Exchange 2010.”

If that’s not enough motivation, remember that a happy customer is a customer that is way more likely to call upon you to deploy technologies with equally impressive growth opportunities, like Lync for unified communications.

As I have blogged about before, we still have a significant amount of customers running their businesses off of technology that was conceived more than decade ago. One cannot argue that things have changed a bit in the last ten years. For example, are you still trying to find a WLAN card for that Pocket PC device of yours, so you can ActiveSync your email without a USB cable? (Funny aside, I literally just found an old SD card style Wi-Fi adaptor in my growing gadget graveyard that I bought for my Compaq iPAQ a bunch of years back.)

Doubt it.

So, get out there and have those conversations with your customers about everything Exchange 2010 can do for them. Because, you certainly don’t want a competitor of yours to show up with something like Google’s Gmail and win favor with a customer who’s comparing their own current 10+ year old infrastructure against Google’s near facsimile of the Exchange value prop from 9 years back.

But wait, there’s more!

If you still have Lotus Notes customers in your area, it’s important to know that our recently completed research found out that they are extremely unsatisfied with their lot[us] in life. We’re talking about double-digit differences in product satisfaction. This is probably no surprise to you, considering we’ve told you about those 22 million seats that have switched over the last few years.

Don’t get distracted and miss the opportunity to grab this low hanging fruit!

Especially since this same annual survey mentioned that “nearly a third of Lotus Notes users” are looking to make the switch over the next 12 months, with nearly 20% of the remaining base is “strongly considering” making the change. Nice!

Oh, and I really hope you’re not running your business on 10+ year old technology. I know it is hard enough to stay competitive in this fast paced market, but don’t let your email infrastructure hold you back from being as satisfied as your customers are/will be on Exchange 2010. This is where your benefits from attaining the new Messaging Competency, specifically the internal-use rights, can be a HUGE asset for your businesses.

The morale of this post: don’t miss out on the opportunity to benefit from this winning equation of hunger for + happiness around Exchange 2010.

And, if your customer really, really wants to move, but is encumbered by budgetary or technology limitations, consider shopping Office 365 (and Exchange Online) as a means to get them to the promise land with even less friction. Again, they’ll love you for it.

And, if it is any consolation, I will too.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

So, You Want to Host Exchange?

2011-08-08T18:08:57Z

This happens to be the title of one of the highest rated sessions we had in our Business Productivity track at this year’s WPC. This Interactive was led by Michael van Dijken, a top subject matter expert on hosting Exchange and a member of my ~~member of my~~ Exchange Partner Marketing team.

As evidenced by the experience we had in the breakout room (and the feedback in the session evals), Michael drove a very compelling discussion around what it means to be an Exchange hosting partner in this new world of public and private clouds, whether offered by Microsoft or our rich eco-system of solutions partners.

Michael did such a great job drive framing this discussion, I asked him to do a guest posting to provide you some guidance and direction if you are considering hosting Exchange 2010—whether in a public and/or private cloud—considering we are now in an age of native multi-tenancy built into the product, in a post-HMC world.

Without further ado, here’s Michael:

A few weeks ago, I once again had the pleasure of attending our annual Worldwide Partner Conference. As I’ve come to expect, this was an outstanding event, and I had the opportunity to have many great conversations with partners. As the “hosting guy” on the team, several of my conversations were with hosting service providers, and I was encouraged by the number of hosters getting ready to upgrade to Exchange 2010.

One of the questions which I found come up consistently (both in conversations and in my interactive breakout session at WPC titled “So You Want To Host Exchange?” – BP22i) was whether to deploy Exchange 2010 using the “/hosting” mode switch, or to simply use the standard configuration typical of an on-premises deployment. Given that this was such a topic of interest, I thought I’d address it here on the Exchange Partner blog. But first a little background on the subject.

With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1 earlier this year, we added a deployment option known as /hosting mode. Using this deployment option creates what can be thought of as a multi-tenant approach to hosting Exchange. In actual fact, /hosting mode uses a different Active Directory schema to create true separation between tenants – something which can obviously be very beneficial to service providers.

While this sounds like cotton candy, it should be noted that deploying using /hosting mode does have some limitations, most notably the fact that Exchange Unified Messaging is not available. There are no plans, at this time, to address this in the immediate future. You can learn more about this topic on TechNet.

Now, if you’re a service provider considering upgrading your hosting infrastructure to Exchange 2010, here’s my perspective on how to pick the right approach – it’s the same perspective I gave at WPC. Each approach has its pros and cons, and as with most things, your target customers should drive your decision. /hosting mode is an excellent approach if isolation and information privacy is of utmost concern to your target customers – but its light on a few key features as noted above. The on-premises approach delivers the features customers are asking for, but a lot of work needs to be done to the configuration to “mimic” multi-tenancy (and doesn’t ultimately achieve the same level of separation as /hosting mode).

“That’s all well and good, but what are customers asking for?” you might ask. Well, fortunately we have great research to draw from here. We know that most customers on Exchange 2003 and many on Exchange 2007 plan to upgrade to Exchange 2010 in the next several months. This is a great starting point – it means opportunity abounds. We also know that one of the primary reasons these customers cite for their desire to upgrade is so that are able to use the advanced features in Exchange 2010 – like Unified Messaging and the native archiving and discovery capabilities. So, interpreting these two pieces of information, we see that a significant portion of the opportunity is best served offering a full-featured hosted Exchange service. This perspective, by the way, resonates with service providers we’ve spoken to in recent months.

Now, there are (somewhat limited) scenarios where /hosting mode may be applicable. For example, particular regulated industries might require a high degree of tenant separation, or certain customer segments where features may not be a primary decision driver.

At this point, you’re probably asking “hasn’t Microsoft said that /hosting mode is the only way to go for service providers?” Well, yes, that has been our guidance. However, recognizing and listening to your feedback, we have started to adjust our perspective and began to articulate this at the Hosting Summit held in March. We’ll continue to do so in the coming months leading up to the release of Exchange Server 2010 SP2.

You might also be wondering how to deploy without using /hosting mode given that our published guidance is for /hosting mode. The best approach to do this today is to use a hosting automation solution, or to engage the services of a System Integrator with depth in the hosting industry (such as Implement.com). Following this approach both speeds your time to market, and offers you the confidence of a product already tested and proven in the marketplace. Check out these hosting automation solutions from the partners we work closely with:

Parallels Automation Microsoft Exchange Service Module

Ensim Unify Service Provider Edition

Cortex control panel from Citrix for delivering hosted Exchange

Extend ASP for hosting Exchange

We will also provide more guidance in due course. Stay tuned!

So, /hosting mode or standard enterprise deployment – it comes down to the needs of your customers and the market you’re trying to serve.

Michael van Dijken
Senior Product Management
Exchange Partner Marketing

Missed WPC11? We DVR’ed It For You!

2011-07-27T22:23:53Z

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 digitalwpc.com and you can watch Julia’s session on-demand.

Even if you made the event, but missed her session on Tuesday, you still can benefit from learning about the fantastic business momentum we collectively experienced in FY11, how the marketplace looks and what the competitors are up to. You’ll also get very prescriptive guidance on the four key areas of focus and opportunity for you in FY12:

Deploy sold seats
Migrate Notes and GroupWise
Drive security, archiving and voicemail
Deliver private cloud

My favorite part of this presentation is the clear overview you receive on how your partner opportunities align to our Exchange business priorities for FY12.

And, as an added bonus (yup, we keep on giving!) you can even download the session presentation slide deck for review with your colleagues and business partners!

Did you happen to catch Julia’s session live? Well, you can also take a look at Kirk Gregersen’s general session that spoke to how to “Go Big” with Lync.

Here are the direct links for you to both of these:

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

WPC11: What a Week of Winning Together!

2011-07-22T23:33:58Z

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, connections and cocktails.

Without a doubt WPC11 was a blast. However, I must admit that this year’s WPC took me a few extra days to recover from compared to years past.

“Why?” you may ask.

Put simply: this was one heck of WPC for me and my Exchange partner marketing team.

Before I outline my top reasons why I feel WPC11 was a massive success for the #ExchangePartner community, I want to take a moment to say

THANK YOU!!

Thanks to each and everyone of you who made the significant investment in time and money to journey to southern California to spend an entire week (mostly) away from your businesses to connect with Microsoft and each other. And, thank you for your active participation in just about every single facet of the conference. We fully recognize how physically and mentally taxing one of these events can be, but when you have as much stuff as we wanted to share and the strong desire to help partners establish meaningful connections with each other and us at corporate, it is tough to slim it all down to fit neatly in a five day package.

Again, thank you!

Now, on to my “Top Five” list of why I felt WPC11 was a success for you, our Exchange partners:

I have no more businesses cards: May seem trivial, especially in today’s massively digital age, but I travelled to L.A. with a full box of business cards (+/- 250 in quantity) and left with none. Each year, I use this to measure one of my personal objectives for WPC, i.e., meeting and getting to know a little bit more about as many partners as I possibly can. Returning with only your business cards and none of mine makes me feel I nailed that commitment. And, for those of you with whom I spoke with and have a card of mine, do not hesitate to reach out and let me know how I can help. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn (if that whole business card thing is so 1990s for you).
The Kogi Truck served over 1,000 partners in less than 2 hours: We sold out the Kogi Truck. That’s right! The line was enormous and there were a lot of happy partners who walked away with some amazingly tasty (and world-famous) Korean-Mexican fusion tacos. More importantly, we had a chance to remind you about the killer “Better Together” story around Exchange, Lync and SharePoint (who happened to be the sponsors of this mid-day snack on that busy Monday of WPC week).

And, an added treat to this added treat was the fact our good friend Dux Sy (of @meetdux and SharePoint partner Innovative-e fame) conducted a live streaming webcast--from the plaza between the LACC and Staples Center where we parked the Kogi crew--featuring partners from around the world sharing their thoughts about the keynotes (and the tacos!) that morning. NOTE: if you fast forward to about 5 minutes in, you get to see yours truly make a quick cameo.
There is no doubt that partners are “Going Big with Lync”: Might seem strange for me as the Exchange partner guy to mention how awesomely present (and BIG) Lync was at WPC11 as a measurement of success for the Exchange partner community at the conference. Well, I don’t think it strange at all, because Lync (beside being one killer unified communications solution) is a great growth opportunity for Exchange partners.

Not only is the Lync experience bettered when Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 is in place, Exchange partners can help Lync customers by implementing advanced workloads like voicemail with Unified Messaging to fully round out an enterprise voice deployment. Oh, and if you’re not a Lync partner today, I would encourage you to investigate the new Communications competency which will arm you with the basics around how to add IM and presence to your portfolio of Exchange services offerings. Just don’t forget to be investing in the new Messaging competency for Exchange at the same time!

Net/net: The huge momentum behind Lync means that you have a fantastic opportunity to up-level these conversations to a “Future of Productivity” discussion, which means you get to land gems like the 301% risk-adjusted ROI with a breakeven point (payback period) of 7.4 months after deployment of the Microsoft productivity platform (which happens to include Exchange 2010). We are extremely bullish that you will win customers over the competition every time when you tell the whole “FOP” (as we ‘softies like to call the “Future of Productivity”) stack story and your customers will thank you.
Office 365: Need I say more? I really hope you had a chance to catch the blockbuster Office 365 partner launch on Day 2, especially the great panel discussion featuring the business leaders of Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office. I might be a little biased because my boss (Julia White, Sr. Director of Exchange) was one of the panelists, but the 100s of partners in attendance got an opportunity to learn firsthand about how we think about Office 365 as a strong asset for both partners to reach new customers and to expand the money making services you provide.

And, my good friends on the Office 365 partner team gave away a car as part of the proceedings.

Talk about an opportunity to really drive the business!
Roskill Outlined Significant Investments in the Microsoft Partner Network: Before Jon brought up Kevin Turner or sat down with Sir Richard Branson, he spent his Wednesday morning remarks summarizing a long list of investments and improvements (“multibillion-dollar” to be more specific) to MPN. Not only did he mention the evolution of the UC competency into the new Communications competency for Lync and the Messaging competency for Exchange, but he spoke to new programs and tools that are your disposal to really drive your Exchange businesses. I am most excited about the work we’re doing with the MPN portal and I have a big project this fiscal year to further enhance your experience on our Exchange portal page in MPN.

If you missed this one, I strongly encourage you to catch the on-demand replay on digitalwpc.com.

Pretty good list, right?

Well, I have two bonus reasons:

Bonus #1: During his Tuesday morning keynote, our divisional president Kurt Delbene mentioned one of my most favorite stats: Over the past 5 years, 22 million Lotus Notes seats were migrated to Exchange. We could not do this without partners like you, and this is such a great set of wins to celebrate at WPC. But, our work is not yet done! There are millions of more seats that need to be “Exchanged” and we need your help to make sure our mutual customers have a smooth journey on the way.
Bonus #2: Getting the chance to “work the crowd” as I tried to drum up awareness of the Kogi Truck Monday afternoon. As one would expect with any event, sometimes things get a little crazy and everyone needs to pitch in to help. I saw my chance to do just that as thousands of attendees were exiting the Staples Center and heading to the dining hall in the LACC. To make sure you guys didn’t miss out on the Kogi Truck, I grabbed one of the signs, headed into the streaming masses of partners, and screamed “You can’t build your business on an empty stomach. Instead, come try one of L.A.’s famous Kogi Tacos, brought to you by Exchange, Lync and SharePoint!!” I think this picture says it all:

Okay, that’s wrap for WPC11.

I truly hope that you found this event as valuable as we did in delivering it. And, I welcome your feedback on what we can do better, differently or even more of at WPC12.

And, don’t forget to keep the discussion going via Twitter and use the #ExchangePartner hashtag.

Again, thank you to the over 15,000 attendees from 138 countries for coming to L.A. and see you in Toronto (or, better yet, beforehand)!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

#ExchangePartner: The Latest Trend in the Exchange Partner Ecosystem

2011-07-09T19:59:51Z

Hashtags, as defined by our friends in the Twitterverse, are “used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet.”

Others, like hashtags.org, add that hashtags “are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.”

I like to think of them as mini-communities within the massive universe of Twitter updates and followers of these 140 character commentary from real people (well, mostly) sharing their real-world experiences, in (most cases) real-time.

Now, I know I don’t need to explain Twitter to all of you.

Instead, I would like to share that we (your humble Exchange partner marketing team here in Redmond) have established a new hashtag to help us, collectively, build out our Exchange partner ecosystem community on Twitter.

Called, simply enough, #ExchangePartner, this new tag will enable all of us who are building our businesses on Exchange share and stay connected.

While we’ve already started priming the pump with the contests we stood up for this year’s WPC, our goal is to keep this hashtag a humming all year long following this week’s event in L.A.

So, here’s what I encourage all of you to do is:

Start Tweeting!
Include the #ExchangePartner has tag in your Exchange related Tweets
Create a search or follow the #ExchangePartner hashtag in your favorite Twitter client(s), like I have done in both TweetDeck on my laptop and Seesmic on my Windows Phone 7
Benefit from the sage advice and random musings from your fellow Exchange ecosystem members

It’s that easy!

Heck, why not give it a shot at WPC this week?

I’m going to be watching the trends and really look forward to seeing what all of you have to share.

And, if you are a fan of Lync (like I am) there’s also a new hashtag for the Lync partner community called (no surprise) #LyncPartner.

Ian (from 37,000 ft en route to L.A.)
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing