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...

In less than six weeks, Steve Ballmer and Jon Roskill, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Partner Group will kick off the Monday morning of WPC at L.A.’s famous Staples Center . In a venue that has played home to the 17-time champion Los Angeles Lakers...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

Let’s be honest. WPC doesn’t end when the sun sets after a full day of keynotes, sessions and meetings. Much like the action-packed agenda during the day, our evening schedules will be filled with receptions and parties to attend.  And, there is...

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

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...

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...

Earlier today, we unveiled a brand new partner program aimed at helping our mutual customers--both IT Pros and the users they support--simplify the task of selecting the best Exchange ActiveSync capable mobile devices, which in turn offer a premium experience...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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 ...

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...