I think we can be proud that in an industry of over 100 vendors, resellers and OEMs Microsoft has been voted in the top 5 businesses in that industry alongside Surfcontrol for IT partnerships. SurfControl and Microsoft were at the CNET Awards on Tuesday night and took a runner up (or in media speak 'Finalist') for the CNET Awards technology Partnership of the Year Award 2006:
http://blogs.technet.com/photos/mike_p/images/459927/original.aspx
So my question to you is: which one of you wishes to step up in 2007 and take the Search and Collaboration Award for Innovative Customer Solutions?? Well if you want to, then you know where to come - get in touch with me now at mikepal@microsoft.com and join the wave around Search at Microsoft!!
For the first year ever Microsoft is delivering a huge amount of our Partner conference on the web. This years UK Partner conference is taking place this week, but for those not able to make it you can simply go here for the latest news and information about our strategy and upcoming plans with partners:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/partnerconference/
Launching this Tuesday 26th September you will be able to hear more about the following:
Enjoy!
So I mentioned last week about the Business Search conference coming up on Friday 13th October, at this you will get to here the following:
The presenters are all from Redmond so you will be getting the news from the horses mouth so to speak - great content at a great event in Reading. To register all you have to do is click on the following link:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032310025&Culture=en-GB
I look forward to seeing you there!
Hi All - just changed the style on all the posts to remove the annoying black highlight on all the posts - hopefully this will make reading this blog via RSS a little easier - let me know if this works for you!
Cheers!
Sure some of you have seen this article in InfoToday about the Search offering in SPS 2007 - some great industry acknowledgements in here, some of the quotes are below but the link takes you to the full article! My favorite quote is the following:
"If Microsoft makes this function part of SPS, it will pose a serious threat to companies offering SharePoint specific search enhancements and be a strong competitive challenge to Google and it's Appliance and Onebox API"
Microsoft—Faceted Search Coming Soon? by Paula J. Hane http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060918-1.shtml
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060918-1.shtml
According to Arnold, given the economies of scale that Microsoft has, its lower cost systems with embedded search may be priced as much as 90 percent less than text mining systems sold by competitors like Autonomy plc and FAST Search & Transfer. This will put further price pressure on enterprise search sector leaders trying to get top dollar for their enterprise platforms.
Great news for the upcoming MOSS 2007 product - fancy jumping on board? then mail me at mikepal@microsoft.com to book your place at the Search Roadshow that James Akrigg and I are running in November! If you are a new partner to Microsoft then mail me and we may have something else up our sleeves for you!
We are planning a week where James Akrigg and I get on the road and visit partners who are interested in learning the latest around MOSS 2007 and the Search capabilities therein. The week planned so far is the week commencing 20th November.
For more on James please check out his blog at: http://blogs.technet.com/outofoffice/rss.xml
If you fancy being one of the first to have the deep understanding and investigate the opportunity around these technologies then please just mail me at mikepal@microsoft.com and you can reserve your place now!
So we have all seen this type of office antics before and this is another in the same vain - a really funny song, brilliantly worded and an amusing video all scripted to James Blunt tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxqsWHpznsg
Search post coming up!!
So I am afraid I have not been able to blog much this week as I have been out of the office on a team building offsite - please rest assured normal service will resume next week. For your touch of Friday humour check out the team and some of what we did here:
http://blogs.technet.com/chrisp/archive/2006/09/08/454641.aspx
I wouldnt want to embarrass the other teams or demonstrate an overly competitive nature - suffice to say - we won! great photo on Chris' blog.
Right so based on your feedback I have decided to change this blog so that we have two separate blogs for those looking for specific Search content versus HPC. The blog links will be as follows:
Search Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/mikep/default.aspx
HPC Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/mike_p/default.aspx
Thanks for the feedback and I hope you enjoy the change. Please note the HPC blog is currently bare as it's brand spanking new for content...stay tuned this week...!
This made me smile when I saw it....looks like the world is thinking Google and MS, and Hugh Macleod has placed a touch of humour around the theme:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/googlems115-thumb.jpg
So, too much chat about two competitors and not enough about the business value derived by the customer? Surely not I hear you cry! Well I guess it gets clicks or sells newspapers...this actually reminded me of a fact a jounalist from the Register once told me: "fact is a bad story about Microsoft gets 80% more hits than a positive story about Microsoft - so why would we print the good stuff?"
Incidentally if you have not tried some of the wine that Hugh writes labels for, it is well worth investing in. Please note this is not a sponsored link!