B  V A NEW YORK – June 28, 2011 – Steve Ballmer launched Office 365 today in New York City, for small businesses and enterprises. Small businesses are fast becoming the heroes of economic recovery, aided by new technologies such as cloud computing. “Small and midsize businesses are...

  by Ron Grattopp…..Heard about Office 365, the follow on to BPOS?  It’s already out in public beta and launch is not too far off.  Your customers will be asking about it soon, if they haven’t been already, and you need to get ready for it, and be ready to advise your customers how they...

  by Ron Grattopp……The “Cloud” and Virtualization are arguably the two hottest topics in the industry today, and Microsoft has some great technology for you leverage in your customer solutions portfolio in both of those spaces.  If you didn’t already know about it, the Microsoft Virtual Academy...

By Ron Grattopp…..Well, I did a little research on “paradigm shift” and I ran across this one site, http://taketheleap.com/ , with what I consider the best simple definition of it: “Moving from one thought system to another ” and this great quote: "...everything can be taken from a man but one thing...

By Ron Grattopp….. We’re well into baseball season now, so I thought a baseball metaphor title might be reasonable .  I presented a Microsoft all-up cloud story breakout session and helped man our vendor fair booth at a major Distributor’s semi-annual partner conference this past week and, as you...

Cloud productivity services, such as Microsoft Office 365, make it possible for small business to access the best productivity technology at a predictable monthly cost.   Office 365 brings together familiar software such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online...

by Ron Grattopp….. In my last post, just a couple of days ago, I told you about the Online Business Productivity Services (OBPS) Customer Rewards Offer which was an offer running thru April 1, 2011 that provided customers with rebates up to 50% of their first year subscription fees to use as partner...

by Ron Grattopp….. This is an exciting customer offer designed to encourage customers to act now on BPOS and to help partners drive online services adoption . This offer will run from February 1 through April 1, 2011. Qualifying customers can receive up to the equivalent of 50% of their first annual...

by Ron Grattopp…..                As I was doing my last post, I looked around my team’s postings on Microsoft Online Services (MOS)/BPOS, and I noticed that although we had covered just about every aspect of MOS/BPOS that you can...

by Ron Grattopp…..In my previous post I introduced an article on CRN, by Rauline Ochs, called Shopping For Cloud Vendors .  Rauline works, I believe, for IPED, apparently a research arm of CRN, and my post included an overview of the 4 main questions she proposes that VARs should be asking as they...

by Ron Grattopp…..I’ll bet all of us have heard that phrase on a flight followed by the crew’s thanks for your business.  This post isn’t so much about thanking you for your loyalty – it should be a given that we appreciate your partnership – but rather pointing out a couple of key examples of some...

by Ron Grattopp…. I have been doing a series of events lately known as the Intel Channel & Embedded Conference.  Even though this series is targeted to our OEM audience, one of the subjects I present on at these events I believe is important for all partners, and that’s Windows Live, especially...