Josh Condie - There are significant changes in the pricing, licensing, skus, and key product features of Windows Intune with the new Wave D offering launching this month – greatly enhancing the partner reselling and services opportunity.  Many partners are seeing strong success leveraging Windows...

Josh Condie – For those of you who subscribe to the weekly Technet Newsletter, you may have already seen this.  For those of you who don’t, or may not have reviewed the entire newsletter, this resource is worth calling out.  The Work Smart Guide for Windows 8 is a condensed, visual guide to...

B  V  A With the anticipated release of Windows 8 and Windows RT, how are you going to manage all those devices?  Microsoft announced on Sept. 10th, 2012 upcoming solutions based on System Center Configuration Manager SP1 and Windows Intune.  J.J.. one of my teammates, blogged about...

Josh Condie – Microsoft Press has just release 3 great new books to arm yourself with as your colleagues and customers begin to explore the new client OS. Help them deploy, manage, use and experience all the new features and form factors that are about to hit the market:   Troubleshoot and Optimize...

B  V  A On September 10th, 2012 Microsoft previewed the roadmap for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1 and the interoperability of Windows Intune and System Center Configuration Manager Console SP1 and Windows Intune.  This is extremely useful with Windows 8, Windows...

J.J. Antequino ---------------------------------- You’re probably wondering what this new platform is all about, but the good news is that we are hosting One-Day launch events to tell you all about it! The Cloud OS Signature Event Series will give you the opportunity to engage with the Redmond product...

  Josh Condie – Below is the schedule for all of the upcoming Practice Accelerator sessions scheduled for next 3 months.  The cost to attend a Practice Accelerator session is now only five Partner Advisory Hours!  A high-value training offering that can help your business expand across...

B  V  A Veeam introduced a new free version of its award-winning Veeam Backup & Replication™ software. The free version, Veeam Backup™ Free Edition, provides a subset of the functionality in the full (paid) editions of Veeam Backup & Replication. One of the coolest utilities in Veeam...

Josh Condie – Employees are becoming more and more tech-savvy and demanding greater flexibility with their work style, where and how they access information and what devices and computing platforms they use.  An increasing number of employees are mobile or home-based today and need to work from...

Rob Waggoner   I’ve put together a few quick overviews of different Microsoft Products and today I wanted to provide a quick overview of Windows Intune.  We have some good information on Windows Intune, but this provides an overview of what is available now and what is coming in the near future...

B  V  A Just because you are using Virtualization technologies, does not mean you have a private cloud.  I have been speaking about Pro-active Management for several years, and now as we move into the “Cloud World” we start to hear certain definitions – Public Cloud, Private Cloud, SAAS...

B  V  A Hopefully you are aware Microsoft, based on feedback from many partners, changed the Virtualization and Systems Management individual competencies into one competency starting in May 2012.  For more information check out this post - Competency Merge   Part of this change was...

Rob Waggoner A few months back, I shared the Forefront for Exchange and SharePoint, the Elevator Pitch video , and today I wanted to share the video that covers the Forefront Servers and the System Center Endpoint protection solution.  I combined all three of these solutions into one video since...

Rob Waggoner   If you are already looking at or running System Center 2012, be sure to install Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for System Center 2012 as well.  It includes some last minute updates that did not make it into the RTM package.  CU1 can be downloaded here: Description of Update Rollup...

B   V   A Wanted to give a Quick Update: In November Ron Grattopp  blogged about a new benefit of Software Assurance known as System Center Advisor – http://blogs.technet.com/b/uspartner_ts2team/archive/2011/11/21/secret-sauce-for-selling-sa-in-smb.aspx I was recently talking...

B  V  A Did you see the announcement made at Microsoft Management Summit 2012 in Las Vegas about the next version of Windows Intune.  If not, check out the official blog entry on our “Windows for Business” blog - http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/business/   Hopefully you already...

Rob Waggoner I received the following question: Q: Will SCVMM 2008 R2 manage a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Server? A: Yes, but SP1 needs to be applied to your SCVMM 2008 R2 installation first. Here’s the excerpt from the What’s New in Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 . Why is SP1 required?  Because...

  Josh Condie – Adding to Woody’s great comments about the value proposition of Windows Intune.  I was preparing for a presentation on Intune recently and came across a whitepaper that IDC recently wrote about the value of Windows 7 for SMBs:  The Benefit of Using Windows 7 in Small and...

  Rob Waggoner I have these conversations a lot.  Why System Center, especially with Hyper-V?  What’s the story? First, I’m passionate about Hyper-V and System Center.  Together they are a knockout combination.  Hyper-V is the best hypervisor on the planet… Period.  It’s...

B  V  A Private Cloud, CIO Conversation assessment, and Five Application Workload-Specific assessments There are actually 2 different Cloud Assessment tools, the first is targeted to the End-User Customer, you can use this to introduce the topic of Private Cloud, and utilizing Process and Management...

By Ron Grattopp …..Not long ago (November actually) I gave a shout out to Cindy Bates’ blog about DR (disaster recovery).  A couple of interesting factoids that were included in the DR e-guide her post highlighted were that >40% of the SMB respondents believed IT downtime could damage staff morale...

Rob Waggoner I’ve talked a lot about virtualization and I even demonstrated how to add a vCenter Server to SCVMM 2008 R2 here .  Today I wanted to show you how to add the same vCenter Server to a System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Server.  If you haven’t seen the information on System...

Rob Waggoner On January 17th we announced the new System Center 2012 lineup.  One of the improvements we made to System Center hasn’t received a lot of attention… yet.  That’s the new Unified Installer.  While you’ll only use the Unified Installer once, you will love the power and ease...

B    V    A Announcing System Center Advisor officially launched - my teammate Ron Grattopp had a great post in November introducing the “Secret Sauce” to a brand new benefit available to Software Assurance customers – It is taking advantage of System Center Advisor, a cloud...

  Woody Walton As a Microsoft partner it is important for you to keep abreast of the latest developments on the solutions you sell, implement, and service.  2012 will be a year of many product releases at Microsoft.  This means changes to product capabilities, to SKU line-ups, as well...