Received an email from my Heathcare peers, I thought I would share with you.
Health and Social Services Partner Resources
Sales Training:
Learn about the opportunity in the healthcare industry with this presentation Click Here
Analyst Relations for the Channel (ARC)
Microsoft has teamed with Gartner and Forrester to give Microsoft partners access to the same research and analyst inquiry expertise Microsoft uses to analyze IT markets, position Microsoft solutions, and gain greater awareness of Microsoft competition. Sign up to get insight about your business competition.
Connected Health Platform
Find toolkits, solution accelerators, and prescriptive architecture, design, and deployment guidance for e-Health solutions built on the principles of the Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint.
Close more deals. Help your health customers reduce costs and increase efficiency with infrastructure and platform optimization models and tools:
Campaigns and Promotions:
Health and Social Services News and Announcements
Call for Proposals for Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange 2010 in Atlanta Now Open
Interested in presenting at Microsoft HUG Exchange 2010 in Atlanta, GA?
The Microsoft Health User Group is looking for submissions that detail innovative and inspiring solutions to healthcare, using Microsoft technology and frameworks.
Microsoft Healthcare User Group Events:
Christophe tells me.
… FYI in case you have missed them, the engineering has started a series of blog posts on the new 2010 features/capabilities.
Topics so far (expect a lot more in the coming months):
Start bookmarking http://blogs.msdn.com/project in case you have not done so to learn about 2010.
As part of our efforts to continually improve access to Project information we have added Bing search on our new community pages on http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/community.aspx
Want to know how to become “Demo Ready”? Need to know about the “AX” or “SL” story ? across all the Blogs.
Use the search box.
The plan is to extend search across all the links mentioned in my previous email/blog posting http://blogs.technet.com/doug_mccutcheon/archive/2009/10/30/some-useful-microsoft-project-links-to-find-content.aspx .
Also take a look at an addition to the list from Brian Kennemer of MCS, http://blogs.technet.com/projectified
Christophe tells me…
I am pleased to announce the release of a white paper written by Michael Jordan, Lead Architect from Microsoft Consulting Services entitled: Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 – Performance and Capacity Planning Best Practices This is a great asset for all customers and partners to ensure they are following deployment best practices to guarantee optimal performance, it is based on best practices learned from hundreds of Project Server 20007 customers engagements as well as scalability labs.
Purpose
The purpose of this guide is to extend the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Performance Testing Lab (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f595e22-c9f1-4376-a8b2-7a7eccd2aba5&displaylang=en) whitepaper by providing Best Practices and Recommendations. Further recommendations are made in this guide based on field experience and deployment successes in real world scenarios against the main areas of the system. The emphasis is on Project Server 2007 in a production environment using physical servers. Reference is made to virtualization in the relevant sections. However, for a more comprehensive overview please read the Project Server 2007 Hyper-V guide (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc982157.aspx).
The guidelines and recommendations in this guide present the “what” and “why”. Certain areas are prescriptive providing steps on “how” to accomplish the recommendation. However, the assumption is the audience of this guide is able to understand the reasons behind the guidance and take the necessary actions within their organization to implement optimization that applies to their scenario.
The guidelines and recommendations in this guide cover technical, functional and process related guidance. It’s important to note these are mutually inclusive of each other and present cross-impacts through the system when a design is not balanced across all 3 areas. It’s expected that administrators of a Project Server 2007 deployment will collect regular operational and functional data, and over time trend the system for performance and scalar depth. Optimization in all areas is required on a regular basis to maintain an efficient system and identify remediation steps through operational policies.
Audience
The intended audience includes IT administrators, database administrators, data architects, system engineers, project managers and business analysts who may be involved in implementing Project Server 2007. This document is designed for a reader who has general knowledge of all the required application and platform components that support Project Server 2007.
Additional Project Server 2007 resources for IT Professionals can be found on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/projectserver/default.aspx
In the month of November we will be making a publically available Project and Project Server 2010 Beta. We would appreciate your support in making your customers aware of this and getting them to sign up to the Beta at http://www.microsoft.com/project/2010/en/us/default.aspx
One way I am doing this is including the following in my email signature. Feel free to do the same. Any other ideas to drive Beta uptake, let me know?

Been doing some documentation recently and collected a group of links relevant to the Project business. Thought I would share this with you. Let me know if you have any others.
Microsoft Blogs
Other
Sites
Video Channels
Facebook
Twitter
Community
PROJECT 2010
Public announcement (customer and partner ready)

We are pleased to announce the availability of the following Microsoft Project 2010 technical resources:
At http://technet.microsoft.com/projectserver/ the following areas are covered:
- Planning, Deploying and Operating Project 2010 Environment
- including Project 2010 hardware and software requirements and deployment guidance
· Upgrade and Migrating to Project 2010 through a brand new “Upgrade and migration” resource center
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/project/ developers will find growing list of resources including Project 2010 Beta Software Development Kit (SDK) as we move closer to Project 2010 Beta in November.
Get all your Project 2010 end-user, IT Professional and Developer questions answered by product experts from Microsoft and the community (Project MVPs):
Questions & Answers
Q: Great content! Is there a plan to grow it?
A: Yes, this is the first milestone of a journey, will be continually publishing new content with the upcoming Public Beta in November and until Project 2010 is released in the first half of 2010.
Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 (SharePoint) is the fastest-growing server product in Microsoft’s history. With more than 85 million licensed users, SharePoint is the market’s leading portal & collaboration server. As organizations around the world deploy SharePoint, they consider engaging deeply skilled Microsoft Partners to assist with their planning and deployments.
Practice Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint is a service designed to build your practice around SharePoint solutions. Practice Accelerator focuses on building your capacity by enabling Partners to service the mid-market space at scale and delivered via Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Practice Accelerator provides a comprehensive framework consisting of customer-ready methodology, tools, and skills. This ensures that you are able to provide great experience to your customers on a consistent basis.
Practice Accelerator will help you jumpstart your SharePoint practice. Leverage Practice Accelerator to increase your revenue stream and enhance market positioning.
Upon completion you will be able to successfully identify customer requirements and scope, analyze, plan, and deploy SharePoint. This offering provides you with a detailed delivery framework covering every step from pre-engagement to post-delivery stages, including materials that you can leave with the customer. It also includes a series of tools, templates, best practices, hands-on labs and guides. This material will help provide architecture design as well as post-deployment maintenance and monitoring recommendations.
The Practice Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint covers the following components:
Customer Engagement
Tools to elicit customer needs
Effectively scope the engagement
Design a solution that maps to customer needs
Customer leave-behinds for ongoing maintenance and governance
Architecture Guidance
Easily customizable reference architecture documents for you to design and provide to your customer
Project Guidance
Guidance and templates for planning and managing your customer’s projects
Planning & Design
Planning guides for providing guidance around decisions to be made regarding:
Physical and Logical Designs
Capacity Planning
Taxonomy and Information Architecture
SharePoint Security
Portals and Collaboration
Enterprise Search
Delivery Details
Cost: $4,000 US (or equivalent) per Partner
Duration: 16 hours total; 4 hours per day over 4 days
Number of attendees: Up to 4 consultants
North America
Time: 9:00 A.M.–1:00 P.M Pacific Time, Monday–Thursday (four days, four hours each day)
Upcoming dates:
- November 9-12
- November 16-19
- December 7-10
- December 14-17
United Kingdom
Time: 9:00-13:00 UK time. Monday–Thursday (four days, four hours each day)
Cost: £2400 plus VAT – GBP per partner (Up to four partner consultants per partner organization can attend for this fee.)
Upcoming dates:
- October 26-29
- November 23-26
- December 14-17
- January 25-28, 2010
- February 22-25, 2010
To register, https://partner.microsoft.com/40114791?msp_id=practiceaccelerator
For more information, contact pasales@microsoft.com .
A partner who had recently refreshed their branding to a rather nice logo, went about it in a novel way which I thought I would share with you. They used a service that offers a competition format.
Whiles I cannot attest to the process, I personally liked the end result. For you reference and consideration , see Http://Logotournament.com

The following SharePoint 2010 content was disclosed today at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, this is very exciting times for Project 2010; with the ability to have Project Professional 2010 sync to a SharePoint 2010 task list (recent blog post from the Product Group is here Project 2010: Introducing Sync to SharePoint) and the fact that Project Server 2010 is built on SharePoint Enterprise 2010.
Top SharePoint 2010 Resources
- SharePoint 2010 Website - to view SharePoint 2010 in action
- SharePoint 2010 forum- for SharePoint 2010 questions
- SharePoint 2010 PressPass- for the SPC 2009 keynote video, a Q&A with Jeff Teper, and more
- SharePoint 2010 Developer Center - for developer info (MSDN)
- http://www.mssharepointitpro.com - for IT Pro information (TechNet)
- http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint - for more SharePoint information
The Project business delivered two sessions today at SPC09 (on more on Deployment/Upgrade/Extensibility on Wednesday):
- Project Professional 2010 Overview
- Project Server 2010 Overview
Enthusiasm and feedback for both were extremely positive (yes recordings will be made available at a later date) as well or the questions we got at the Project 2010 booth.
The message to our customers and partner “Yes , Project Server 2010 is the Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise 2010 application for project management”.
SharePoint 2010 was publically disclosed today at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. This means that we can now talk about the full capabilities and benefits that come to our customers that come with the installation Project Server 2010.
Marrying the features that Project Server 2010 lights up in SharePoint Enterprise 2010 and taking it further with the additional capabilities available should make a “knock out” project environment, second to none.
Also announced was that public beta for Project Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be released in November.
Features I noted through the keynote were the ability to deploy documents sets as a content type; the ease at which LOB data such as that held in the Project Server database can be exposed and the ability to link to dynamic charts up to date charts as part of blog posting (thinking status reports) were a small part of this new release.
Next challenge, how to get informed.
My first stop would be the official SharePoint site at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pages/Default.aspx
My second would be the blogs listed at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/
Happy reading.
Thank you to the following partners who have indicated they are “Project 2010” ready and will be talking about Project 2010 at the SharePoint Conference.
- UMT Consulting
- The Versatile Company
- The Occam Group
- Robbins-Gioia
- RCM Technologies
- QuantumPM
- Project Hosts
- MSProjectExperts
- LMR Solutions
- IIL
- Campana & Schott
- Blue Badges
- Advisicon
Exclusive Project 2010 sales decks have been posted to the Microsoft partner portal. These decks are only available to EPM Specialized partners within the IW Competency.
To access see https://partner.microsoft.com/global/program/competencies/iwsolutions/epm
The Microsoft Project 2010 Work Management Solutions Overview is a 1 hour delivery deck and provides a highlights of the main features of Project/Project Server 2010.
The Microsoft Project 2010 Quick Reference Guide is an abbreviated version of the above.
As well as this content, the latest “Questions and Answers” around Project 2010 have been posted.
Next significant milestone for the Project 2010 release will be the publication of the Beta version of Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010. Make sure you are notified by registering you interest on either the links provided in this blog or supplied on the Microsoft Partner Portal.
If you are not currently EPM Specialized and would like access to this content , find out how by referencing How to become EPM Specialized


Dear Partners,
We are pleased to announce the Microsoft Project 2010 Technical Ignite & Sales Training being held in
- Prague, Czech Republic from 4-6 November, 2009
- Paris, France from 18-20 November
- Mexico City, Mexico from December 1-3, 2009
- Brazil, Sao Paulo from December 8-10, 2009
- Singapore from 2-4 February, 2009
- Sydney, Australia from February 9-11, 2009
This free in-person training is by invitation only and is targeted at Microsoft Partners and Microsoft Field in consulting, sales, technical sales, and marketing roles.

The Project 2010 “Ignite” is a three day Instructor-led training program for Enterprise Project Management (EPM) 2007 partners and the Microsoft field in technical roles. The goal for the Project 2010 "Ignite" Program is to prepare EPM professionals for deployment, operations and customization of Project Server 2010, hence to build skilled EPM partners when Project 2010 becomes available in the market.
The "Ignite" curriculum is targeted towards EPM consultants, IT Professionals, Admin Professionals and Developers that have experience deploying, operating and customizing Project Server 2007. Content will be technical and will range from 300 to 400 levels (Experienced to Advanced/Expert). With this in mind, the "Ignite" content will not be designed to cover all Project Server functionality, only the new functionality of Project Server 2010 will be presented. In other words the goal is to help better understand the differences, deltas and new features. The content will be a combination of instructor-led training, product demonstrations and hands-on labs. The Project 2010 "Ignite" training will be delivered in English by EPM experts from Microsoft.
To view a full agenda please visit the registration site.

The "Are you Project 2010 Ready!" sales training is a one day Instructor-led training program for Enterprise Project Management partners and the Microsoft field in sales and marketing roles. The goal of the "Are you Project 2010 Ready!" sales training is to prepare the Partner and Microsoft sales and marketing force to sell and market Microsoft Project 2010 and the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution. Content will range from 100 to 200 levels.
With this in mind, when registering, please choose the appropriate track as the Sales Track (“Are You Project 2010 Ready!”) will run in parallel to the first day of the Technical Track (Project 2010 “Ignite”). The content will be a combination of instructor-led training and product demonstration. The Project 2010 "Ignite" training will be delivered in English by Microsoft Project experts from Microsoft.
To view a full agenda please visit the registration site.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact the Project 2010 "Ignite" Registration Team at projectignite@dynamicevents.com. Please note there is a similar program for SharePoint 2010, more information can be found on this site.
Apart from two further North American events this will be the only face to face training planned this fiscal year.
We look forward to hosting you at this event!
Project 2010 “Ignite” Team

The Project team will be at the “sell out” SharePoint Conference:
Session
| Title | Speaker |
| Project Professional 2010 Overview | Monday 19th Oct, Jan Kalis, Room Breakers B, 2:45 pm to 4:00 pm |
| Project Server 2010 Overview | Monday 19th Oct, Christophe Fiessinger, Room Lagoon J, 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Deploying and Upgrading to Project Server 2010 | Wednesday 21st Oct, Christophe Fiessinger, Jan Kalis, Room South Pacific F, 4:30 pm to 5:45 pm |
- Project 2010 booth/kiosk at the MSFT pavilion with some fresh content; come meet Microsoft, MVP’s and partners at the booth
- Project table at Ask The Experts session
- Two Hands On Labs
- Desktop 2010 Overview
- Project Server Overview
Use your to MySPC tool to book these sessions.