Tartan Tech: Microsoft Scotland Insight : MS Scotland Info

Resources from BPOS Partner Day - Monday 9th FEB

SmallCountry — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:47:56 GMT

Thanks to all who attended the Business Productivity Online Services session on Monday. We hope you found it an informative introduction and are now considering how the Online services opportunity.

The slides and resources from the day are downloadable here.

In addition, there is further 1 day "hands on" training event scheduled in Microsoft Edinburgh. Course 44CO107 - Implementing Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) is free to partners, and is bookable through the UK Partner site.

Thanks to Peter King, Adam Khan for their hard work on the day. Thanks in particular to Ted Shultz who has posted a list of answers to questions raised on the day at the link above - I have included a picture of Ted in dynamic pose off duty enjoying the surf of his native California.

Microsoft Scotland - Gold Partner Forum - 11th December

jhenders01 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:46:00 GMT

‘Win, Drive, Grow & Innovate with Microsoft in FY09’

The second Microsoft Scotland Gold Partner Networking Forum of FY09 is scheduled to take place on Thursday 11^th December 2008 at our new offices at Waverley Gate, Edinburgh. This Session will include a talk from Jeremy Peat, Director of The David Hume Institute, our special guest speaker on the Scottish Economy and the opportunities and challenges facing businesses today.

The timing of the event is 10am for a 10.30am start. We aim to conclude the session at 12.30pm whereby more time will be available for networking and a fork buffet lunch will also be provided.

Please contact Ross Duncan to confirm your attendance: email: t-rossd@microsoft.com or telephone 0118 909 2969. Please register by Thursday 4^th December. Due to anticipated high demand, places are limited to 2 attendees per GOLD partner.

The agenda for the event is as follows:-

AGENDA

1000 – 1030 Registration, Coffee & Networking

1030 - 1045 Welcome, Business & Events Update – James Henderson & Yvonne Thomson

1045 – 1130        Microsoft Technology Briefing:
                           System Centre Data Protection Manager (DPM) – Stephen Porter, Storage Partner Manager, Microsoft, EMEA
                                     Azure, BPOS & OCS - Peter Ferry, Senior Technology Advisor
                                     Professional Developers Conference – Graeme Bryce, Chief Technology Officer, Factonomy

1130 – 1140 Recent Wins using Microsoft Finance – Martin Thornton, Microsoft Finance

1140 – 1150 Citizenship & Volunteering Opportunities – Princes Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT)

1150 – 1230 The Scottish Economy – the opportunities & challenges facing business - Special Guest
Speaker: Jeremy Peat, Director, The David Hume Institute

1230 – 1430 Fine Festive Lunch (in Waverley Gate) & Networking

We look forward to seeing you on the 11^th December.

Hey! You! Get on to my Cloud!

SmallCountry — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:02:27 GMT

Houston was a productive trip for the Scottish Partners at the World Partner Conference, and might even be considered a pivotal moment as Microsoft Partners were finally presented with a workable business model for Microsoft Business Productivity Online (BPOS).

For me, and certainly for any Partner involved in implementing collaboration tools, the biggest news was that there is 12% compensation for partners referring their customers to BPOS.

This isn't just money for old rope, Partners will earn this through their skills in planning and migration of users onto the service.

Thereafter, there is a 6% annual fee for customers remaining on the service after 12 months. With the BPOS suite (Exchange, Sharepoint, Live Meeting and OCS) at around $15 per user per month, this will form the basis of a recurring revenue stream for partners to manage and provision the service on behalf of customers. This might earn a partner $22K over a 3 year period for 500 users, which compares reasonably with the margins involved in delivering the hardware, software and services involved in a on premise solution.

The 30+ attendees from Scotland had the opportunity to ponder on striking keynotes from Steve Ballmer (president and CEO), Stephen Elop (head of Microsoft Business division) and Kevin Turner. Together with the host Alison Watson, leader of Microsoft Partner Program, all focused on opportunities in the move to Software + Services: a software marketplace comprising of both traditional on-premise IT, and cloud -delivered software services. You can catch all of these on the Silverlight based Digital WPC site.

Scotland's special envoys created a few hits in the press - in Scotland on Sunday, Hi-tech Scotland and the Scotsman, and attendees may be interested to see some incriminating pictures from Houston below.

Now back in Edinburgh and reflecting on what I heard, the Highlights of the conference for me were as follows:

Microsoft Online - BPOS

As mentioned above, Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft Business Division, talked about Partners opportunity in the Online cloud-delivered form of Microsoft's collaboration tools Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting and Office Communications Server. He knows a bit about online services, having previously worked in Macromedia and Adobe.

BPOS will be attractive to many customers - it reduces the time and hassle of deployment and at a stroke addresses issues of availability, business continuity, anywhere access, etc. One surprise for me was its keen price - For the minimal, limited "deskless worker suite" , its as cheap as $3 per user per month.

You can get an idea of what this might look like from the demo, and to prepare for the 2009 UK availability of the service sign up for the Microsoft Online Services Quickstart

Clearly there will be a lot of small print to understand on BPOS including the technical detail and implementation models - a directory synch tool will be available for customers with AD (i.e. most), and they can mix and match "on premise" and "hosted" users. For partners delivering Hosted messaging and Collaboration, SPLA license costs will be reduced to match BPOS.

Cloud Computing

Steve Ballmer clearly articulated his views of how Microsoft will build a cloud computing platform - with software deployed run and managed to highly scaled and highly available Internet services - and how this will work together with desktop, mobile devices, and traditional on-premise servers through an evolution of todays software development models. Even Prof. Clayton, Geek in Disguise is getting a bit cloudy about the cloud.

Unified Communications

Chris Capossela spoke of the transformation of the $45 billion Communications marketplace with unified comms expanding to take a much bigger proportion of overall spend from siloed voice and web conferencing solutions.

For Microsoft partners there is a sizeable opportunity around the integration of voice into customer Unified Comms deployments - in recognition of this the Unified Comms Solutions Competency was announced with a Voice specialisation for partners investing in skills around VOIP integration and conferencing.

Essentials Business Server

Finally, our very own Robert Adie of Glasgow City park based Digital IP shared his experiences of delivering Secure/Reliable computing for medium sized businesses with a packed auditorium in Houston.

The launch of Essential Business Server in November 2008 will present a profitable opportunity for partners, like Digital IP, who wish to server medium sized businesses with a standard platform giving them the basic ICT infrastructure of the modern business - which is security, management, email, collaboration and remote/mobile access - in a economic and compact 3 server format which offers simplified deployment and migration.

More on Digital IP and their experience of the Essentials Business Server Technology Adoption Program at a later date.

Hyper-V Hyperspace

SmallCountry — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:27:00 GMT

The fun bit in Microsoft Scotland is working with customers to discuss how Microsoft solutions could have a positive impact on their business.

Words and pictures can only go so far. And a powerpoint presentation is often a better way to induce sleep than induce a vision of a future business enabled by powerful software tools.

So my colleagues and I generally demonstrate how the products work in real customer scenarios with real data. Rather than finding lots of hardware to run lots of Microsoft products on, we obviously use hardware virtualisation to support this - and for a few months now we have been using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.

Our trusty Scottish Shuttle Quad-core mini-server workhorse (pictured) was just painlessly upgraded to Hyper-V RC1. Last week we ran a 2 hour session around Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration technologies for a customer based in Aberdeen - over LiveMeeting. This environment was supported by 2 virtual machines images of Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2003. Our main impression is of a highly performant hardware virtualisation platform, supported by a well-executed and simple to use admin toolset.

Hyper-V is scheduled for release up to 180 days after RTM of Windows Server 2008, which by my reckoning takes us to August 2nd 2008. With RC1 now available, things are clearly going well in John Howard's Hyper-V development team.

For many customers and partners starting consolidation and Virtualisation projects, that means they can now go into a test phase with a solid release candidate, in the knowledge that the fully supported release version will be available at the start of August, if not before.

If any readers are tempted to evaluate Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, some simple things to watch out for which will save you time:

Upgrade to RC1 from RC0 is painless - as long as you have gracefully shutdown all your virtual machines and none are in a saved state
If you want full integration of your Guest VM, and highperf network connectivity you will need to install Hyper-V integration services - this is helpfully available to all virtual machines as a "dummy" CD
This is only supported on Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2003 SP2, so another alternative is just to install an emulated "Legacy Network Adapter" to the VM - not so performant and won't give you mouse integration
I found that after updating my Vista guest, I needed to use MSCONFIG.EXE to force HAL detection at reboot before the VMBUS was detected - after that network, mouse integration etc worked well

As our Shuttle is a shared resource the next step is to install the System Center Virtual Machine manager 2008 beta to utilise the virtual machine library functionality - more on that soon.

John Howard : Hyper-V RC1 is available for download

Yahoo has nothing to shout about - Scotland on Sunday

SmallCountry — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:04:33 GMT

Steve Ballmer was clearly reading TartanTech and saw last weeks post on the Yahoo saga - immediately deciding to call off the bid. Subsequent backtracking from CEO Jerry Yang and threats of action by shareholders on the board are leading to speculation of a further bid, for example in Bill Magee's article in Scotland on Sunday.

Yahoo has nothing to shout about - Scotland on Sunday

Ethical Beverages

SmallCountry — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:03:29 GMT

According to the Corporate & Social responsibility folks at Starbucks, you can get your caffeine fix AND save the world today.

After 2PM Weds 27th Feb, just as the postprandial dip set in following the hastily scoffed lunchtime sarnie, you can claim a free cup of FairTrade coffee at your favourite global coffee conglomerate.

Those within staggering distance of the George Street Edinburgh, Starbucks after 2PM today, can join the queue of Microsoft Scotland folks eager for a free caffeine fix.

http://starbucks.co.uk/en-GB/_Social+Responsibility/_Social+Responsibilities/Good+Coffee+Day.htm

Seek and Ye Shalt find

SmallCountry — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:02:10 GMT

As a hardened road warrior at the sharp end of a high tech industry, one must be super organized and efficient to have the edge in the cut and thrust of commerce.

Sadly most of us fail to reach these levels of efficiency, and spend several minutes every morning searching for wallet, keys, clean socks, mobile phone, and all the assorted electronic paraphernalia of the dot-com entrepreneur.

Most enterprises are the same, and fail to get the best out of their employees who spend 20% of their time looking for information and expertise, rather than being productive. These same employees have fueled the growth of the top 5 Internet search engines by searching for useful stuff on the Global Interweb, but thus far few have the same single point of access to information inside their organisation.

That's why Enterprise Search is a key application for customers with information management challenges (and I don't know any customers who don't have information management challenges). Implementing Microsoft Search technologies can be a quick win to address these challenges, and helps gain support for wider information management projects based on Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

Any Microsoft partner offering services around MOSS should fully understand Microsofts overall search strategy across Internet, Desktop and Enterprise, and be aware of Microsoft customer messaging around Search. That's why we have asked Mike Pallot will be telling us more about this in an informal meeting at our Edinburgh offices at 4PM on 21st November. If you are interested in coming along, please drop a mail to Peter or James.