Vijay Riyait, one of our SBSC Partner Area Leads (PALs) has written a post on his blog about the new SBSC PAL website. This has just been set up and Vijay is asking you to contribute some content. As a Small Business Specialist partner and member of this community please do offer your support and contribute what you can:

During this year’s WPC in Houston there was much discussion about how the PALs should communicate publicly. To cut a long story short the PALs have created a Sharepoint site http://www.sbscpal.com which has been very kindly provided by Jose Morales (one of the European PALs based in Slovenia). It’s a WSS 3.0 site which Jose and his team at B4 Contact have built a CMS around called Sharepoint CMS. This allows the public facing site to be branded and have some great templates added. The content is easily managed via an intuitive web based interface. It has been created by the PALs and paid for by the PALs but with the full support of Microsoft. It is independent of Microsoft so they do not control the content, we do as a Community!

The site is split into the PAL regions of the World and on the frontpage you can click on the respective country flag to go into that public area. The UK region can be found here and is maintained by myself.

The reason for writing this post is to start to encourage people to contribute to this site via me if you are a UK SBSC Partner. The content is open to what you think would be valuable but here are some of my thoughts :-

  • Blog roll links to SBSC UK Partners (if you have an active blog let me know!)
  • Contact details of Current SBSC Groups
  • Upcoming Events
  • Partner Interviews (let me know if I could interview you about business/technical stuff?)
  • Business/Technical Articles (would you be willing to write an article for the site?)
  • Customer Case Studies (do you have an existing Microsoft Published Case study which could be highlighted or one of your own stories?)
  • Links to other existing resources

Now, I know you UK SBSC Partners can be a shy retiring bunch sometimes so I’m not expecting a sudden stampede to contribute so I’ll be reaching out to certain people in the coming weeks to seek contributions by calling in favours, begging and bribery:-) We have commitments from Microsoft to provide contributions so this is a serious thing we are doing. We want to make this site unique and not just be duplicating content. This can be a great Showcase/PR vehicle for you as a UK Partner because it will be seen at the highest levels of Microsoft not just in the UK but also at Microsoft Corporate level. I’m pretty sure Andrea Russell in Redmond will make certain that people within Microsoft see what we are doing as a Community.

So, contact me at vijay@sikhgeek.com or Mob: 07773 123 562

I'd like to take this opportunity to personally thank Vijay for his hard work and dedication in helping us build, develop and grow the UK small business specialist community!