Happy Friday, everyone!

I can’t believe we’re just a little more than one week away from the main event!

WPC11 is quickly approaching, and I am looking forward to heading down to Los Angeles see all of you.

To date over 14,000 have registered to attend and that’s quite impressive.

I’m not surprised to see this, as we’ve got a rocking line up of main stage vision and value keynotes, breakout sessions, and (of course) special guests like Sir Richard Branson and Grammy Award winners Los Lobos.

If your schedule is looking like mine, it’s packed with lots of meetings, networking events (a/k/a parties), and plenty of sessions to attend. Well, in an effort to help out our great Exchange partners here’s another tip on three sessions you are going to want to have on your calendars for Tuesday, July 12:

• 1:30-2:30pm in LACC-404AB
  BP04: Dollars, Euros, or Yen: How Exchange brings you growth opportunities from on-premises to the cloud
  Julia White
  
• 3:00-4:00pm in LACC-404AB
  BP14 Exchange vs. Google and Zimbra – How to Beat the Competition
  Alym Rayani and Gary Danoys
   
• 4:30-5:30pm in LACC-501A
  BP22i - So You Want To Host Exchange?
  Michael van Dijken

In addition to this cheat sheet, be sure to check out my earlier post for more details on what we’ll be covering in these sessions.

And, if the slated topics aren’t enough to spark your attention, attend BP04 (Julia’s breakout session) and you’ll be entered for a chance to win an XBOX 360 console with Kinect and a flat screen TV (we’ll also give out XBOX 360 console with Kinect at BP14 and BP22i).

Yup, you read that correctly.

An XBOX 360 + Kinect +Flat Screen…talk about your partner value prop!

“But, Ian. What’s the deal with that contest where I might win a pass to the ‘THE PARTY’?” you might be asking right about now.

I really want to thank all of you for posting your “most excited to learn” tidbit on Facebook and Twitter for a chance to win a pass to “THE PARTY”.

Your responses we’re AWESOME, and you’ll be happy to know we’ve got great content lined up in our three main Exchange sessions that addresses those topics you cited you wanted to get the scoop on.

Here’s a quick update: we have selected 70 lucky recipients who will receive a pass to “THE PARTY” and they will be contacted by the end of this week.

Fret not, because there are still opportunities to get the golden ticket to one of this year’s hottest events. And, when I say “golden ticket”, I really mean you still have a chance to snag one of our 25 VIP passes during the week of the event! 

Here’s how:

1. On Monday, July 11th simply stop by the Kogi Truck between 11:30am - 1:30pm. Say “hello” to me or members of my team, grab some notoriously good tacos, chat with other partners, and pick an Exchange and Lync button. (NOTE: you can also stop by our Exchange and Lync demo kiosks at booth #136 in the Solution Innovation Center to pick up a button if you missed the taco line).
2. Then wear this button in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Monday through Wednesday we are giving away VIP passes to 25 lucky partners spotted sporting this Exchange and Lync flair.

Awesome, right?

Stay tuned (as always) for more details and updates as we plan to blog away and (more importantly) we’ll be posting updates via Twitter through the #ExchangePartner hashtag.

Can’t wait to head on down to L.A., and I hope you all feel the same!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Great news!

Earlier this week, we officially launched a brand new customer facing partner page on our microsoft.com/exchange site!!

As you may recall, this site was previously a mishmash of a static list of ISV partners we stood up around the Exchange 2010 launch in November 2009, and a link off to the Solution Finder for locating SI partners. Since the Solution Finder and Solution Profiler have now been retired (officially on June 30, 2011), I spent a bunch of time with our Exchange digital marketing guru to see if we could use this moment to do a complete makeover of the page.

After a few weeks working with our partners over in Pinpoint, the aforementioned Exchange digital marketing guru, and a few others, I am thrilled to announce that we have completely overhauled the site and moved to the Microsoft Pinpoint platform.

“Why Pinpoint?” you may be asking.

It’s fairly simple: building this customer facing partner locator page on Pinpoint means we can deliver a way more dynamic (and frankly cooler) experience for both our customers and you, our Exchange ecosystem partners.

I particularly like the fact you have the power to maintain your own profiles (and their associated applications or professional services offers) to keep them current, strong marketing tools for you to reach new customers. We also benefit from improved search, customer reviews and ratings, and (of course!) the ability to flaunt your investments in the MPN competencies you are attaining (like the new Messaging competency later this calendar year).

Now, we didn’t just slap a Pinpoint box on the Exchange Partners page. What you see there is a scoped view into Pinpoint with just those partners who have solutions (applications or services) for Microsoft Exchange. This slims down the list of 10s of thousands of Pinpoint company profiles to a healthy handful of Exchange ecosystem members.

To make this possible, we asked the Microsoft Pinpoint team to do some backend changes to the Pinpoint database.  Specifically, there is now a new “Works With” super category called “Microsoft Exchange”, and we’ve scoped our view into Pinpoint for Application or Professional Service listings that include one of its children, i.e., “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” or “Microsoft Exchange Server 2007”.

So, your call to action is to go into Pinpoint and either create or update a new Profile and set your “Microsoft ‘Works With’ Products and Technologies” to “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” (see screenshot below) for your solutions for Exchange:

“Wait! What if I also do neat things for Exchange Online?”

Not a problem!

In these cases, especially if you offer an application, I recommend you first set your “Listing Type” to reflect whether your solution is on-prem, online, or both.

And, since you can choose up to a maximum of 3 “Works With” products/technologies, I’d suggest selecting “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010” (assuming your product is working with the latest versions of both the server and service) and then chose either “Microsoft Exchange Online” or “Microsoft Office 365” underneath the “Microsoft Online Services” category.

Here’s what that would look like for my “Contoso’s Awesome App!”:

It’s important that you invest the time to build out a complete profile and associated App/Services description. This really is an opportunity for you to place a digital marketing brochure--with screenshots, links to more details, white papers, et al—in front of a group of hungry customers seeking to benefit from the large partner ecosystem of system integrators and ISVs who have developed professional services and value-add applications that can help them maximize the return on their investment in Microsoft Exchange.

“Okay, so what’s next?”

Getting your customers to summit ratings and feedback is another important tip for gaining great visibility in this new Pinpoint view on microsoft.com/exchange. You’ll likely note that the default sorting for our Pinpoint page is ”Rating”, so get your customers out there telling others the great things you have helped them do with Exchange!

Finally, one of the many benefits you unlock when you attain a MPN competency, is the chance to feature these brands on your Pinpoint profile. Your competency details will show up on the search results page, as well as in your Company Overview tab (see screenshot to the right).

Let your prospective customers know that you’ve invested to become technology experts, from the Microsoft Partner Network, who can deliver innovative, proven solutions built on Microsoft Exchange that will support their businesses and give them a competitive advantage.

Again, this is huge advancement to what we had previously, and I really hope you’ll take the time to invest in creating and maintaining a profile on Pinpoint.

As always, I would love to hear your feedback on this approach and how your experiences have been with Pinpoint as I am fully vested in making this a great sales and marketing tool for our partners.

Want to know more? Just stop by and ask while we’re at WPC in a just a few short days!!

See you in LA!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Hashtags, as defined by our friends in the Twitterverse, are “used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet.”

Others, like hashtags.org, add that hashtags “are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.”

I like to think of them as mini-communities within the massive universe of Twitter updates and followers of these 140 character commentary from real people (well, mostly) sharing their real-world experiences, in (most cases) real-time.

Now, I know I don’t need to explain Twitter to all of you.

Instead, I would like to share that we (your humble Exchange partner marketing team here in Redmond) have established a new hashtag to help us, collectively, build out our Exchange partner ecosystem community on Twitter.

Called, simply enough, #ExchangePartner, this new tag will enable all of us who are building our businesses on Exchange share and stay connected.

While we’ve already started priming the pump with the contests we stood up for this year’s WPC, our goal is to keep this hashtag a humming all year long following this week’s event in L.A.

So, here’s what I encourage all of you to do is:

1. Start Tweeting!
2. Include the #ExchangePartner has tag in your Exchange related Tweets
3. Create a search or follow the #ExchangePartner hashtag in your favorite Twitter client(s), like I have done in both TweetDeck on my laptop and Seesmic on my Windows Phone 7
4. Benefit from the sage advice and random musings from your fellow Exchange ecosystem members

It’s that easy!

Heck, why not give it a shot at WPC this week?

I’m going to be watching the trends and really look forward to seeing what all of you have to share.

And, if you are a fan of Lync (like I am) there’s also a new hashtag for the Lync partner community called (no surprise) #LyncPartner.

Ian (from 37,000 ft en route to L.A.)
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

When I first kicked off this Exchange partner blog, about five months ago, I opened with a seemly innocent comment about how there were “only 159 days until WPC11.”

Not surprising, those 5+ months just flew by, and before we realized it, we were all in L.A. for a week chock full of keynotes, sessions, connections and cocktails.

Without a doubt WPC11 was a blast. However, I must admit that this year’s WPC took me a few extra days to recover from compared to years past.

“Why?” you may ask.

Put simply: this was one heck of WPC for me and my Exchange partner marketing team.

Before I outline my top reasons why I feel WPC11 was a massive success for the #ExchangePartner community, I want to take a moment to say

THANK YOU!!

Thanks to each and everyone of you who made the significant investment in time and money to journey to southern California to spend an entire week (mostly) away from your businesses to connect with Microsoft and each other. And, thank you for your active participation in just about every single facet of the conference. We fully recognize how physically and mentally taxing one of these events can be, but when you have as much stuff as we wanted to share and the strong desire to help partners establish meaningful connections with each other and us at corporate, it is tough to slim it all down to fit neatly in a five day package.

Again, thank you!

Now, on to my “Top Five” list of why I felt WPC11 was a success for you, our Exchange partners:

1. I have no more businesses cards: May seem trivial, especially in today’s massively digital age, but I travelled to L.A. with a full box of business cards (+/- 250 in quantity) and left with none. Each year, I use this to measure one of my personal objectives for WPC, i.e., meeting and getting to know a little bit more about as many partners as I possibly can. Returning with only your business cards and none of mine makes me feel I nailed that commitment. And, for those of you with whom I spoke with and have a card of mine, do not hesitate to reach out and let me know how I can help. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn (if that whole business card thing is so 1990s for you).
   
   
2. The Kogi Truck served over 1,000 partners in less than 2 hours: We sold out the Kogi Truck.  That’s right! The line was enormous and there were a lot of happy partners who walked away with some amazingly tasty (and world-famous) Korean-Mexican fusion tacos. More importantly, we had a chance to remind you about the killer “Better Together” story around Exchange, Lync and SharePoint (who happened to be the sponsors of this mid-day snack on that busy Monday of WPC week).
   
   And, an added treat to this added treat was the fact our good friend Dux Sy (of @meetdux and SharePoint partner Innovative-e fame) conducted a live streaming webcast--from the plaza between the LACC and Staples Center where we parked the Kogi crew--featuring partners from around the world sharing their thoughts about the keynotes (and the tacos!) that morning. NOTE: if you fast forward to about 5 minutes in, you get to see yours truly make a quick cameo.
   
   
3. There is no doubt that partners are “Going Big with Lync”: Might seem strange for me as the Exchange partner guy to mention how awesomely present (and BIG) Lync was at WPC11 as a measurement of success for the Exchange partner community at the conference. Well, I don’t think it strange at all, because Lync (beside being one killer unified communications solution) is a great growth opportunity for Exchange partners.
   
   Not only is the Lync experience bettered when Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 is in place, Exchange partners can help Lync customers by implementing advanced workloads like voicemail with Unified Messaging to fully round out an enterprise voice deployment. Oh, and if you’re not a Lync partner today, I would encourage you to investigate the new Communications competency which will arm you with the basics around how to add IM and presence to your portfolio of Exchange services offerings. Just don’t forget to be investing in the new Messaging competency for Exchange at the same time!
   
   Net/net: The huge momentum behind Lync means that you have a fantastic opportunity to up-level these conversations to a “Future of Productivity” discussion, which means you get to land gems like the 301% risk-adjusted ROI with a breakeven point (payback period) of 7.4 months after deployment of the Microsoft productivity platform (which happens to include Exchange 2010). We are extremely bullish that you will win customers over the competition every time when you tell the whole “FOP” (as we ‘softies like to call the “Future of Productivity”) stack story and your customers will thank you.
   
   
4. Office 365: Need I say more?  I really hope you had a chance to catch the blockbuster Office 365 partner launch on Day 2, especially the great panel discussion featuring the business leaders of Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office. I might be a little biased because my boss (Julia White, Sr. Director of Exchange) was one of the panelists, but the 100s of partners in attendance got an opportunity to learn firsthand about how we think about Office 365 as a strong asset for both partners to reach new customers and to expand the money making services you provide.
   
   And, my good friends on the Office 365 partner team gave away a car as part of the proceedings.
   
   Talk about an opportunity to really drive the business!
   
   
   
5. Roskill Outlined Significant Investments in the Microsoft Partner Network: Before Jon brought up Kevin Turner or sat down with Sir Richard Branson, he spent his Wednesday morning remarks summarizing a long list of investments and improvements (“multibillion-dollar” to be more specific) to MPN. Not only did he mention the evolution of the UC competency into the new Communications competency for Lync and the Messaging competency for Exchange, but he spoke to new programs and tools that are your disposal to really drive your Exchange businesses.  I am most excited about the work we’re doing with the MPN portal and I have a big project this fiscal year to further enhance your experience on our Exchange portal page in MPN.
   
   If you missed this one, I strongly encourage you to catch the on-demand replay on digitalwpc.com.

Pretty good list, right?

Well, I have two bonus reasons:

• Bonus #1: During his Tuesday morning keynote, our divisional president Kurt Delbene mentioned one of my most favorite stats: Over the past 5 years, 22 million Lotus Notes seats were migrated to Exchange. We could not do this without partners like you, and this is such a great set of wins to celebrate at WPC. But, our work is not yet done! There are millions of more seats that need to be “Exchanged” and we need your help to make sure our mutual customers have a smooth journey on the way.
  
• Bonus #2: Getting the chance to “work the crowd” as I tried to drum up awareness of the Kogi Truck Monday afternoon. As one would expect with any event, sometimes things get a little crazy and everyone needs to pitch in to help. I saw my chance to do just that as thousands of attendees were exiting the Staples Center and heading to the dining hall in the LACC. To make sure you guys didn’t miss out on the Kogi Truck, I grabbed one of the signs, headed into the streaming masses of partners, and screamed “You can’t build your business on an empty stomach. Instead, come try one of L.A.’s famous Kogi Tacos, brought to you by Exchange, Lync and SharePoint!!” I think this picture says it all:

Okay, that’s wrap for WPC11.

I truly hope that you found this event as valuable as we did in delivering it. And, I welcome your feedback on what we can do better, differently or even more of at WPC12.

And, don’t forget to keep the discussion going via Twitter and use the #ExchangePartner hashtag.

Again, thank you to the over 15,000 attendees from 138 countries for coming to L.A. and see you in Toronto (or, better yet, beforehand)!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

WPC is certainly a gift that keeps on giving!

Align these lines, I am pleased to share with you the video replay from Julia White’s Exchange general session (a/k/a BP04 – Dollars, Euros or Yen: How Exchange Brings You Growth Opportunities from On-Premises to the Cloud) is now available.

Just swing by digitalwpc.com and you can watch Julia’s session on-demand.

Even if you made the event, but missed her session on Tuesday, you still can benefit from learning about the fantastic business momentum we collectively experienced in FY11, how the marketplace looks and what the competitors are up to. You’ll also get very prescriptive guidance on the four key areas of focus and opportunity for you in FY12:

• Deploy sold seats
• Migrate Notes and GroupWise
• Drive security, archiving and voicemail
• Deliver private cloud

My favorite part of this presentation is the clear overview you receive on how your partner opportunities align to our Exchange business priorities for FY12.

And, as an added bonus (yup, we keep on giving!) you can even download the session presentation slide deck for review with your colleagues and business partners!

Did you happen to catch Julia’s session live? Well, you can also take a look at Kirk Gregersen’s general session that spoke to how to “Go Big” with Lync.

Here are the direct links for you to both of these:

• BP04 - Dollars, Euros or Yen: How Exchange Brings You Growth Opportunities from On-Premise to the Cloud
• BP03 - Going Big with Lync: Delivering a New, Connected Experience

Enjoy!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing