Fresh on the heels of this morning’s announcement, I couldn’t wait to share with you these bright, shiny and brand smackin’ new Messaging competency logos:

These are fairly “hot off the presses” and I think they’ll look real good on you!

And, as part of this “Mid-Monday Momentum” treat, we also launched a brand new “Become a Partner” page off of microsoft.com/exchange:

My favorite part?

Click on the video link and watch what I like to call our “Greatest Hits” reel of partners telling partners about how they have grown their business with Microsoft Exchange.

Good stuff!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

While it may seem more prevalent than I’ll make it out to be, it’s not everyday you get to launch something. So, when you get to start off your Monday morning with the fantastic news that something you and your team has been working on for a better part of a year is now live and launched, you feel a little extra special.

As I mentioned in one of my posts last week, we were moments away from the upcoming launch of your new Messaging competency.

This fine Monday morning, I am thrilled to announce it is finally here!

Welcome to your New Messaging Competency!

This week the Microsoft Partner Network celebrates its one year anniversary since launching broad programmatic changes to bring more value to partners like you. In an ever-evolving industry, we recognize it’s necessary to evolve programs to meet new marketplace trends and business needs. Responding to your feedback, last May we announced we were evolving the Unified Communications (UC) competency to better enable your organization to differentiate expertise in the marketplace and compete more effectively.

Today, the UC competency has been officially retired and we officially launch the Messaging and Communications competencies.

Earning the Microsoft Messaging competency helps give your organization a competitive advantage to increase your revenue opportunities with Microsoft Exchange. As I mentioned last week, we are extremely bullish that the new Messaging competency will give you a competitive advantage through such benefits as access to Exchange training resources, even more Internal Use Rights for Exchange Server 2010, exclusive access to compete resources, the distinguished Messaging competency logo, and much more. Unlocking these benefits can expand your customer opportunities and strengthen your Exchange expertise that can lead to shorter sales cycles.

The Silver Messaging competency recognizes your expertise in implementation, design, deployment, and support of Microsoft Exchange Server.

And, the Gold Messaging competency highlights your deeper investment in archiving, security, and voicemail, along with your ability to help customers with their journeys to the cloud with Microsoft Exchange Online.

If your organization was enrolled in the UC competency and meets the new requirements of Messaging and/or Communications competencies, you will be migrated automatically as appropriate. For other UC competency partners, migrations will be complete by November 11. Thank you for your patience as we complete these migrations. Also, I encourage you to check out the “Evolution of the UC Competency” guide for a comprehensive FAQ section.

It is fantastic to offer you the opportunity to ENROLL in the Messaging competency.

Grab more details on the value and benefits of the Messaging competency here.

Then check out the requirements to enroll in the competency here.

Again, welcome to your new competency!

Before I close, I wanted to recognize all the hard work that Kristin Murray (Exchange) and Caroline Chung (Lync), as well as our partners (no pun intended) over in the Worldwide Partner Group (like Dan Truax and Katie Larson) for making today possible.  Thanks for all you have done to help make our partners even more successful!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

We received a lot of fantastic feedback (via this blog and face-to-face at events like WPC and Partner MS101) about what kinds of resources would be most useful for you as you build and grow your businesses with Exchange. One of the common themes of late has been “yeah, I get you want us to invest in the advanced workloads of Exchange, but show me what success looks like!”

That was a really good piece of feedback, and the team and I spent some time on how to best deliver such a “partner success story” case study.  So here goes: starting today, we are launching a new series on the blog called “Spotlight on Partner Opportunity”.

We hope this will help shed some light on how others in Exchange ecosystem are capitalizing on a range of partner opportunities Exchange can afford your business, and how things like our very, very, very (super), very soon to be launched Gold Messaging competency will enable you to get trained up and noticed for your competency and capability to deliver on the “more than messaging” benefits of Exchange Server and Exchange Online.

Okay, so here’s the very first one for you and please keep the feedback coming!!

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Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Archiving

Exchange offers your business more opportunities to provide services beyond email infrastructure upgrades or migrations. Thanks to the advanced capabilities we’ve delivered in Exchange 2010 (such as email archiving and discovery, security and voicemail) you have the opportunity to build specialized, high value practices which should equate to more services revenues that go above and beyond traditional email server deployment and configuration.

We continue to see momentous customer demand for Exchange 2010 in the marketplace. And, this demand only grows stronger if we take into account a thought provoking figure from our research findings: 81% of organizations worldwide do not have an adequate archiving solution today. This means there’s plenty of green field opportunity for you to position, consult and deploy email archiving capabilities in Exchange 2010.

Partners like Dimension Data recognize this customer demand and are taking advantage of these additional services opportunities:

“Dimension Data has seen strong and steady adoption of Exchange 2010 across all sectors since its release. The new features in Exchange 2010 are greatly compelling for our clients. Interestingly enough, the new native archiving functionality has been a great conversation starter for us. Most all of our clients have  some level of archiving requirement making this is top of mind for them. In fact we see an increasing number of our clients making the choice to upgrade now specifically because of the new archiving capabilities offered in the [Exchange] 2010 release, and expect to see more as time goes by.”

- Anne Greenwald, Global Business Development Director
Microsoft Solutions at Dimension Data

Delivering email archiving requires specialization that leads to higher-touch customer engagements with the opportunity for more services dollars for your organization. And it’s a win for customers, too, who can meet their archiving needs with Exchange 2010 and avoid paying for third party solutions.

So what’s next?

• Upsell your customers on the email archiving capabilities in Exchange 2010. Remember there’s low hanging fruit considering 81% of organizations are without an adequate archiving solution today.
• Enroll in the Gold Messaging competency, launching just next week, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers. We have designed the Silver Messaging competency to highlight your capabilities around deploying and configuring a traditional messaging environment, and the Gold Messaging competency recognizes your investment and specialization in delivering email archiving (in addition to security and voicemail and your ability to help customers with their journeys to the cloud).

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

What a week for the blog, eh?

It’s a blog post three-peat week for me!

I must admit, I do feel a bit like my beloved Seattle Sounders FC (our local Major League Soccer franchise), who just a few weeks back won their third Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup in a row (a three-peat feat that had not been witnessed since the 1967-69 Greek American AA last snatched the silverware hat trick).

Okay, that may have been a longwinded and deliberate way of mentioning my Sounders in an Exchange partner community facing blog, but it worked, though, right?

Nevertheless…on to business!

I’m not sure you noticed this or not, but we’re all over the Microsoft Partner Network’s portal’s homepage this week:

More specifically, our two recent UC Partner of the Year award winners (InfoWAN and Polycom) are featured on the main stage as part of our ramp to next week’s official launch of our two new competencies: Messaging (for Exchange partners) and Communications (for Lync partners).  And, as you’ve likely gathered the current Unified Communications competency (known around these parts as the UC competency) is set to retire at the same time.

Now, I’m not just sharing this with you because we’re impressed with our own graphic design, but that we also have a new (and pretty neat) page for you to learn the latest about how these two new competencies will help you “Broaden your business portfolio and meet customer demand.”

You can check that out by visiting: http://mpncompetencies.com/unifiedcomms/

As you’ll learn by clicking on the aforementioned link, we are extremely bullish that the new Messaging competency will give you a competitive advantage through such benefits as access to Exchange training resources, even more Internal Use Rights for Exchange Server 2010, exclusive access to compete resources, and much more. 

Doing the math here, we also believe this means you’ll experience increased opportunities with shorten sales cycles thanks to the brand, resources and support you’ll gain after attaining the Messaging competency.

BUT WAIT!

There’s more!

Even though the Messaging competency isn’t live just yet, there’s a really good call to action for you.

It’s simple: just read up on the changes that are coming through this great “Evolution of the UC Competency” guide the team has put together.

It’s a good read and something that will keep you busy until my next post. Well, at least it will get you ready for next week’s launch.

I can’t wait, can you?

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Great news, Office 365 fans!

Earlier this morning--very early for your humble blogger based here in Redmond, WA--Research in Motion (RIM) announced that an Open Beta (a/k/a public beta) has been launched for their new BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365.

Can I get a “Woo-hoo!”?

This is great news for you, as I suspect you may have customers currently interested in moving to our cloud for business productivity yet they were curious about how they can get BlackBerry to access email, calendar, contacts, etc. with Office 365.

As we shared back in March, RIM and Microsoft have been working together to deliver a new type of services offering, that moved the “connective tissue” between Exchange Online and the world of BlackBerry wireless synchronization to a new RIM-hosted cloud service.

That new RIM-hosted cloud service is called RIM BlackBerry Business Cloud Services (or RIM BBCS to keep things simple).  BBCS is “is available at no additional cost to current enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online. The service works with BlackBerry smartphones on business or consumer data plans. The service offers BlackBerry access to Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar, and contacts. And IT administrators can provision, manage, and secure their organization’s BlackBerry phones from a convenient web-based console.”

As the partner guy, I am pretty excited about the approach RIM has taken. It certainly serves as a great role model for other partners that wish to deliver value add enhancements to Office 365 while preserving the cost and business agility benefits the cloud offers.  More specifically, RIM is delivering BlackBerry Enterprise Server capabilities  without having to have those servers installed in our datacenter.  Instead, RIM is tapping into the scale and cost efficiencies the cloud enables and has built this new service utilizing familiar underlying RIM technology enhanced to connect via “cloud-ready” interfaces into Exchange Online (i.e., Exchange Web Services) to extend Exchange Online goodness to BlackBerry smartphones.

Good stuff.

Now, you can find more info about this new service by visiting our Microsoft Office 365 Blog and the new Office 365 Wiki article we posted right after the RIM open beta announcement. There’s also a new comparison chart RIM posted to help you understand how the feature set of BBCS stacks up to BES, BES Express or just good ol’ BlackBerry service from your Wireless Provider.

As for your call to action, it’s pretty simple:  If you have customers evaluating Office 365 (or Exchange Online) and seeking guidance around how BlackBerry fits into our mobility story, just point them to http://www.blackberry.com/cloudservices to learn more about BBCS.

You can even let them kick the tires (and I encourage you to do the same) by signing up for an Office 365 trial (NOTE: This needs to be an Enterprise Plan Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan E3)) and enabling the service under “Setting up email on mobile phones” in the Admin console (see right for a screenshot from my tenant).

And, you should also have your customers sign-up for the BlackBerry Beta Zone to ensure they get access to all of the additional resources RIM is providing, and perhaps more importantly, your customers can provide valuable feedback into RIM on how to get this from open beta to general availability.

Stay tuned for more details as we progress from today’s open beta (which is available in “over 30 countries” starting today) to the expected general availability milestone planned for January 2012.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing