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

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

Having /hosting in the title of this post may look cryptic (or potentially a HTML goof), but to many of our hosting service providers (a/k/a hosters), this is a well understood setup switch to enable you to deploy Exchange Server 2010 in a multi-tenant fashion. In the words of our TechNet article on this SP1 capability, “multi-tenant support provides the core feature-set of Exchange Server in a manner that can be deployed to multiple customers in a single installation.”

However, as we learned from an earlier post by Michael van Dijken (my hosting partner guru and main advocate for Exchange hosters on the Exchange Partner Marketing team), while this option was welcomed it also presented some limitations (like not having support for Exchange Unified Messaging). As he covered in both the blog posting referenced above and his interactive session at WPC2011, there area a few things you can take under consideration when thinking about hosting Exchange in a multi-tenant fashion.

Since sharing this guidance, Michael has worked closely with our engineering team, members of the Operator Channel group, and even a bunch of partners to formulate the best strategy for hosters to host Exchange 2010 moving forward.  Today, we shared these details via “The Exchange Team Blog”, and I’ve (once again) asked Michael to provide his thoughts and perspective on the changes we are making:

This morning, Kevin Allison (general manager of Exchange Customer Experience) published a blog post this morning regarding the future of the /hosting mode switch in Exchange. If you are a hoster, or work with hosters, I highly encourage you to give this a read. From my perspective, this change represents excellent news for hosters in the long run.

In summary, the blog post articulates the evolution of our thinking around how hosters should host Exchange going forward. With Exchange 2010 SP1, we recommended that hosters use the /hosting mode switch when hosting multi-tenant Exchange. In fact, we required this for hosters to be supported by Microsoft. With the availability of Exchange 2010 SP2, this will change, and our recommendation to hosters will be to use the on-premises configuration when hosting multi-tenant Exchange. Hosters will be supported using this approach provided the Hosting Guidelines have been followed.

In my previous post on this topic, I outlined the fact that customers upgrading to Exchange 2010 are looking for many of the advanced features offered with Exchange. This was consistent with feedback we have heard from hosters, which made it clear to us that we needed to address concerns with /hosting mode, and do so quickly. Taking this new approach enables hosters to offer a wider set of features to their customers while streamlining deployment and ongoing management of their Exchange 2010 infrastructure – all good news for our partners.

As a result of this change, no further investment in /hosting mode will take place, and it will not be carried into the next version of Exchange. Reinforcing some important points from Kevin’s blog post, here are a few critical things you’ll need to know:

• /hosting mode will be supported through the standard support lifecycle for Exchange 2010. It will still be available in SP2 and any future service packs or roll-ups.
• Multi-tenant hosting on the next version of Exchange will be supported, in a similar fashion to the approach we will take with Exchange 2010 SP2.
• Microsoft will publish guidelines for hosting a multi-tenant environment using the on-premises configuration of Exchange. Microsoft will also publish a step-by-step process for upgrading from Exchange 2007 HMC or migrating from Exchange 2010 SP1 /hosting to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration.

For hosters who are currently on Exchange 2007 using HMC, upgrading to Exchange 2010 will be a lot easier. You’ll want to do the following:

1. Wait until Exchange 2010 SP2 ships
2. Review the Hosting Guidelines and step-by-step upgrade guidance
3. Plan your upgrade to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration as per the Hosting Guidelines. Engage with a control panel vendor for hosting automation software as you choose.
4. Deploy Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration.

For hosters on Exchange 2010 SP1 using the unsupported on-premises configuration, simply upgrade to SP2 following the Hosting Guidelines. The biggest change to your approach will be to use Address Book Policies to segment your GAL.

For hosters on Exchange 2010 /hosting mode, you have a choice. You could migrate to Exchange 2010 SP2 using the on-premises configuration, or you could continue to use /hosting mode throughout the product lifecycle of Exchange 2010. While migrating will have some impact to your business, it does mean that you can offer features like Exchange UM and Public Folders. It also means that you will not need to deploy Lync into a separate forest if you have plans to offer a hosted Lync solution. If you choose to migrate, you’d take the same steps I outlined above.

As part of this new approach, the Exchange team has partnered closely with many of the control panel vendors to ensure that their solutions support Exchange 2010 SP2. In the near future, the team will publish a list of validated solutions – solutions that follow the Hosting Guidelines and are therefore supported by Microsoft. Deploying a hosting automation solution or control panel can dramatically decrease your time to market, and is worth considering.

After careful considering, we found this to be the best approach to addressing the feedback we heard, and putting hosters on a path to success with Exchange. More information as it relates to the specifics will be forthcoming, so please do track both the Exchange Team and this blog.

Thanks
Michael van Dijken
Senior Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing

Sadly, I cannot remember which comedian who’s bit it was—although I suspect it was something the great George Carlin once said—but it goes something like this: saying "it’s always the last place you look” after someone shares they’ve located a missing item (like car keys or a wallet) after a long search is just plain silly.

Why?

Well, of course you’d find the missing thing in the last place you looked, because after you find it, you (should) stop looking.

Right?

Perhaps that was a long winded way to intro today’s post, but it was the first thing that came to mind after I’ve spent the last few weeks with a number of partners across a few big events, like our recent edition of Partner MS101 here in Redmond.

More specifically, there was a common theme each time we asked questions around the types, quality, and usefulness of the to- and through-partner content we produced to help support your Exchange businesses. Basically, we heard “it’s great stuff, when we can find it.”

Now, I am a big fan of giving you what you need to be successful and a big part of this strategy is our desire to treat our great partners like a true extension of our field. To do that, we need a centralized location and some controls in place to enable us to share a wide range of collateral.

Sounds straight forward, right?

Yes and no.

While we do have the infrastructure around our MPN competency (today that’s the Unified Communications competency, yet very shortly that one retires in favor of our new Messaging competency), I don’t believe we’ve done the best job at keeping you abreast of all the great stuff we’ve put up there.

I did try to get a little more color from the partners I was with about the best way to keep you informed.  In some cases there was a desire for regular email newsletter updates. Others would like something akin to a SharePoint alert. Just a small number liked Tweets.  RSS feeds were also mentioned.

At one point, I suggested we could use this blog, and I laughed when one of the partners in the room said, “why don’t you then just email us a link to the blog posting.”

As an Exchange guy, I love that email is the preferred mode of transportation here, however it can face some scale challenges in such a large eco-system of Exchange partners, i.e., my team doesn’t have all of your email addresses. Be that as it may, we are working with our partners in WPG to see how we can better integrate into the rhythm of weekly, monthly, and regionalized email blasts they drive.

However, we do own this blog and we can scale out more effectively (and you can subscribe to the blog via an RSS feed through Outlook – see, there’s an email-esque connection!).

As such, we are going to start a more regular cadence of blog posts around new content as it becomes available.

I see this helping meet two goals:

1. it seeks to improve the discoverability of the stuff we have on our portal page (and I am an equally huge fan of improving discoverability across the board), and
2. as evidenced by the examples I shall highlight below, some of this content is “locked” so that only holders of our competency (again that’s UC Competency today, and Messaging Competency in the near future – woo-hoo!) can access it, which means there’s yet another meaningful benefit for you to attain our competency.

Thoughts?

Before you answer, here is this week’s “featured content” plug.  Thanks to great partnership with our Exchange market insights guru, we now have two new Sales Cards posted on Novell GroupWise and IBM LotusLive.

In both cases, these Sales Cards offer you insights around the competitive solution, how Exchange stacks up, and some great guidance on addressing objections with best practices on how to start a conversation with these accounts.  And, as you likely recall from our discussions at WPC, migrating customers off of legacy platforms (like GroupWise and Notes) to Exchange or Exchange Online (part of the Office 365 suite) is a big area of focus and opportunity for you this fiscal year.

Check out the new items above (and note you will need to be a current UC competency holder to access), and if you’re looking for more you can find a whole bunch on our MPN portal page dedicated to Exchange 2010.

See, it really will be the last place you look. 

More importantly,  I’m also hoping you’ll make this first place you look.

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing