BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

BMS have attained Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status! Well done and congratulations to the whole team at BMS for making it possible. The beers are definitely on me!

It’s been a bit of a mission of mine to try and attain Gold Certified status before the MPN changes take place. The reason behind this is simple. Once all the MPN changes are in place and we have competencies and advanced competencies I want to be able to say to prospects that we were Gold Certified before the changes!

Now that should tell you something about what I think about the changes or to be more precise, the names chosen to differentiate the levels. Everyone understands what Gold means, but does everyone understand what having a competency means? I think not.

At my weekly BNI meetings I stand up and say we are a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and a (Gold) Certified Partner. Now I appreciate unless I explain what is involved in getting to Gold the other members are non the wiser as to what it actually means, but the word suggests an achievement worthy of merit such as a gold medal for coming first.

Once the MPN changes take place I’m going to have to say we are a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and a competency partner. I can imagine it now – the very least we would be expected to be is competent! I’m not sure being an advanced competency partner sounds much better either.

I suspect it’s WAY too late for Microsoft to reconsider the naming convention now that the MPN changes have been “locked out”. Mind you that didn’t stop them postponing the Small Business Solution Provider competency!

Anyway, I’m very pleased we made it to Gold just in time and very proud of the team at BMS for always giving 110%. Now on to the next challenge!

If you’re a new developer and wondering which platform to use or an existing developer and not happy with your existing platform check out Black Marble’s view on the Microsoft offerings. 

Personally I don’t do a lot of development work, occasionally dipping in and out of Visual Studio to write bits of code for MS Dynamics CRM for internal use, but the intuitive interface means even I can be productive in a very short space of time!

Black Marble talk about their move from Java to .net and how they have embraced the Microsoft stack. This is an expanded video which provides more detail around their decision to move to the Microsoft stack 

Following on from my previous post about Microsoft’s vision for the future of business technology here is another video (only 2mins) about a SharePoint specialist called Black Marble.

These guys really get what Microsoft products are about and swapped from using competitive products. Well wouldn’t you if what used to take 8  days now takes 2!

It’s really obvious that consistency of the Microsoft development tools and the year on year improvements made to them make a real difference to their productivity and gives them a competitive edge. That’s what I was talking about before when I said Microsoft products provide a solid foundation to build your business on.

This sort of message convinces me even more that Microsoft are the right choice when it comes to the products and services we offer. It has also prompted me to get off my backside and go get some SharePoint training – particularly as most of our customers already have SharePoint services built in to SBS 2003/8 and don’t really make any use of it!

This short 6 minute video gives an interesting insight in to Microsoft’s thinking and where they see things in 3, 5 and 10 years.

I saw Stephen Elop deliver one of the keynote speeches at WPC09 and although he isn’t the most compelling of interviewees he does come across as being sincere, so it’s well worth a watch and will help you focus and define your own long term goals. As a Microsoft partner the key areas of investment Elop talks about are the same ones you should be thinking about investing in as well.

It’s interesting to hear that Dynamics CRM has seen a 40% growth year on year despite the recession although I’m surprised Stephen didn’t mention Sharepoint as I understood it was Microsoft’s fastest selling product to date? Never the less if you wanted to build on the Microsoft product stack you currently sell Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint are definitely the way to go. Particularly as both obviously lend themselves to the “in the cloud” model.

This video gives a slightly more toned down vision of the future compared to Steve Ballmer’s recent talk at Washington DC University and for the first time for a while the term software + services was mentioned again. I thought Microsoft had dropped that as it didn’t really seem to catch on and the new version was “we’re all in with the cloud”?

The good news is that the Microsoft vision for the future of business technology remains consistently grounded in research which, while it doesn’t always produce the most inspired products certainly helps to deliver strong technology foundations in the ever changing world of IT!

I know some Microsoft partners and IT managers are not looking forward to changing their business model to adapt to the new world of cloud computing and are looking elsewhere. Personally I’m happy to be “all in with Microsoft” as their long term strategy has a lot to offer.

Last Tuesday I had a meeting with Dominic Gill from Microsoft to talk about the new Microsoft Apprentice Scheme.

A short description of the program follows:

Short description as follows:

“The Microsoft Partner Apprenticeship was designed for and developed with Microsoft Partners to improve the capability of the partner network and add a stream of new ICT recruits, particularly for SMEs who have struggled to recruit appropriately trained staff or apprentices in the past due to the perceived barriers to entry.

The concept focuses on Partners clustering together in regional areas, which will enable you to benefit from collective recruitment and purchasing power.

The programme aims to:
• Harness the power of collaboration to reduce total costs and provide a richer learning experience for the apprentices.
• Allow Microsoft Partners (particularly SMEs) to engage in ICT apprenticeships in a way that was not previously possible
• Allow all Microsoft Partners to actively recruit the apprentices as full-time employees on day one of the apprenticeship.
• Provide an intensive learning period at the start of the programme to ensure apprentices are up-to-speed sooner than in traditional one day per week apprenticeship models.

Details of the Programme
Apprentices will participate in a 7 month apprenticeship
which will involve:
• Classroom learning at Europe’s leading Microsoft IT
Academy, Zenos
• Vocational learning whilst in the workplace
This mix of a Work Based Learning and Programme-led
apprenticeship is unique. It has been designed to offer
Partners and Apprentices a fast-track into productive
employment whilst ensuring all of the necessary technical
and business skills are learnt. This will produce flexible,
rounded individuals able to follow a number of valuable
career paths – a huge benefit to the sector as a whole.

We are recruiting both Partners and Apprentices NOW!
Register your interest by signing up to the Employer
Charter which can be found at www.microsoft.com/uk/
partner/apprenticeships. You then have two options:
1. You are looking to take on and develop your own cohort
of apprentices (i.e. more than 10 apprentices from
one intake). Contact mspa@e-skills.com to register
your interest and you will be assigned to the most
appropriate Zenos Academy.
2. You are looking to take on and develop between 1 and
9 apprentices. Contact mspa@e-skills.com and your
requirement will be matched to others by both role
specification and geography so a suitable cohort can be
assembled. e-skills UK will manage the resulting cohort.
If you require more information, we will be holding a
series of road shows across the country, details of which
are available at www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/
apprenticeships.”

About time too! I can’t imagine how many hours we’ve wasted over the years on hold to prove to MS  Support we really do have the issue reported in a specific hotfix.

Not any more though. As posted by Girish you can now get the hotfix by email link after accepting the MS agreement and choosing the version required. Nice one!

The imminent arrival of our first child has seen us scouring Internet sites looking for suitable names. It seems nothing invokes quite the same level of emotive response as the naming process!

Having exhausted most of the main baby naming sites I glibly typed the phrase “weird baby names” into Google. I should have known better I suppose! It seems there are several resources devoted entirely to the subject.

One in particular caught my eye: Wikipedia’s List Of Unusual Personal Names. Under the People Named For Something Else was this entry:

Vista Avalon is the legal name given to Microsoft MVP Bil Simser’s daughter born May 18th, 2007 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Vista is the name of Microsoft’s operating system, released in 2007. Avalon is the codename given to Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, part of the .NET 3.0 framework.^[17]

Of course this started me thinking about all those Microsoft code names…. and before long there it was - Cougar Longhorn - perfect! Now all I have to do is convince the other half

Looks like this is doing the rounds again but this time targeting those running Microsoft Word. If your customers download and install the “update” they’re basically installing Troj/Kango-D.

From the Sophos website:

The greeting is personalized (Dear: <firstname> <lastname>), mentions you are subscribed to the ?Microsoft Windows Update mailing list?, and asks you to download the patch from:

?http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/outlook/update-0-day/download.aspx?id=63852?

Once the above link is clicked, a request is not made to ?microsoft.com? but instead to one of many compromised sites hosting a Trojan, proactively detected by Sophos as Mal/Behav-112.

An interesting feature of this campaign is the target?s full name, and in most cases the organization they are associated with, is mentioned within the message. The samples we have received also lists a bogus Microsoft Windows Licence key, all in an attempt to make the message look legitimate to the recipient.

REGISTERED TO : <Firstname> <Lastname> , - <Organization>
Licence KEY : <key>

Sample Screenshot:

To be on the safe side we’ve blasted out an email to our customers making them aware of it.

I’ve just attended the MS CRM 4.0 readiness launch for MS partners. Although there wasn’t a lot of information relating to the SME market, there were some points worth noting; particularly if you are intending to roll out CRM 3.0 before the launch of 4.0 sometime in the next 2-3 months.

4.0 is more of an evolution rather than revolution. Some of the interesting points that came out of the day:

• The email tracking token is no longer required to track emails.
• MS CRM is the fastest growing CRM product.
• RTM date set for December 2007
• Integration with Office Communicator
• Licensing model allows for on-premise or partner hosted
• Full remote access without VPN
• New auto-correct and auto-complete functionality
• Completely integrated workflow engine

If you go ahead and roll out 3.0 now, the install process for 4.0 will detect your existing install and upgrade it without breaking. This will be a major factor for people looking at getting their hands on the new features!

For developers, full integration with Sharepoint and MOSS will mean that portals for vertical markets can be built on top of CRM to provide scaleable solutions.

Surveys by Gartner have shown that services around CRM generate 4 times the amount of revenue that the licences produce - so developing CRM can be lucrative if handled the right way.