BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

Nearly April already, where is the year going! This is a reminder  of the upcoming AMITPRO meeting on April 14^th 2009 at the Arden Hotel, Coventry, 5PM for a 5:30PM start.

April’s meeting is all about partnering with BT via their Associate Program. BT have now recruited over 190 Microsoft

Small Business Specialist Partners and have presented the Program to two other SBSC User Groups. The presentations went very well and were well received. BT received some great feedback, both positive and negative, which has allowed them to improve the Program going forward.

An overview of the presentation to be given by David Williams can be downloaded from here:

http://cid-ceec735cd4d431fa.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/BT%20Associate%20Program

Look forward to seeing you all on the 14^th!

p.s.

Emily Lambert has given me a dozen Windows Vista Small Business Challenges Supplement’s which I’ll be handing out at the meeting. The supplement focuses very heavily on SBSC partners and is well worth a read. More info over on Emily’s blog here:

http://blogs.technet.com/uksbsc/archive/2009/03/20/2nd-windows-vista-small-business-challenges-supplement-heavily-promotes-sbsc.aspx

I never thought it would happen (go knows I’ve resisted it so far)but eventually I have taken the plunge and joined the Twitter community!

I didn’t want to but it seems everyone I know uses it and the final straw was when I found out there are discussions around the Windows 7 Ignite program which I was missing out on, so if you want to know what I had for breakfast and other earth shatteringly important things like that please feel free to seek me out on Twitter under the guise of stevewright_bms

Emily Lambert has just sent me a big bunch of the Small Business Challenges supplement which I’ll be handing out at the next AMITPRO meeting – so if you want to get your hands on one you’ll need to come along!

This 2nd edition of the supplement is packed with interviews and comments from SBSC partners on every page and is destined to be circulated to over 200,000 people!

In Emily’s words:

Each page of the supplement focuses on one of the five winners of the Small Business Challenges competition, who were set a number of tasks and were supported by an SBSC partner. Each of the five SBSC partners who supported the competition are given the opportunity to give their own opinion, which enabled them to highlight their own businesses, but also demonstrates the wider capabilities of SBSC partners.

This sort of exposure can only be a good thing for the SBSC program – excellent stuff!

I couldn’t make the March meeting as I was at the Microsoft Ignite event in Munich, so first off I would like to say a big thank you to Vijay Riyait for standing in for me.

It sounds like it was a great meeting and I’m sure I’ll catch up on all the events in the next few weeks. In the meantime I thought I would share the takeaways from the meeting:

BPOS – Microsoft’s Business Productivity and Online Suite

and secondly:

The Zenos presentation - Zenos Provide Government Funded Training specifically for Technical IT Support Staff.

Details of the the April meeting will be released soon.

I’ve just got back from 4 days at the Microsoft Windows 7 Ignite program in Munich. The Ignite program is all about getting the ball rolling and generating excitement around the forthcoming release of Microsoft’s new operating system as well as getting feedback and real world use information about the product from partners and nominated customers.

We were very lucky to be among 4 UK and 26 other Microsoft EMEA partners from around the world invited to take part in the event. The US and Canada had taken part in a similar event last week.

We flew out on Tuesday morning and I caught up with Richard Tubb of Netlink IT on the way in to Birmingham airport to catch the flight. Rarely have I experienced an easier travelling experience as we merely got off the plane at Munich, jumped straight on to the S8 train which dropped us off within 2 minutes walk of the hotel entrance – excellent!

The first evening was spent at a cocktail reception but to be honest I only remember the beer, wine and excellent food. We were introduced to Ivonne Perrig of Microsoft and Jerry Honeycutt who were to be our presenters for the upcoming presentations and also met up with the other two UK partners Guy Gregory from Peak Support and Neil Crowther of NCI Technologies.

The 2 day presentation was split in to 2 main parts: Technical demonstrations of Windows 7 itself including IE8 and presentations around how the data and partner/customer evidence collection would work.

Now the course is over we will be receiving 2 laptops for our own use and 2 laptops each for our 4 pre-nominated customers each pre-loaded with Windows 7 and Office 2007. During the course of the following months we will all use the laptops on a daily basis and feedback information on how things go in the form of surveys, telephone interviews and by submitting reports via Microsoft Connect.

My immediate impression of Windows 7 is the no nonsense approach it takes to letting you get things done. It’s all about productivity. Right from start up (which is surprisingly quick) it looks like it means business. In Vista a lot of the features and functions were designed to make life better and easier for the admins, in Windows 7 they’re all about making things easier and more productive for the end user. Gone is the annoying sidebar (although you can still have gadgets floating freely anywhere on your desktop). Services that only start when needed really help the experience immediately after logon as you can start working straight away. The new action centre means you aren’t continually bugged by annoying pop ups all the time. The annoying UAC prompts can now be controlled granularly to allow much less interference. Aero Snap and Aero Shake are 2 cool features which at first seem quirky but are really quite useful once you get used to them.

There’s a whole load of other features I haven’t covered here but Richard has lots more detail on the event and some pics he took  you can view over on Flickr.