If you were at any of the Microsoft partner events in the last couple of years,  you would know that  Microsoft has been in the process of revamping the Microsoft Partner Program and its ecosystem.  The changes officially started this past July when they renamed the Microsoft Partner Program to Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), partly in line with their effort to reflect and re-emphasize their reliance on the partner network.   They also announced the new partner program requirements, and the revision of the competencies sets.

As far as the requirements, Microsoft is asking that in order to maintain the competency status current:

• Be an active member of the Microsoft Partner Network;
• Meet the appropriate individual or software certification requirements per competency;
• Meet the minimum sales bar as appropriate; and
• Submit at least 3 customer references of recent (12-months) completed work performed per competency

For the new competency rollout and the mapping to the old ones, as of this writing,  only 3 out of the 29 competencies announced  have been rolled out.  Desktop Platform, Virtualization,  Server Management and Systems Management.

The complete list (along with estimated launch dates)  follows:

Useful article related links:

• Microsoft Partner Network Site
• Competency Matching Tool

We are often asked what is Windows Azure, and how does it help the business. 

Explaining what an application hosting platform is, and how it can help it is not as simple as it sounds… Microsoft Azure is an application hosting environment rather than a server-based like Amazon’s AWS environment.

• Azure is a service that allows you to upload an application and run it.
• Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)  is a service that allows you to rent one or more virtual machines running Linux/Windows or some other operating system .
• Both services charge based on usage parameters like CPU usage, number of requests, data transferred, and other variables. (consider and understand these carefully)
• Both services provide "behind the scene” reliability, scalability and capacity, so you do not have to worry about it

In doing some of the research, I came across a nice presentation  made by Steve Marx, which I had  to share with all.

I went to Steve’s blog:  http://blog.smarx.com   and found it to be a wealth of very relevant information on the Azure topic.     Thanks Steve! – We have marked your blog as one to follow.

As many of you already know, we have been  strong proponent of cloud-based services for a very long time…   The idea of  maintaining an expensive and complex in-house infrastructure to support basic IT services  is steadily shifting away from mainstream business. Adoption of cloud-based services continues to climb steadily.

However, a recent  article on the Dec’09/Jan’10 Fortune Small Business magazine titled “Control the Cloud“, provided an excellent example that “one-platform” does not fit all.

The FBS article describes a company, which provides a specific set of application services for its customers, whose requirements were not met by cloud-computing.     They reconsidered their implementation, brought it back in-house,  this time they used server virtualization to minimize  the number of physical servers which resulted in significant cost reduction including space, power and air.

Although, in the end, not a less expensive solution than cloud-based computing,  it did meet the requirements and goals, at significant costs reductions than their previous hardware based implementations.

Let us know what you think! – If you have a story to share, send it our way!

A very interesting video on the hardware architecture behind cloud computing was posted yesterday on Microsoft’s Channel9 site…  The walk-though is presented by Patrick Yantz, a Cloud Architect with Microsoft’s Data Center Services Team at PDC09.

Self contained 40-foot containers (yes the kind you see on the road)  are used to store 1000’s of motherboards and equipment that is used to drive the cloud…   Pretty Cool!

Link to  Channel9 Story   or directly to video here

As my esteemed colleague Jorge points out, it has been a busy summer (and now autumn) for us on this team, and as such, our posting frequency has not been, shall we say, “optimized.”

I’ve been on the road a bit, and speaking at a number of Windows 7 Launch events, where I get the opportunity to speak to groups of IT Pros on the features and benefits of Windows 7. That, in itself, should be cause enough to celebrate my good fortune. But, because I’m a creature of habit, I cannot let these opportunities go by without extolling the virtues of my favorite topic: optimization.

And let me begin (again) by saying the reaction to the enterprise features of Win 7 is overwhelmingly positive. I can’t remember the last time I felt such a crackle in the air (or saw so many full houses!) over an operating system. But once the shine of the OS that will displace XP and bring us all to a fighting stance with those increasingly strident (and – some would argue – inaccurate) commercials coming out of Cupertino is absorbed, we get the chance to get down to brass tacks: what will this do for me, my department, and my company?

The answer, it would seem, is at once simple, and rather complex. Folks in the IT world are facing tough challenges today. The usual ones: shrinking budgets, constrained resources, fewer headcount, etc. But also a host of new ones: XP’s looming end-of-life, virtualization opportunities – there to be missed, and new modes of delivering data and services to end users – both on premise and in the cloud.

IT Pros are sizing up Windows 7 and wondering if it is time to approach their management (or, more likely these days, their CFO) with the proposition that it’s time to bring the workforce into the 21st century. Microsoft touts this, with the broad brush of marketing, as “The New Efficiency” and is poised for a barrage of new releases that threatens to make our jobs easier (or at least destroy those few places of refuge where we don’t do any work .

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are just the beginning, and the IO folks among us know that these great releases are simply a foundation, and that one must, as a forward-thinking, new-world-of-work adherent consider the benefits of unifying their communication, virtualizing their workloads, and creating a user-centric infrastructure of people-focused data and services, while at the same time perpetually seeking ways to lower costs and improve efficiency not only in the workforce, but among IT staffers.

You’ve seen through my ruse, naturally, and will immediately identify my larger project – one that I put forth at my speaking engagements. The Microsoft stack offers a ton of “synergetic value” (take that, search engines) in the simple act of combining products that work well together and evoke new paradigms for how we work. I promise you: I”m not just a shill for Redmond. I’m a believer – I’ve seen the benefits of zero-touch image deployments of Windows 7 that leverage the easy application delivery that App-V provides. I’ve seen the look of relief on the faces of administrators who feared SMS, but now love SCCM. IT leaders love the word “free” and as such, are starting to realize that a hypervisor is a hypervisor, but a free hypervisor is good business. The list goes on.

So what does this all have to do with my Win 7 Launch engagements? A lot, actually. I wrote earlier that IT Pros are excited about Win 7, but that once that excitement dies down, they want to get into some pretty deep technical discussions about how to deploy it, how to leverage MDOP, and how to watch it all carefully with System Center.

A quick show of hands at these events – something that surprised me – was that 90% of the folks in attendance were already running some version of Win 7, and many were actively experimenting with Office 2010. These folks came not to hear about how great 7 is, but to hear best practices for making it freaking HAPPEN at their company.

That’s when my excitement stirs. I can get past the PowerPoint and Pastries part of the day, and get my hands on the whiteboard, where I can draw a vision of the future NOW.

And that’s why I get up in the morning, put on pants I don’t really like, heft my two laptops onto a plane, and stand in front of my colleagues and speak. Almost nothing makes me as happy as watching a room full of smart folks stop working on their laptops and start asking the more difficult, off-slide questions.

I hope I’ll see you out there, and that our conversations prevent me from ever getting to that last slide.

Microsoft announced that is cutting the price of  its BPOS services today

• Exchange Online from $10 per user per month to $5 per user per month.
• BPOS bundle — Online: Exchange, SharePoint, Communications and Live Meeting — from $15 per user per month, to $10 per user per month

This is a 30% price drop and is fantastic news for the sales proposition of BPOS.

As we have mentioned in the past, many organizations are now moving from on-premises to a hosted solution (cloud computing).   One of the greatest values out there (for what it contains) is Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) –    We expect to have many, many customers to continue to migrate into this platform.

With a  set of migrations under our belt,  we can talk about  some tools  that are available out there to help in this task.

• Microsoft BPOS provides good tools for the migration from on-premise Exchange , POP3 and Active Directory synchronization. 
• http://www.migrationwiz.com/public/default.aspx
  • MigrationWiz will currently migrate any internet accessible mailbox via IMAP and POP to Exchange Online
  • (Have not tried it, but we hear it is pretty  good)
•  www.quest.com/bpos/
  • Free pre-migration test tools (free)
  • Migrating from Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise to Exchange Online
  • Migrating from Lotus Notes  Apps to and SharePoint Online

Before you proceed with the migration of email, consider what you want to migrate into the new environment, and how automated you want this process to be.

We will update this as new tools come up. Let us know of your experiences with these and others…

As part of the Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk – Test Drive Program, a   pre-configured VHD  that enables you evaluate Microsoft Windows 7 for 90-days was released yesterday.

What is notable is that this VHD requires Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, or the R2 to use this virtual machine, because it is the 64-bit version of the product.  When will we have the 64-bit version of Virtal  PC ?

You can download at Microsoft’s download site

Wow – It is hard to believe how fast the summer came and went.

As you can probably gather from the frequency of posts, it was a very busy time for all of us at the InfraOps team.  Busy working with clients and getting to know updated technologies.   Lots of activity, including  some much needed summer breaks.

Anyhow, our commitment to continued postings  is renewed – Thanks to all for the ping!  – Stay tuned!

Some of us have been using it already, but just in case you did not know, MAP 4.0 is now officially released.

As you would expect,most of the changes are around Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, but there is much more.   Definitelly a good upgrade!   According to the official release, key new features include:

• Windows 7 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V R2 Server Consolidation
• Integration with the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator
• Inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests
• User Interface and Proposal Customization for Partner co-branding
• Enhanced SQL Instance Discovery
• Enhanced Usability and Improved Inventory Performance

Additional Features

• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V Server Consolidation
• Windows Vista Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• 2007 Microsoft Office Readiness Assessment
• SQL Server Instance Discovery
• Desktop Security Assessment for Anti-virus and Anti-malware Programs Installation
• Forefront Client Security/NAP Readiness Assessment
• App-V Infrastructure Readiness Assessment
• Power Savings “Green IT” Proposal

Download here.  More info at: MAP Toolkit