Whilst there's a lot of the information that we discussed that I'm not at liberty to discuss outside, there is a lot of agreement between the SBSC PALs on a lot of topics.
It seems that Australia is not the only region with an apathetic SBSC community. After I posted, reposted and even blogged my call for input from the Australian SBSCs and received a whole 13 emails from around 500 SBSCs, I figured I was fighting an uphill battle moreso with our apathetic community than against Microsoft. It is a real shame to have a community so apathetic that I am trying to support and move forward to develop a better SBSC program with, however it is good to know that I am not the only one with such an SBSC community.
We also all agreed that even though Groove was nice in theory, it was close to unusable in practice due to its "Windows 3.1" look and feel. This is a product that will be good in a few revisions, or maybe once the MS Office team gets a chance to look at it.
We all agreed that Microsoft Licensing is a mess and needs to be cleaned up a lot so that it is understandable by the SBSCs and other MS Partners worldwide.
We all expressed our disappointment at Microsoft total departure from the security/gateway/firewall area in the SMB world. Not that I personally agreed (ever) that ISA on SBS was a good idea *unless* you had proper gateway firewall in front of it, but Microsoft's total vacating this area is somewhat of a concern.
There was discussion about Microsoft's lack of support for products such as Response Point and Office Accounting in non-US markets. We'll see what happens.
Aside from that, it was good to meet the other 2008-09 PALs and just talk about issues and see that we have so many similarities in our own thoughts about the SBSC program and with our own regions in general. There's definitely differences in all of our approaches, ideas and regions as well, which is great. Knowing that these PALs are here to support each other as well as to support the SBSC program is a very encouraging thing.
Regards,
The Outspoken Wookie
1 comment:
I think that Microsoft has a hard enough task simply sorting out pricing, much less anything else.
Be good to hear back from those "looking into pricing".
It must be pretty hard to set pricing at 1:99.98 (+/- %age for predicted exchange rate fluctuations).
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