Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Mike Mars of TS2 talked about the changes to the Microsoft Partner program: Microsoft Announces New Partner Enhancements! As you can see below, these are the most significant enhancements to the program since its inception approximately 18 months ago.

What does this actually mean for a lot of us? More ways to reach a competency, more ways to promote your business by showing all the areas you have experience with (remember, 3 happy customers in each competency area willing to fill out a survey and answer a call from Microsoft == Competency). If you’re not excited about the talk of competencies because you do not want to deal with employees: Have you earned your Microsoft Small Busiess Specialist certification?

Microsoft Announces New Partner Enhancements!

The Microsoft Partner Program is rolling out new program enhancements to help you extend your market reach, increase operational efficiency, and realize maximum business potential.
This announcement represents the most significant enhancements to the program since its inception approximately 18 months ago. Many of the new benefits are available today, and the rest will become available early this fall. In addition, we’ve centralized processes, expanded into global support, added four new Microsoft Competencies, streamlined and simplified the Partner Points model, and made many all-around enhancements to the tools and infrastructure to make it easier to do business. Download the complete announcement for additional details.

Turn Expertise into Opportunity: Achieve a Competency
Achieving a Microsoft Competency enables you to promote your expertise and differentiate your organization from the competition. Attaining a competency provides access to additional benefits and value-added resources to help drive business results.

Save Up to 30% on Microsoft Certification Exams Worldwide
To help Gold Certified and Certified Partners become qualified to attain Microsoft Competencies, Microsoft is offering certification exam savings on Partner Competency Exams (PCEs) and Microsoft Business Solutions and Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) exams for a limited time. Learn more.

Overview of What’s New
We’ve centralized processes, expanded into global support, added four new Microsoft Competencies, streamlined and simplified the Partner Points model, and made many all-around enhancements to the tools and infrastructure. The following are highlights of what is new.

Four New Competencies
* Custom Development Solutions Competency
* Licensing Solutions Competency
* Mobility Solutions Competency
* OEM Hardware Solutions Competency

Changes to Existing Competencies
* The Business Intelligence Competency will be renamed Data Management Solutions with Database Management and Business Intelligence as the underlying specializations
* The Integrated E-Business Solutions Competency will be renamed Business Process and Integration

New Opportunities for Small Business
* The Small Business Specialist designation
* The Microsoft Professional Accountants’ Network (U.S. Only)

Improved Membership Management
* Partner Membership Center
* Simplified navigation, unified anniversary dates, and points expiration
* Streamlined enrollment and renewal process
* Automatic enrollment into competencies (if requirements are met)
* New support for global businesses

New Ways to Earn Partner Points
* Software License sales
* Small Business Specialist designation
* Pool Partner Points across multiple locations

So I was in Miami yesterday doing the usual partner breakfast and we started chatting about blogs and the recent sale of Websonic to AOL and the conversation took a turn to trying to make money of the blogs, especially Natasha’s idea to cash in on the Microsoft community blogs. I personally don’t believe in that at all, but yesterday gave me some extra ammo to fight the blog “gold-rush”.

Why do you blog?

So why do we blog? In my case, it is to spread information. I work with a ton of partners and running a mailing list is just not an option at all. I don’t post anything here that I would not be comfortable sending in an email. It is also my resource directory – I’m at pretty much every Microsoft roadshow in Florida and every time we break I get surrounded by a dozen people with questions. Ordinarily, this involves handing out links and spouting off names – now I can point them here. Why? Because when you spend some time frustrating yourself with a problem and you find the solution – you want to share it. And two months later, when you forget how you solved it in the first place there is a place for you to find the step-by-step. It works, it keeps me happy and it keeps people reading this blog happy.

How do you cash in on it?

Truth of the matter is – you don’t. This is not a business, a PR division of Vlad Mazek, or a marketing outreach. It’s just my blog. Like a tech web page. As you’re reading this (and re-reading, wtf is he trying to say? God damn illiterate people on the Internet) you realize fairly quickly that I’m not a journalist. If I wanted to pretend to be a newspaper I would at the very least spell check some of this.

Anyhow, this one is a bit personal: don’t expect to make money with blogs. Just yesterday I got an email from a fellow SBSer that I was helping on the list. Here was his email:

Say, Vlad … any chance you can match (insert competition here) price of unlimited SharePoint users and 500 MB of storage for $20 / month?

I certainly appreciate all you do for the SBS community, but business is business … 8^)

Ouch. So he appreciates all the free help, but won’t shell out the few extra bucks to get the kind of support he knows I already am capable of providing. Why should he? Save a few bucks by going with the cheaper technical solution, then ping Vlad for free help. How would you respond? Here is my response:

First of all thank you for your kind words and bringing this to me.

Unfortunately, no, I can’t beat bottom-dollar hosting; it is not the kind of service we are out here to provide. I understand that business is business and I understand you have to go with whoever provides the best deal.

Again, thanks for giving me a chance on this one, I appreciate it. Best of luck with our competition.

Never hurts to be polite. He sends me a followup email and I reply trying explain to him how the licensing works, what the difference is, which questions he needs to ask to figure out the “apples and oranges” argument – how to you backup, which antivirus software do you use, how many domain controllers for each domain, what are machine specs, how many users are on them, how much are “extras” and who answers my support questions… But here is the interesting thing – two emails in the thread later, he sends me two more technical SharePoint questions. Now this is an IT consultant, mind you, that earns money by providing advice. But he expects me to give it to him for free.

Now, would you be willing to help? I mean, if you were in this blogging and community thing solely for the commercial purposes, you would tell this guy to go.. well, I’ll leave the creative writing aspect to someone else.

Point is: You cannot objectively be willing to help people if all you are doing is trying to make $$$ out of it. I get questions from people asking “Should I blog, what should I write about, how do I get involved” and there is really no clear answer to that other than “Because you want to.” If you don’t want to help people, questions like “My Exchange Information Store stopped. Whats wrong” will make you jump out the window. You blog because you think you have something insightful to say.

You participate in the community because you care about the community. You answer questions because you have the answers and you know that if you have the answer and are willing to share it, when your question comes up there will be someone out there to answer it too.

Consider this your 24 hour notice if you’d like to participate in the SBS podcast tomorrow. To ask questions send email to sbspod at microsoft.com, or leave voicemail at 206-984-0184.

We’re once again going live this Friday. Inside SBS episode 4 will begin recording at 11:00 CST and we will again be fielding email, calls, voicemail – you name it, if it is related to SBS, we’ll discuss it. The more the merrier!

Phone number for the live call-in portion of the podcast:
(866) 500-6738
Use participant code: 8612341 (changes weekly)

Now if that doesn’t float your boat, our fellow SBSer Eriq Neale is going to do a radio show. Courtesy of Susan Bradley:

Eriq Neale is doing a radio show! Cool! eOnCall will air at 10am Central time today on Apostle Internet Radio ( http://www.apostleradio.org ). Later this evening, the show will be available for download from the show site ( http://www.eoncall.com ) if you were not able to listen during the broadcast.

Update: To all of you that freaked out about Vladville disappearing today, don’t worry, its still alive. Apparently Blogger crashed early this morning and the comments that were posted simply uploaded an empty index file. My sincerest apologies to those affected by the Vladville outage this morning, your refund checks are in the mail!

Consider this your 24 hour notice if you’d like to participate in the SBS podcast tomorrow. To ask questions send email to sbspod at microsoft.com, or leave voicemail at 206-984-0184.

We’re once again going live this Friday. Inside SBS episode 4 will begin recording at 11:00 CST and we will again be fielding email, calls, voicemail – you name it, if it is related to SBS, we’ll discuss it. The more the merrier!

Phone number for the live call-in portion of the podcast:
(866) 500-6738
Use participant code: 8612341 (changes weekly)

Now if that doesn’t float your boat, our fellow SBSer Eriq Neale is going to do a radio show. Courtesy of Susan Bradley:

Eriq Neale is doing a radio show! Cool! eOnCall will air at 10am Central time today on Apostle Internet Radio ( http://www.apostleradio.org ). Later this evening, the show will be available for download from the show site ( http://www.eoncall.com ) if you were not able to listen during the broadcast.

Update: To all of you that freaked out about Vladville disappearing today, don’t worry, its still alive. Apparently Blogger crashed early this morning and the comments that were posted simply uploaded an empty index file. My sincerest apologies to those affected by the Vladville outage this morning, your refund checks are in the mail!

Fast Company published the second annual “Customers First Award” and well.. misleading. According to their nomination process, they were looking for “freshness” so that automatically disqualified Jet Blue… and allowed Best Buy to get on which kind of nullifies the entire listing. This is the company that started putting together a “blacklist” of customers not to deal with because they were taking advantage of too many mailin rebates. This is the company that filed lawsuits against their customers when they complained in public forums. They get a “Customers First Award” whose tagline states: “the folks who really know what it takes to keep customers happy–and coming back.”

Customers First Awards for 2005:
1. Netflix
2. Panera Bread
3. Talbots
4. Cabela’s
5. W Hotels
6. Intuit
7. Build-A-Bear
8. Craigslist
9. Travelocity
10. Kiehl’s
11. Virgin Atlantic
12. Best Buy
13. USAA
14. Zappos
15. Whole Foods Market

Skype is the biggest VoIP service around, now owned by eBay, and its particularly popular overseas. They even use it on their PocketPC when they are nearby wi-fi hotspot so they can save their minutes. In the Vonage-land that is USA, Skype is the soft phone, anotherwords, people use it to make free PC-to-PC calls from their computer. I’ve received a few calls from it and I honestly could not tell the difference, you can even pick up a Skype headset at Office Depot.

Anyhow, Linksys is entering this Skype market with the CIT200: hands-free wireless handset. They are calling it “Cordless Internet Telephony Kit” to justify the $130.00 hit to your pocket (which in my humble opinion is almost criminal) for something that would otherwise cost $8 at Walgreens. On the bright side, it will save you quite a bit of money if you’re making international phone calls.

Congratulations to Dave and James on their new baby, the Palm Beach IT SBS group. If you’re in Palm Beach area and work in IT, this is the place to hang out at. Not only because you can get the content you can’t see anywhere else, but even if you’re gainfully employed one day that situation may change… now where, oh where, can you ask if someone is hiring? 😉 Fellow geeks, we gotta network. It is not just for sales people and marketing weasels.

There were 9 (new) members in attendance. As the first meeting the discussion revolved around the direction this group would take in future meetings, and what has been put in place to get this group kicked off tonight. David O’Keefe has designed a website for the group and can be found at www.palmbeachit.com for upcoming information and to sign up to become a member of the group, David has also set up an account with google & yahoo to post messages/email to each other. You can find a link to join on the website www.palmbeachit.com

It seems that everyone in the antivirus game seems to be spending more money on partnering and marketing in the last few days. I wonder if that Microsoft Antigen shot across the bow had anything to do with it. Hmm. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but Symantec has launched a Small Business Security certification, which J.W. Locke of SMBTN feels is a nice complement to the Microsoft Small Business Specialist certification. Here are some of the benefits:

Key benefits of the program include:
* Official certificate and special business card logo to highlight and promote your certification
* Opportunities to build your business and increase sales revenues via program referrals
* Free self-paced technical training
* A variety of co-marketing opportunities
* Ongoing communications and news from Symantec for certified professionals

Jim points to a PDF and a book that can help you get this certification. Check out Jim’s blog btw, lots of useful reseller information.

If you can’t beat them, unite. Microsoft MSN Instant Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger networks are joining together to fight AOL and the new threat from Google (I don’t think anybody considering it a threat has actually tried to use it, but thats a different topic).

SEATTLE, Oct 11 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) are preparing to link together their free instant messaging services as they take on entrenched messaging leader AOL and market newcomer Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , a source close to the companies said on Tuesday.

The deal, the first major alliance between two of the Web’s main providers of instant messaging, will allow users of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger service and Yahoo Messenger to swap instantaneous text messages with each other.

If you can’t beat them, unite. Microsoft MSN Instant Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger networks are joining together to fight AOL and the new threat from Google (I don’t think anybody considering it a threat has actually tried to use it, but thats a different topic).

SEATTLE, Oct 11 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) are preparing to link together their free instant messaging services as they take on entrenched messaging leader AOL and market newcomer Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , a source close to the companies said on Tuesday.

The deal, the first major alliance between two of the Web’s main providers of instant messaging, will allow users of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger service and Yahoo Messenger to swap instantaneous text messages with each other.