The Sikh Geek

At the recent ISV Event that I attended down at Microsoft there was mention of Microsoft’s Online Services and the recent announcement around them and when asked who had heard about it, then about a couple of hands went up in a room full of ISV Partners! Microsoft is really doing a great job in getting this information out to ISV Partners to create solutions around them. It’s probably just as well because if you are a UK Partner you can’t get on any of the Early Access stuff like CRM Live (US and Canada only) or Sharepoint. At the event it was said that a Datacentre in Ireland was beng built so that services could be delivered to Europe sometime in 2009! So, Microsoft is telling us this is a really important change coming get on board, but we won’t/can’t tell you what the Partner model is nor can we let you actually access the services to see how they might benefit your customers. I think the truth is that Microsoft doesn’t really know.

Apart from David Overton, I haven’t seen anyone from Microsoft actually give a Partner vision apart from saying "It’s really good and really important and of course we want to work with Partners"!

I think this Register article has it about right that Microsoft is actually quite cautious about all this.

To be honest I had never heard of this until the recent Kaseya meeting at our SBS Group. It sounded pretty cool and actually very useful. It is the ability of the latest Kaseya offerings to monitor and control machines which have the Intel vPro Technology regardless of power state and regardless of the Operating System. Don’t ask me how it does it, for all I know it’s done by telepathy or something

Read the Kaseya Press Release and the Intel Overview of this "Voodoo" technology.

It’s not often you can feel like you are really contributing to something or supporting something that is changing people’s life for the better. But this story about one of my clients, Leicestershire Cares, which is a Charity highlights the great work they are doing.

Read the story at the online version of the Leicester Mercury about one of the successes of the Flying Fish Project, run by Parminder Basra.

I came across this a while back and meant to blog it. Microsoft has a set of Resources on the Partner Portal for Managed Services which includes such things as the Managed Services Handbook which is described as a set of guidances for how to develop, market and sell a Managed Services offering to your customers. They have presentations for to help customers understand the value of your Managed Services offerings. There’s a load of templates to use as well. It’s amazing what you find on the Portal sometimes!

Girish has some info on his blog that the SBS EMEA Team have started producing a SBS Newsletter which highlights issues the Support Team are seeing. I think this a great resource and credit must go to that Team for taking the initiative.

Go subscribe now!

Yes, it’s true Richard Tubb has switched to using Linux and is loving it, you can read all about his new love affair with the Asus Eee running Xandros Linux. As he promised in his blog post he bought it to tonight’s AMITPRO Meeting. He was heard tonight discussing switching to an entirely Open Source business model. We had to rip his Blue Badge from his shirt sleeve. I believe there will be high level meetings convened in the morning at Microsoft to discuss this defection. The shock waves will ripple through the IT industry for a long time to come and I’m expecting it to be picked up by The Register.

… actually, you know I’m joking but he was loving his "baby" and I’ve not seen him that excited since a certain night in Reading!!!

I’ve just got back from Florida from a 2 week break there with the family. I like the US for a number of reasons and one them is that it just one big melting pot of people and cultures. I know that the UK is fairly diverse but almost everyone you meet and talk to is from "somewhere" in the US.  I know people often say that America has no culture but to me it has a thousand different cultures and you can hear it in the different languages you hear spoken. It’s funny how a Nation built almost entirely on immigration can have any sense of coherence and any ideals that can bind people together. But it does and people are proud to be Americans in a way we as Britains wouldn’t show or be embarrassed by.

It is the ultimate consumer society but reading the USA Today Newspaper and it was full of the impending economic crisis. The most trusted Institutions seem to be unravelling overnight with the US’s 5th largest bank Bear Stearns being bought by JP Morgan in a rushed 11th hour deal. The analysis was that if Bear Stearns was allowed to go into Administration then it would have caused chaos in the entire Financial System with it being uncertain as to where it would end - a kind of chain reaction! Isn’t kind of funny that as Small Businesses people accuse us of ignoring our cashflow and debt and yet somehow this gets ignored for these huge institutions where there it is called Risk Management or a High Growth Strategy!

But after all that the US is a pretty complex place and so different from coast to coast. The other unique thing is that at the moment you have a woman and a black guy fighting it out for the Democratic nomination to become President. It’s very interesting to me because it shows that race doesn’t necessarily have to be a barrier in the US. Here in the UK, I couldn’t even imagine a black person becoming Prime Minister within my lifetime. So, which is the more Cohesive society?