Yesterday evening I went up to the SBS Manchester Group meeting to talk about some of the discussions that were had at WPC as part of the PALs Meeting. It was a very interesting discussion around a number of topics. For me it was interesting to hear what value people see in the SBSC Programme. It got me thinking and I realised that there are two separate things at play here which are :-
- SBSC Certification/Programme Benefits
- Community Membership and Peer-to-Peer Networking
I guess you can have the second without having the first and the question is which is the more valuable?
I have no doubt that business growth and personal development comes from the second and for people to see real value in SBSC then the two have to be more closely tied in together. By this I mean if you obtain SBSC then you should be getting into an exclusive for SBSC only Peer-to-Peer Networking Group.
There was a discussion around the SBS/EBS Launch Plans by Gareth Hall, the Microsoft Windows Server Product Manager, and what this might look like. I’m not going to give you the details because you need to get to your local SBS Group and listen to Gareth yourselves on one of his visits to the Groups. Suffice to say I really like his thinking and we certainly need to think out of the box and ultimately it must mean more SBSC Partners go out and talk to more Customers and to sell more (for Microsoft that means more licenses and for us as Partners it means getting more service revenue).
Emily Lambert, the Microsoft SBSC Programme Lead, was there to talk about some of things happening around SBSC and how she is taking feedback onboard and then eventually planning to try and start to address some of the issues.
There is a great bunch of people there at Manchester SBS Group and great that the North West is one the areas that Microsoft is implementing a Regional Approach. There is a new North West Microsoft Small Business website which I think is a fantastic idea and if you can get some Case Studies from local Partner then it will be a great resource.
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August 25th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Hi Vijay, good to meet you up at the Manchester meeting. From what we heard from Gareth and Emily sounds like an interesting couple of months ahead. Should hopefully bring some new partners and new customers in too.
Thanks for your input, always interested to hear what’s happening elsewhere in the world - Leicester included
Mike.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:13 am
[...] his experiences at WPC and updates from a PAL perspective on the SBSC programme. Go here to see his blog post regarding the evening’s meeting. For those who are yet to meet Vijay, he is a very active UK PAL [...]