The Sikh Geek

Yesterday was the first conference call of the FY09 PALs and Andrea had arranged for Scott Whitright, Senior Product Manager, Windows Server Business Group to have a discussion on Infrastructure Optimisation. Now, I know nothing about IO which is one of those "scary" Microsoft Terms. I believe it is something used for larger customers or that was the impression I got from some of the other PALs who had experience of it. It is based around three models which are :-

• Application Platform Optimisation Model
• Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimisation Model
• Core Infrastructure Optimisation Model

Scott was interested in knowing if IO could be applied to SMB and in what form it might make sense. Do you have experience of this model? What do you think?

One of the things within Small Businesses who have had SBS 2003 installed, is ensuring that the customer is making the full use of the assets they have paid for. This is often not achieved because SBSC Partners are not skilled up on things like Sharepoint and SQL Server 2005, so do not feel comfortable in supporting customers on it. At the end of the day these are complex products all thrown into a single solution and being an expert in all these products individually is not humanly possible. This is only going to get more difficult with SBS 2008 and EBS 2008.

I know the point was made that SBS/EBS 2008 has made the deployment even simpler and maybe too simple! My belief is that deployment should be simple and quick because the whole point is to have the infrastructure in place so that customers can start benefiting. The concentration of effort should then be on helping the customer to make effective use of the technology, looking at the business processes, looking at the business data and seeing what value the business can extract from the technology. However, that is probably a different set of Partner skills and probably a different set of Small Businesses than we’re used to. I don’t know? So, maybe the focus should be on upskilling Partners?

That sort of nicely leads on to the discussion we had about the Online Peer Groups. Mark Crall and Brad Kowerchuk were able to give their insight into the HTG Groups and the value they see from them.

One thing I cannot fault Microsoft are the intentions to try and provide SBSC Partners a mixture of business and technical training and support.