Entering the Microsoft Online Zone – A personal experience – Day 1
Today was a landmark event for me as I entered the world of Microsoft Online Services as a customer, www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx.
My reasons being that I often collaborate with third party organizations as part of my role. I wanted a forum we could all share and use for our common purpose.
My base need was to share documentation with 40 people, which is above the 5 seat minimum, but like any techno geek (my wife has less pleasant terms for this) I was like a kid in a candy store and took the lot when presented with the various software options (and actually could for see a use for them). My ticking clock here is the Project Conference in 2 weeks, where I want to share content with a select group of partners.
The “lot” in this case was the BPOS offering, BPOS stand for Business Productivity Online Suite and includes the following :-
The purchase experience took us no more than 3 mins. We needed to supply our own chosen domain name, whether current or specific for purpose and credit card information. There was a purchase order route for those who wanted that option, but in this case I was acting like any other hungry consumer. Give it to me now baby!
The other option was to nominate a “partner of record”, now being responsible for Partners in the Project business this put me into a quandary as I could only nominate one. The purpose of this section is to recognize partners who sell online services to mutual benefit, see https://partner.microsoft.com/global/productssolutions/productsonlineservices and sign up and certify. This recognition currently runs from initial customer signup and renewal.
As part of the transaction my budget and I were pleasantly surprised and pleased to benefit from a discount. See the calculator that produces an estimated cost www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx which was the foundation for my original estimate.
Transaction completed, the massive investment in data centre will fallback and high availability kicks in as my newly created domain/sites are scripted in. Now I cant sit down with my watch to see how long the deploy takes as I need to help delivering a first class Project Conference experience. I will blog about the Online experience in the future.
Tomorrow logging on and seeing whats, what…
Call to action:
- Get familiar with this great customer service by exploiting your partner benefits which give you access to these services, https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40086373
- Certify as an Online Services partner to share in the business, https://partner.microsoft.com/global/productssolutions/productsonlineservices
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