One of the recent heated discussions has been around the services that Microsoft has started to offer to consumers and small businesses.

Last night at the Thames Valley Partner Group I was asked in Microsoft was going to start servicing customers directly.  This was then followed by Matt's presentation (http://www.axxis.com) on SLAs and much discussion was had about how people do/don't want to deal with those "how do I format my Excel spreadsheet" type questions.

So I thought I would highlight the services Microsoft offers, for both consumers and small businesses, but we are hardly alone in this and I think it ties up to Vlad's post at http://www.vladville.com/2006/04/your-potentialour-passion-they-took-r.html.  The world is constantly changing, online services are being offered by many people and Microsoft is working to see how new partner can benefit and existing parnters can take advantage of them.

So let's look at the services:

SB+ / One Care - information about this can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/uk/businesscentral/small-business-plus/default.aspx?xid=sbp_bc_btn and the pricing is detailed https://www.microsoft.com/uk/businesscentral/small-business-plus/about-small-business-helpdesk-loggedin.htm.

This is often just sorting out stuff that can be found on MS web sites, but can be hard to find.  This is often the type of work that most partners do not enjoy doing, or is often not profitable.

This is discussed on the SBSBPI web site http://www.sbsbpi.co.uk/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=115&highlight=onecare with people generally coming out positive, plus we are looking at how to make it even MORE partner friendly.

We do have other services coming, such as http://www.officelive.com and http://ideas.live.com, however these are not finished products yet, so are either free, or will be advertising funded in the future.  This will include services like hosting, Instant Messaging, e-mail etc.  Many of these we have offered for a while already, or other competitors have come into the market meaning that the dynamics have changed already.

What we are doing is looking how we tie these together, so we are currently looking at how SBS fits with these products as well as CRM, BCM, Office and Windows.  Sometimes we don't get it all right on day 1, but our aim is still for a lively and very profitable partner eco-system.

As always, let me know your thoughts via the comments or forums.

ttfn

David