I got the:
"Ready for a new day" Launch Sales toolkit for all U.S. Partners
in the mail yesterday. While this is all marketing fluff type stuff it's a good disk to review and does have some good information for those of us looking to sell Office 2007, Vista, Exchange 2007. Specifically there is a doc that outlines the differences between the versions of Office as well as the differences in versions of Vista. I have not gotten all the way through it, but we should all probably be familiar with it's content by the time products start hitting PC's.
Also fromt he Office Website...you (your customers) can try before you buy...
http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?assetid=HA101741481033&Origin=HH102112001033
Try the Microsoft Office system now
Experience the 2007 Microsoft Office system online
Discover how simple it is to get the 2007 release for keeps
the three links above are all accessable from that first one and I plan to have select clients start out here before we rush out and buy.
One client has taken the plunge for the Company-Wide open Value Lic specifically for the upgrade path and rights available through Software Assurance...
check out the Small Business Desktop Platform SKU if you have not already at Microsoft Incentives...
https://www.microsoftincentives.com/#44
Bill Watters, MCP
Annabel Watters, PC
214.732.6377
bwatters@watters-cpa.com
In case you have not heard, there's a megaton bomb coming very soon...Microsoft's next wave of desktop and office technologies are pending releases. Yes, yes, yes Vista is in there with it's 7 or is it 9 flavors. I know, I know there's an upgraded Office suite or 7 in there as well. What has gone relatively quietly through development and testing and now release is one of the backbones for modern businesses. Yes that's right Exchange 2007 has been released. According to at least one blog about the release, it's been in use internally for quite a while and with selected partners and early adopters to the tune of roughly 300,000 mailboxes, or something like that. Pretty cool, so it's in production and people are using it. What I don't hear alot about though is the troubles. Could it be that this thing is as stable and reliable as people expect from a core business function like e-mail? Well from what I understand, Yes. in fact when speaking to people who have been on Exchange 2007 for any length of time, the one thing they say to me is that it works, it's just there. When they were migrated some knew it, but most did not. It just happened and a couple of days later they realized that something was different or in many cases did not realize it all. Sure Exchange 2007 has some cool new featues, including unified messaging, with the right infrastructure, better integration with the office stack, etc. The best feature of all is that it works, from day one. There's no fiddling around, there's no, "oh email will be down for a couple of hours today." I think that's what people want, that's what people need from their email.
Another thing that is out in the ether, about to be released...MOSS. and this stuff does not grow on the north side of trees and rocks. Rather, this is Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. Sharepoint has had several itterations, and comes in a stripped down form called Windows Sharepoint Services. If you don't know about Sharepoint and you are a Microsoft Partner, get out from that MOSS covered rock!!! If you are an end-user and don't know about Sharepoint, WHY NOT!!! THIS STUFF IS HOT!!! WSS 2.0 and Sharepoint 2003 were very good platforms for sharing information. But MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are really the foundation for the next generation Office. Workflow, shareing of loose and structured data, web-enabling your workforce, mobile-enabling your workforce, now sharepoint is the hub of EVERYTHING for the information worker. And the best part is it's easy. Again just do it. And the fun part is when it is part of the Stack, it's unbelievable. As a techie, I get to see stuff from all sorts of hardware and software vendors. The thing I can't get past is how much product development and release is about the technology, for technology's sake. But Microsoft's People-Ready software really and truely is about making digital-work easier. It really is about making information workers more productive. Yes you have to drink the kool-aid, but believe me, I am seeing it happen everyday.
A couple of weeks ago, I put in a Small Business Server 2003 R2 for a client. When talking to one of the people over there, I started showing her Companyweb...BANG! Unfortunatly her machine is still Windows 2000 with Office 2000. I took her over to another machine that has Windows XP and Office 2003...BOOM! when I showed her some of that functionality, what they could be doing with it...her eyes bulged and now they are on track for the Small Business Desktop. When they get that, they can get Vista and Office 2007. We may even put in a full MOSS or at least WSS 3.0 in the spring with the new desktops... They have a CRM application in place, and when I started showing them how to get their sales forecasts directly into Excel, and then share that data through sharepoint, that was the deal-maker. This is stuff she had heard about from the CRM maker, the ability to quickly and easily glean information from the system, but in 2+ years NO ONE had shown her, she had not get to see that with her own eyes on their own data. When I first started talking about it she said, oh that can't be done, you need this add-in or that add-in.
It is corney, but you give information workers data, and it's good, you give them access to the data and it's wonderful!!! This new wave of products, from Vista with the side-bar, to Office with it's Ribbon, to Exchange with it's stability and Unified-messaging, and MOSS/WSS with it's workflow and easy of access to data securely, that's GREAT STUFF. Unlock the stack and there's your info, there's your data, there's your next deal, there's your cost savings or production hiccups. It's all there for you to see and act on.
Call Abbie or Me, we'll sit down and show you what's here today and what is on the horizon. We can talk licensing, we can talk process improvement, and we can help you unlock your data.
-bill watters