Microsoft Partner Dashboard

Microsoft unveiled at its Worldwide Partner Conference here July 10 a partner dashboard that promises to consolidate information from across hundreds of pages on various Microsoft corporate and partner Web sites and provide partners a single source to measure stats against the partner pack.The tool gathers information on partners’ certifications, customer engagements and other up-to-the-moment statistics currently spread across the portal, providing a single glance at overall metrics and monthly progress of partner activity.

Read the full article that was published in eWeek here.

SharePoint as your enterprise search application?

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela announced a new search product developed in partnership with consulting giant BearingPoint at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver on July 10. The product, called SingleView, is built on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 collaboration portal and is already being used by dozens of large enterprise customers.

You can read the entire article here in eWeek.

Selling unified comms and QoS to the channel

The days where the typical corporate network is just carrying data packets are over, and VARs can take advantage of a new breed of applications called unified communications to turn some solid business opportunities.

The idea is to marry voice, email, instant messages, and even video conversations in one central place, to make it easier to keep track of your connections. It is not a new idea.

You can read more about how three trends have come together to make this compelling for the channel in my story today in eWeek here.

Channel chat: John DiLullo of SonicWall

As part of my podcast series for Ziff’s ITLink community, I talk to John DiLullo, the head of SonicWall’s worldwide sales team, about how to create a profitable managed services offering. What is involved in resellers setting up managed services for their customers, what kinds of skills are involved, and other useful information is covered.

You can download the podcast here.

Channel Chat Podcast: Selling encryption to the channel

I have been working with Ziff-Davis’ ITLink social networking site, adding content that is geared towards the reseller community. Today’s Channel Chat podcast is with Karen Hartsell, the director of world-wide channel marketing for PGP Corp. I spoke to her about how VARs can sell encryption, some of the things that she looks for in picking VARs, and recent changes to PGP’s channel program.

You can download the podcast here.