Cloudy with a chance of Licensing
Latest news on Microsoft licensing, Cloud, and AI
Microsoft today announced that customers who purchase via Volume licensing (which is the majority of businesses I’d have thought) will be able to order Windows 7 from September 1st!
Another Windows 7 announcement from the 1st day of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 was that there will be a 6 month promotion making Windows 7 up to 15% cheaper than Vista.
Already this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is seeing great announcements and, if my time conversion is right it only started no more th an 1 hour ago!
These first announcements are around Microsoft BPOS and primarily concern MS Partners who resell Microsoft’s Online Services.
Partner Order on Behalf Of: This is a feature that I and pretty much every other BPOS partner has been waiting for; the ability to place BPOS orders on behalf of our customers. The current model of sending the customer off to purchase online themselves is quite alien to how this is usually done and can lead to confusion all around. Being able to order ourselves makes it easier for partners to be truly Value Added Resellers.
“..The feature allows partners to initiate trials, specify the services and quantities they recommend for their customers, pre-configure orders for their customers to complete..”
Partner Commerce Dashboard: This is again a great addition for Partners. This gives a consolidated view of the status of trials and orders for all the partner’s customers. The data can be exported to CRM systems via Excel too.
They have also announced that Delegated Administration to Partners will be available by (Oct-Dec) Q4 2009. This means that customers will be able to let their Value Add Reseller (VAR) perform certain tasks on their behalf, this again fits in better with the current model a lot of Partners/Customers have.
Original post over on the MS Online team blog here.
Microsoft have made more details on the Office web products available, a little before this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference kicks off.
Office Web Applications will include:
will work on Macs as well as PCs and will run in Firefox too 🙂
It looks like Neowin may have seen something they weren’t yet supposed to as the link to the Office Web demo video isn’t currently working…
However one video that is working is this here on Mobile Office 2010. It shows that documents can be rendered server side meaning that “just about” every smart phone out there can view them…yep that includes Blackberry & iPhone too.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 