posted on Monday, October 10, 2005 1:46 AM
by
davidboschmans
Partner Conference was a success!
Last Thursday Microsoft Belux held its annual Partner Conference in Gent. Theme of the conference was "Going Beyond". Most partners I talked to found the conference very successful and interesting.
Bruno Segers, General Manager Microsoft Belux, kicked off the conference with a great keynote on Microsoft history and how Microsoft will evolve in the next years. After some partner testimonials and some video intermezzo the BG's (Business Group Leads) did a great job explaining what partners could expect from the different Microsoft segments. Whether you talk about infrastructure and security solutions (Michael Kögeler), the applications platform (Stefan Lamberigts), information worker or productivity solutions (Carmen Dubois), Microsoft Business Solutions (Philippe Gosseye) or how Windows Vista will bring clarity to your world (Wim Van Winghe), it was all covered in the BG's overview session and more in-depth in the solution tracks afterwards.
The closing keynote was delivered by Vincent Van Quickenborne, State Secretary for Administrative Simplification, covering the Kafka project with some great examples of administrative simplification. After that it was time for a great party!
In the morning - before the official start of the partner conference - Microsoft organized a number of summits (CPLS / ISV / IW). As track owner for the ISV Community Summit I decided to bring some future and current platform and product-related content. The first session was on the future of our platform and how Windows Vista and Office 12 will increase the ISV productivity. Next to that I gave an overview of some of the opportunities that ISV's can benefit from when using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 as an integrated application platform. To close the ISV summit, an summary was given of the FY06 partner program and how ISVs could handle the changes.
Throughout the day I received a lot of questions on the MSDN Subscriptions and its levels (that are about to change), Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET upgrades, SQL Server 2005 Express and migration from MSDE, ... I'll address these topics in upcoming posts.
Had also a lot of great feedback from the people who attended the IW Community Summit. One of the presentations that were very well appreciated was the BIWUG-session which covered some Office 12 highlights. Good to see that the community was present for the Microsoft partners!
So, overall, great conference, lots of interesting content, a lot of people and a great networking opportunity. Let's go beyond in FY06!