SharePoint 2007 Hosting

Business Situation

According to the Microsoft Partner Website, the Partner Program is designed to acknowledge a company’s expertise, reward them for their total impact on the marketplace and deliver value to help their business thrive. The Partner Program extends to technology companies worldwide, so Microsoft has sectioned the global partners off into regions that can be easily managed.

The Microsoft South Central Region, covering Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, hosts weekly webcasts, monthly partner calls and area events as an opportunity for partners to educate themselves and network with other businesses. In addition, Microsoft has a wealth of documentation, contact information, sales/marketing tools and other resources to be shared among all partners in this area. In order to efficiently centralize and manage communications to these partners, the Microsoft South Central Region needed a customizable collaboration tool, complete with calendars, document repositories and lists.

Solution

Fpweb.net Hosting provided the Microsoft South Central Partner team with a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 solution, running on Windows Server 2008. Microsoft uses this solution as a public facing SharePoint site, www.southcentralpartners.com, to communicate and collaborate on partner events and documentation. The homepage features a calendar with the schedule for weekly webcasts, monthly partner calls and area networking events. Additionally, partner announcements, Microsoft contacts and other useful resources are listed on the home page for easy accessibility.

The site’s document repository houses product readiness guides, sales/marketing tools, archived webcast presentations and much more. All of these resources are posted by the Microsoft team for use by partners of this region. Furthermore, sub-sites have been built out, as well, with detailed information on particular partner programs.

Benefits

By using WSS 3.0 as a collaboration and document repository tool, Microsoft partners in the South Central Region can rapidly access program information necessary to make the most of their partnership. Additionally, Microsoft is able to improve partner awareness and involvement by publicly posting events and product announcements to the South Central site. Finally, by posting crucial Microsoft contact information, they have improved communication with partners for this region.

The Highlights:

• Partners in various locations have rapid access to weekly and archived webcast presentations in a single document repository.
• Shared calendar allows all partners to access information on upcoming events and programs.
• Microsoft product updates, partner announcements, sales/marketing tools and contacts create increase partner program awareness and involvement.