Technical, Alliance & Security Resources – Independent Software Vendor

Microsoft Certification can help you pursue a new career in IT, move from one job role to another, or become indispensible in your existing role. Earning a certification not only helps you stay current on the latest developments in Microsoft technologies and platforms; it also enables you to demonstrate to employers your job skills. Take advantage of a new set of discounts that Microsoft is providing on select Microsoft Certification exams. Visit the website below to find out how. This offer is available worldwide while supplies last, and you have to register, schedule and purchase your discounted exam by December 31, 2009.

Tharun Tharian, Senior Product Manager, Developer Platform & Tools, Microsoft and Frank Botello, Product Manager, Windows Server, Microsoft discuss the new capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2. Also covered is how Microsoft is making it easier for you to develop for compatibility, security, stability, reliability and availability on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the tools that are provided to help you in those efforts.

Carlo Malaguzzi provides a great overview of Office 2010 including the partner opportunities, as well as how OBA will provide a platform for building innovative, connected Office-related applications with greater ease. The roadmap to the commercial launch is also covered.

Sonny Ali, Senior ISV Developer Evangelist, Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft provides an overview of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy, products and solutions with an emphasis on how our partners have used these technologies to achieve cost savings and increased agility.

Yochay Kiriaty, Microsoft Windows 7 Technical Evangelist provides a technical overview of Microsoft Windows 7, exploring the different options for partners to develop ground breaking applications with new experiences, better performance and higher reliability. Listen in and join us for a tour across the changes and enhancements that will be found in Windows 7.

Work with Microsoft Technology Architects at a Microsoft Technology Center to understand how to manage and optimize your product for Windows 7. The purpose of these labs is to assist ISVs verify that your applications will run on Windows 7 and to provide feedback to the Windows product group as issues arise.

Microsoft has established testing labs in Redmond for you to have access to all the resources in getting your applications ready for Windows 7. Send e-mail to get information on how to get access to the labs.

Jaime Rodriguez, Microsoft Presentation Foundation Technical Evangelist talks about today's need to reach out to customers on different platforms (Windows, web) and form factors (Mobile, Surface, desktop). With Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, Microsoft is building a unified platform to address the needs of these multi-channel, multi-platform applications. Listen to this session to get an overview of the Microsoft Client Continuum: how we see each technology fitting and how we see the technologies converging over time.

Eric Morse, Director, Emerging Ecosystems, Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft talks about how partners can take advantage of the Azure Services Platform to deliver software as a service without having to maintain data centers or build new capabilities on existing investments in on-premises applications. Learn more about what Azure is and how it can fit into your business and development plans.

Microsoft's Lingan Satkunanathan, Lead Program Manager, Essential Business Server, along with Gary Purchase, Principal Dev Lead for Essential Business Server talk about Microsoft's Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and how it can benefit your business.

Gary Schare, Director, Windows Product Management for Microsoft discusses what that means for partners and what's new with a tremendous upshift in Windows 64-bit adoption. Partners need to be aware of the potholes and the upside to take advantage of the install base that is growing daily.

Hear from Arno Mihm, Program Manager on Microsoft's Virtualization team about the Hyper-V launch event and what you need to know about Microsoft's Virtualization Strategy and do to get certified.

The February 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. Stay Connected. Bookmark The Official Blog of MSDN Magazine.

The International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP) helps Microsoft Certified Partners, Business Solutions Partners and Registered Partners grow their businesses. Founded in 1994, the organization includes nearly 4,000 companies in 33 countries, and over 80 chapters worldwide. The IAMCP provides Microsoft Partners a voice into Microsoft programs, to the IT community at large, as well as a vehicle to facilitate business development among partners. Click here to meet IAMCP President, Per Werngren and hear more about the IACMP. Visit the IAMCP website.

Tune in to Ben Riga, Group Manager, Dynamics Evangelism at Microsoft, discussing how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used by ISVs as a business application development platform for building on-premise or hosted line-of-business applications. In this video, Ben will show you what is going on “under the hood” in Dynamics CRM and how to take advantage of the platform to build vertical or horizontal applications and/or integrate your application with Dynamics CRM. He also delves in to the various deployment choices and explains when each would be most appropriate. Click here to learn how it works and how to use the underlying Dynamics CRM platform.

In 16 locations around the world, Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) enable enterprise and ISV customers to envision, architect, and prove highly secure, customized solutions based on Microsoft and partner technologies. Drawing on the integrated innovation of Microsoft products and technologies, the MTC can be a powerful resource for your organization and can help shorten your solution development time and reduce the total cost of solution acquisition. For more information on how to engage with an MTC, please contact your Microsoft account manager. For additional information on MTCs, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mtc.

Watch the technical overview of SaaS (‘Software as a Service’ vs. ‘Software + Services’), including S+S/SOA architecture aspects, multi-tenancy approaches, moving from on-premise to SaaS (and vice versa), and architecture/technical challenges. We’ll also cover what’s available from Microsoft in terms of platform, frameworks, tools, hosting, etc. to assist ISVs in building SaaS/S+S offerings. Finally, the session discusses Microsoft’s S+S offerings (AKA ‘Live’), and how ISVs may be able to plug into this in the future.

This phone-based consulting support service can help you speed up your development time and lower your operating costs with development advice, code samples, limited-scope reviews, and workshops.

Partners who earn the Microsoft Competency are granted additional licenses for internal use and training purposes.

If you have been using Microsoft Expression Encoder to create Silverlight video applications, you might like to see this interface wrapped it in a Windows Workflow Activity so you can easily automate Expression Encoder in your media workflow. Watch the video now.

Learn how Microsoft can take HPC further through easy cluster management, enhanced collaboration, and common client and cluster development tools. Great performance. Better efficiency. The next generation of HPC is right here.

What's the buzz about OBAs? Here are some great resources to get you started!

What is a MicroISV? We, at Microsoft, consider a small software company, typically numbering one to three people, a MicroISV. MicroISVs talk about their experiences developing for the Windows platform.

Tools, reference documents and product information to develop on the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Learn how the Microsoft SaaS platform can help you build and run SaaS applications.

Learn how to build gadgets for Windows Live and Windows Vista.

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) brings the supercomputing power of high-performance computing (HPC) to the desktop and workgroup level in a familiar Windows-based development environment.

The Midrange Alliance Program brings together the leading technology, service, and application partners with years of experience to help you extend, integrate, or move application workloads.

The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform.

Find out how Microsoft products enable technical interoperability out of the box with software and hardware from other vendors.

Find out how to enhance your Java solutions with .NET.

Develop secure applications on the Microsoft platform with tools and information from the MSDN Security Developer Center.

Information about Application Threat Modeling, including the Microsoft Threat Analysis & Modeling v2.0 tool.