Helping You Put All the Pieces Together…

Last time I wrote about the advantages for partners around early adoption of our platform. Today, I want to take this discussion one step further and talk to you about specific resources you can utilize when integrating product and platform pieces to create and refine your solution.

First, it can be a daunting task to target your application to enterprise customers while taking all of the different touch points with other technologies into consideration. To help you better understand, develop and convey this to your customers, we provide resources such as accelerators, frameworks and reference architectures. In other words, we give you materials that serve as a starting point—usually complete with documentation and example code that shows how to best utilize the pieces and parts of our platform that can help jumpstart your solution.

These materials, directed at both horizontal and vertical markets, are designed to help you at various stages of solution development. Some materials may focus on low-level coding patterns and practices, others on higher-level architectural design patterns, and still others that may relate to an industry-specific initiative such as HL-7 in the healthcare industry.

Speaking of healthcare, there are two recently completed document sets that may be of interest to you: The Connected Healthcare Framework (CHF) and The Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture (CERA).

These two resources provide a great deal of value. Partners can download and quickly see several perspectives on how to utilize Microsoft technology to architect, develop or deploy specific solutions for the healthcare industry.

For some insightful review commentary on the CHF, refer to Roberto Ruggieri's "The Healthcare IT Blog". There you'll find many references to the CHF and can download the Connected Health Framework - Architecture and Design Blueprint - Part 1. There's also a CHF for the Health Plan industry which you can find here or you can read Hector Rodriguez's blog for more detailed information.

For more information on CERA, take a look at the CERA MSDN Industry Center page. There are resources for both the technical and business decision maker, complete with coding examples, whitepapers, and decks.

To give you a preview of what CERA offers, the architecture presentation walks through the process of building a reference architecture. It demonstrates the steps involved in using Windows Live ID for authentication, collaborating between the health and wellness coach and the member, and building an Office Business Application (OBA) for health plans. It also outlines the technical challenges, solutions architecture, and the associated technologies.

For additional information about partnering with us and general information about Microsoft in Healthcare, visit us at www.microsoft.com/isv. To see how Microsoft’s Global ISVs in healthcare are putting these pieces together today, take a look at our chat with Scott Carney of Siemens Medical on Channel 9’s “Inside Out”.

Until next time!

Keith Cox