Here's the URL

We heard again and again at the Partner Roundtable last week that people find it tough to find things on our sites. Too much time is spent on the phone to Partner Account Managers and other Microsoft people simply to find a URL. It shouldn’t be this way and it doesn’t scale. Jonathan solves the problem by having me and other folks on IM and I did consider giving out my IM address to everyone but that doesn’t scale either. Our site is getting better and with a major revamp on the content management side coming later this year things will continue to improve. Our search technology should also help but at the end of the day, if you can’t find what you need we need to fix it. We heard loud and clear and I promised to provide one thing I think could help - a Favourites file that you can add in to your browser with an A-Z listing of useful sites and resources. Who knows, it may help.

I’m busy tracking down the file from the team at Ask Partner and will be visiting them on friday so worst case, it’ll be on this site by Friday evening.

I have another idea though, how about you join a Microsoft alias – sort of. I am sunscribed to at least 50 internal distribution lists or alises and it’s largely what keeps me in touch with what’s going on. How about you tap in to a few Microsofties more closely? It’s pretty easy with RSS and Office 2007 so here is how

  • Download and install the Office 2007 beta (or just Outlook 2007)
  • Outlook 2007 includes RSS feed subscriptions so you can sync and read blogs in Outlook.
  • The easiest way to do this is via IE7 – if you have that installed, simply go to website and if there is an RSS feed the RSS icon will light up orange on the toolbar (like the one at the top of this post). Click on the icon, choose subsribe and it’s added to your RSS folder hierarchy on Outlook.
  • Add some of my teams blogs (listed below with the link to their feed)

If all that new sofwtare is a bit onerous, check out Sharpreader which was my reader of choice pre Outlook 2007.

[added RSS Bandit at Charlie’s request]

What this is going to do is deliver solid info to your inbox from the technical experts in my team. This may not come across as easy as it seems so as soon as I lay my hands on a video camera, I’ll get a video done to show you how easy it can be.

Mark Deakin on Unified Communications (Exchange, LCS, Windows Mobile) 

John Westworth on Collaboration (Sharepoint, Office, Lotus Notes)

Dave Sayers on Windows & Security (Windows Server, ISA) 

Chris Parkes on Business Intelligence (SQL, Business Scorecard Manager, Office)

David Overton on Small Business and Vista

Steve Marsh on Office

James Senior SQL and Business Intelligence

if you want to see more of the Outlook integration before you make the leap, Channel 9 has a pretty good video on it.