EBS Buzz at SMB Summit

Hello from SMB Summit, Day 2 in Dallas, TX! If you couldn't make it to this event, here's a few highlights from this yesterday:

Again, another packed room all day! Mark Stanfill, from our support escalation team, polled the audience "How many of you have an SBS customer today that would be a good fit for EBS?" Guess what, approx. 80% of the hands in the room went up! overall everyone enjoyed the 2 days, with the highlight for the EBS day being the really COOL setup, and some of the health and environment check wizards that will be included! this is inspite of us even forgetting to tell partners that if an IT Pro were to run these wizards & is stumped by the steps provided, there will be a message in the product, on that wizard screen, for him to find a local Microsoft Certified Partner or Small Business Specialist!

The removal of next-gen ISA, now called Forefront Threat Management Gateway, from SBS 2008 and inclusion in EBS 2008, certainly was a topic of lots of lively discussion.

The best part of Day 2 for me personally, was the Practice-building session towards the end of the day - Arlin Sorenson and his team did a skit that was both really funny and educational...it got a lot of cheers and laughs from the partners...well, you'll just have to wait to see the video once we post the sessions of the first 2 days on Partner Portal (if you missed the event and are chomping at the bits to see this, it'll take us a few weeks to get this done - we'll post on this blog and the SBS blog once they're available so you can check them out)

We hosted a party in the evening to thank everyone for their loyalty to SBS and for the early investment in 2 days of readiness...here are some top quotes from partners:

"Very Informative", "You have hit a home run with SBS 2008", "Though SBS 2008 is a great product, SBS 2008 is really heads and shoulders above it", "I finally have something to sell to my midsize customers with EBS", "The 2 days have been phenomenal", "Its amazing to have so much direct access to the Microsoft folks, given we're really small partners", "Awesome to be able to interact with the Dev team directly"...and so on & so forth...

Meanwhile, Wayne & Dean are just unstoppable: https://blog.sbsfacom/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=161 What's up with that? ;) well, we decided to have some fun with the attendees today & showed some of the videos...