EBS well received at SMB summit

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Björn Levidow]

SMB Summit 2008 is the first time EBS has been part of SMB Summit and my first time attending. The first thing that impressed me was the technical depth of our partners here. They had great questions about EBS, many of them about how to migrate from an existing SBS 2003/2003R2 environment into a new EBS installation. The second thing that impressed me was how excited they were about creating an EBS offering into their practices. A couple of partners came up to me and pressed me for release date details so that they could sell it to customers next week!

By far, the part of EBS that generated the most excitement was the EBS Planning Wizard. Mark Stanfill and I described the types of pre-existing issues we saw in our TAP customer environments before doing the EBS Beta 2 install that would prevent a successful EBS install (e.g. broken AD replications, bad DNS entries, etc.). We got head nods of agreement from the audience. We then said we were taking all of that knowledge and making it an integral part of the setup process as the EBS Planning Wizard (A.K.A. Mark Stanfill 2.0) to insure a successful EBS deployment and many smiles broke out across the room. When we said that the EBS Planning Wizard would be available as a separate download so that partners could evaluate a customer’s environment to gather more information on how much to charge for their engagement, the room erupted into applause. As the guy who helped create and drive the EBS Planning Wizard, there are few better feelings in the world. J

-- Björn Levidow