Hey ISVs, Are you MPR for O365?

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Yes, I know.

It’s been a while since I focused a post on some news for our Exchange ISV partners.

Well, you can consider those days over, as I have some Friday Fun Facts on what we’ve been up to on the Microsoft Platform Ready front!

imageIf you’re not already familiar with MPR--and you haven’t already click on the link above—Microsoft Platform Ready “is designed to give you what you need to plan, build, test and take your solution to market.”

While we’ve had good stuff up there on microsoftplatformready.com for Exchange 2010 for some time now, we just recently refreshed the bits around the “Test” stage of the MPR process.  More specifically, we have updated our Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool which enables you to assess your applications for compliance with Microsoft-recommended requirements and test cases. 

More specifically, specifically, we’ve updated the Exchange Server 2010 MPR test to:

Neat, right?

“So, why is this important?”

At it’s essence, the MPR test will help you identify possible compatibility and readiness issues when building your apps for Exchange Server 2010 or Exchange Online with Office 365.  However, while you may wish to test non-complete versions of your software as it’s being developed, only released version tests can be submitted and/or used for earning the Messaging competency as an ISV.

Nonetheless, you’ll want to visit our MPR site a bunch because we will continue to refine the Exchange MPR test tool as we learn best practices for ISV partner applications working with Exchange or Exchange Online.  In fact, Jim Lucey (my ISV partner lead on the Exchange partner team) thinks non-stop about how partners like you can best utilize our modern extensibility interfaces (like Exchange Web Services) to build your solutions to add value to both the on-prem and online flavors of Exchange.  We’ll certainly keep you updated as new guidance is made available and tweaks to the MPR test tool go live.

“Sounds great! How do I get started?” you ask.

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It’s super (and not just a normal Microspeak “super”) easy to get going:

  1. Sign in to Microsoft Platform Ready and register your application to access the Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool.
  2. To begin using the Test Tool, click on the Test My Apps navigation tab.  Details about the criteria requirements and individual product test cases are available in the test tool

Go ahead and give the MPR test tool a whirl and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and feedback.  In fact, Jim is so passionate about this opportunity he wanted me to share some recent examples of fellow great partners of yours who have already engineer their offerings to (in this case) run with EWS for (again, in this case) Exchange Online.  For example, I already spoke about the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services support for Office 365, but there’s also Quest OnDemand Migration for Email, LiveOffice Discovery Archive, and Binary Tree Solutions for migrating to Office 365 just to name a few.

Happy testing!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing