Access Our Internal Knowledge Base

Pretty cool benefit of becoming a Microsoft Certified Professional...  From the MCP Blog:

Internal Knowledge Base Access – Folks, this is the benefit that I’m most excited about. It’s time we started treating our MCP community as part of the Microsoft family and start providing you folks some important access and benefits. Yeah, I can almost hear you thinking, “What’s the big difference? You can already search at https://support.microsoft.com and find the necessary information.” Well, as a certified professional, MCPs will have privileged access to the highly coveted Microsoft internal partner level knowledge base that include exclusive technical information that is not available to the general public. Say you got Bill and Ted working in IT support for a bank. Their boss, Steve, comes in and says, hey, my scanner that used to work with Windows XP doesn’t work anymore in Vista. Can you fix this? So Bill goes and searches on https://support.microsoft.com and finds out that the driver isn’t available, and comes back and says, “Hey Steve, the driver isn’t available…stupid Microsoft”. Ted, who’s is an MCP, goes and searches the internal knowledge base at https://mcp.microsoft.com/mcp and finds out that a driver was submitted, but it didn’t pass certification, and it was causing the system to crash. The Vista team has filed an open bug on the driver that their working to resolve. He also find out that the dev team is working with the hardware vendor on a driver that will be available in the next thirty days. It also provides other partner level information that is not available on the public knowledge base site. Ted comes back and tells this his manager, Steve. Steve now views Ted as knowing something that others couldn’t have told him. Because Ted is an MCP, he gets the inside track on important technical issues that will make him and other MCPs more valuable to their peers and employers worldwide. Benefits like the internal knowledge base access will give our MCP community the leg up in coming across more knowledgeable and competent, and providing a real value in hiring an MCP.