by Julie Golding, U.S. MPN Lead
The competency roadmap provides you with a comprehensive look at both recently implemented changes and planned changes coming to the Microsoft Partner Network, to competency requirements and benefits, and to our cloud partner programs. It’s a document I frequently use when working with partners, and one I encourage my colleagues to use, too.
Here are a few highlights I want to share with you. You can download the latest version of this roadmap from the partner portal. This document is updated throughout the year as needed to help partners stay informed about important program, competency, and cloud-related changes.
- The online technical communities that Microsoft partners have relied on to get expert answers and product support for the past several years have been updated with a new platform to better support you. The Microsoft Partner Support Community still lets you connect to Microsoft experts and other partners to get answers to your product, developer, and presales questions. In addition, you can now get support for your Microsoft Partner Network membership questions, request private communications with a Microsoft expert in any forum, get search results that include MSDN and TechNet communities, and more.
- Presales technical professionals can earn the Presales Technical Specialist accreditation in five solution areas. This accreditation is valuable to you as an individual in demonstrating and promoting your Microsoft expertise. For your company, your accreditation may help meet competency requirements.
- Complete your accreditation by May 31 for an entry to our Sunny Weather Sweepstakes. The Grand Prize is a travel package to Maui—a nice incentive to get started today! Official rules.
- Customer satisfaction is core to business success, and partner feedback led to changes to the Customer Satisfaction Index that were implemented in April. Now, the survey will be always open, so you can align surveys to your project milestones instead of to our calendar. Your customers will experience a simpler, shorter survey that you can customize, and you’ll have a permanent link to your survey, plus enhanced reporting options. Read Julie Bennani’s blog post about this benefit.
- A white paper by IDC quantified the tangible, business value of MPN benefits for competency partners as worth many thousands of dollars. Make sure you are getting the full value of your benefits—from software to incentives to technical support—by downloading your Partner Benefit Statement. You can access your statement from the Core benefits overview page after signing in with your Microsoft account. If you need assistance, contact Microsoft Partner Network support.
Read more competency-related posts.