Over the last few months I’ve enjoyed stretching my legs into the new world of marketing at Microsoft.

I feel I’ve finally got my head around SQL Server, Visual Studio and BizTalk Server and I think I’m making a difference.

As no consequence to this at all, I’ve recently acquired a new product to add to the Application Platform stack – SharePoint Server.  So now, I am the New Zealand Product Manager for SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Visual Studio and BizTalk Server.

Over the next few weeks I’m interested in talking to customers and partners about their experiences around SharePoint, good and bad in order to help get my head around the current situation in the market and put together plans for the next financial year to help both customers and partners with their SharePoint solutions.

In addition to SharePoint, I will also be driving the Business Intelligence message in New Zealand, and owning both SQL Server and SharePoint from a marketing perspective will be a great benefit to ensuring that the message is consistent and helps build clarity from a customer perspective.

So – if you are interested in talking to me about SharePoint, use the contact link and we’ll catch up.  I’m going to be in Christchurch and Auckland over the next few weeks and have a little bit of time to spare in each location at this stage.

A while ago I did a presentation for the Auckland SQL Server User Group (and last years SQL PASS Community Connection).  The topic was building a  business case for SQL Server. 

Since then several people have asked me to post the slides to my blog, but while I’m not going to post the slides here at this stage, I thought I’d do the next best thing and post the model I used to build the business case.

To do this effectively we need to have a framework for building the business case.  The framework I used is a model that Mark Carroll a colleague from my DPE days came up with (incidentally Mark came up with this model before he joined Microsoft).  Mark called the model the 8 business drivers, I’m going to call it the “Mark Carroll business driver model” because it sounds more official and gives Mark the credit for it.  The model looks approximately like this:

1. Tangible costs (How much does the product cost to purchase or maintain?)

2. Skills availability (How easy is it to get people to work on it or solve short term skills shortages?)

3. Customer requirements (Does it meet the stated business requirements?  What about unstated requirements?)

4. Third party products and services (What sort of ecosystem and partner network is there for this product?)

5. Standards and Methodology fit (How will it fit with my business methods? How does it work with established standards?)

6. User Functionality requirements (How easy is the product to learn (i.e. discoverable)? Is there a consistent user experience/paradigm?)

7. Timeliness (What is the time from order to deployment? How quickly can it be modified or customized?)

8. Life expectancy (How long will the vendor be around? How long will they support the product for? Will there be a migration path to the next version?)

If you use these 8 business drivers to build your business case, you’ll find the answers that you are looking for.

Perhaps in a future post I’ll plug SQL Server into this and show how it measures up against this model.

If you are interested in looking into SQL Server Certification there are a couple of live meeting events that you might be interested in putting into your diary.

The first is “Jumpstart SQL 2008 Skills”.  The abstract reads: “If you are new to SQL 2008, this session provides you with information on why and how to jumpstart your skills to SQL Server 2008. Our speaker will share real-life application examples and putting knowledge into context. Register NOW!”  This session is scheduled for May 26 at 4:30pm via live meeting.

The second is for those who are looking to “Upgrade your SQL skills” to SQL Server 2008 from SQL 2005: "If you have been running existing databases and applications on SQL Server 2005, this Webcast session show you exciting new capabilities to improve your applications and reduce support needs within a familiar management interface. REGISTER NOW!”  This session is scheduled for May 28 at 4:30.  Both sessions are an hour long.

These sessions are free and will also provide you with an opportunity to ask questions of a real person (shocking I know…) about your certification steps.

Don't forget to take advantage of the 50% off MS press books if you are considering certification.

In the market for books?  Don’t bother with Amazon.  We can do a deal for you!

MS Press Australia is celebrating its first birthday by providing customers with the opportunity to take 50% off all books.

To take up the offer, do your shopping and then use MSPRESS1 as the checkout code to take 50% off.

I wonder if we should see if we can get MS Press to Tech Ed… thoughts?

If you are keen on more detail around some of the new features that are going to be available with SQL Server 2008 R2 – then you’ll be happy to know that there is more information available from the team in the US.

Included is a breakdown of benefits by areas:

• Support for more than 64 processors
• Application and multi-server management
• Master Data Services (hey look 100m rows in Excel!)
• Self Service analysis with “Project Gemini”
• Self Service Reporting

There is also a video that you can watch to get more information. 

So it seems that there is lots of BI goodness coming in the next version of SQL Server.  If you are buying SQL 2008 today, don’t forget to make sure it has Software Assurance with it so you have upgrade rights.

All this information (along with a link to sign up for the CTP when it’s made available) is available here. Enjoy.

If you are interested in heading to Tech Ed this year, you can now register.

Typically tickets sell out quickly, but this year the economy might dampen enthusiasm a little.  Nonetheless we have extra tickets this year due to some capacity engineering (read more people, more rooms, more sessions).

If you are sure you will be going though – make sure you get in quick.  Last year we sold out in just over two weeks.

If you tweet, you can also follow @techedlive to keep up with the latest.  Don’t forget to tag your tweets with #tenz9.

At Tech Ed USA, we announced that SQL Server “Kilimanjaro” is officially going to be called SQL Server 2008 R2.

This reflects the nature of this upcoming release by highlighting that the core product has not changed and that this release builds on the current release of SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server 2008 R2 is focused heavily on expanding our Business Intelligence capabilities.  Specifically we have announced the following new features in SQL Server 2008 R2:

• Self-service analysis (Project Gemini)
• Self-service reporting tools
• Application and multi-server management
• Support for multi-core processing
• Master Data Services

Master Data Services was announced today at Tech Ed USA which provides a single authoritative data source to ensure the integrity of data across the organization.  Using MDS customers can manage critical data assets by enabling proactive stewardship, enforcing data quality rules, defining work flows aroudn data changes, notifying impacted parties, managing hierarchies and sharing the authoritative source with all impacted systems.

What does all this mean?  It means that using SQL Server MDS customers can provide governance to manage data across the organization and provide a unified framework for rapidly building applications against that data.

SQL Server MDS will ship as part of SQL Server 2008 R2, so watch out for a CTP in the second half of 2009.  SQL Server R2 is on track to ship in H1 of 2010.