Throughout its history, Microsoft has relied on a partner ecosystem to drive their business forward.  Now, as the Redmond giant transforms from a software/platform company to a devices and services company, that’s starting to change – and multiple teams are focusing all or part of their time on developing and publishing lab-tested, multi-product, end-to-end solution content.

As an employee of one of Microsoft’s largest partners, we can either ignore this, or work with Microsoft to ensure that we benefit from their solutions content and use it to improve our own, value-add services.  With that in mind, a colleague alerted me to the presence of Microsoft’s Solutions Advisory Board (SAB) and, yesterday, I attended the first of the bi-monthly webinars that the SAB team are hosting.

In an hour, we briefly covered 4 topics – at a very high level – but to give some idea of the scenarios that were discussed:

• New Office Solutions Content – content that’s been created by Microsoft to help customers make the most of integrating Office client and server products (and, to move towards the cloud at their own pace).
• Using Windows Azure for disaster recovery of an an-premises SharePoint farm.
• Integrating Lync Server on premise with Exchange Online.
• Hosting Internet websites (on SharePoint) in Windows Azure.

I plan to follow up with more detail next week (after the slides have been published) – but this could well be a very interesting forum to take part in…

In the meantime, check out the solution guides for IT professionals section on the TechNet website.