As of Tuesday this week we have achieved Microsoft Certified Partner Status – so we giving ourselves a bit of a pat on the back over here in Cheltenham.

Getting the certified status is something we have know we needed to do for quite a while now – but just haven’t got round to it.

To get the Certification we went for the Microsoft ISV/Software solutions competency – for which we had to demonstrate a successful record of developing and marketing packaged software based on Microsoft technologies.

The first part of this was demonstrating customer satisfaction, so a big thank you to all our customers who provided references to Microsoft for us.

The second part involved putting our Planner product through Microsofts approved “Works with Windows Server 2008” testing.

At first we thought this part of the process was a bit of a pain:  we know our products work with Windows Server, that’s what they are designed for, we test them extensively and if they didn’t work we would start losing customers pretty quickly.

But once we put ourselves in our customers’ shoes we started to see the benefits. When a customer puts a new product on their server they need to be sure that it’s not going to cause a problem and a product that carries a “Works with Windows Server” logo gives customers confidence that it’s going get on just fine with their Microsoft Server products.

Getting software through the “Works with Windows Server 2008” testing process does take some technical and financial investment – and is much more comprehensive that previous tests – but we feel that this investment is going to be worthwhile because of by the customer benefits,  so we plan to put more of our products through the testing process over the next few months.

Tags: SharePoint