It's a question we've heard a lot in the last couple of days: Who decided to
hold a conference in Houston in July?
Well, Microsoft did, and the thousands of partners who are descending upon
the city this week will likely be met with a Texas-style welcome: temperatures
in the 90s (today's high topped out at a relatively cool 92) and high humidity.
Great.
Maybe it's your editor's bias toward Dallas-Fort Worth (mainly Fort Worth),
but RCPU has never been a huge fan of Houston. As a native Texan, your editor
knows and loves huge swaths of his home state -- Austin, San Antonio, the Hill
Country, parts of the Gulf Coast, the desert mountains of West Texas and, of
course, Cowtown (or Funkytown, or whatever you want to call Fort Worth). Texas
can be beautiful.
[Click for larger view.] |
But RCPU came to Houston expecting to spend a lot of time in the hotel, and,
well...we've been pleasantly surprised. The RCPU team -- four strong for this
event -- strolled over to a downtown steakhouse Monday evening for dinner after
the show and had a great time and a spectacular meal. Then, we strolled back
by Minute Maid Park -- the Astros' stadium, which, we have to say, looks kind
of funny from the outside -- and over to a place called Discovery Green.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on July 08, 20080 comments
Yeesh, this is kind of ugly. The "tel" (or just the "Intel,"
depending on how you read it) in Wintel is
saying
no to Vista
.
There's really nothing left to say here, but we're sort of enjoying looking
at the Vista car wreck from the traffic jam on the (hello, early '90s phrase)
information superhighway.
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments
It's the biggest show of the year for Microsoft Partners and the biggest event
of the year for
Redmond Channel Partner
magazine and RCPU alike: It's
the
Microsoft
Worldwide Partner Conference
, and it kicks off next week in Houston.
Before you go, you simply must check out RCP's
preview video, starring your editor and RCP Editor in Chief Scott
Bekker (although not necessarily in that order -- you might say that this video
has no lone star).
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20081 comments
Yes, this should make things much...easier? Microsoft this week introduced
Select Plus
Volume Licensing
, a program intended to simplify and reduce the cost of
licensing for larger organizations. (We'll forgive Microsoft for giving this
program a name that sounds more like the name of a frequent flyer scheme: "We'd
like to board our Select Plus passengers at this time…")
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 02, 20080 comments
Your editor is writing this entry from his childhood home outside of Dallas,
a place that always brings back memories of, well, childhood. Now that we're
stretching into the third or fourth inning of summer, a lot of those memories
are of playing baseball and soccer in the backyard and then weaving into the
house completely dehydrated (hey, it gets hot in Texas) and gulping gallons
of water. But one piece of news this week stirred our recollection of another
summer standard: the summer reading list.
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20081 comments
We say
"finally"
because apparently Symantec was all over it weeks ago.
By the way, should we read anything at all into the fact that Microsoft, which
is now more than a year into its effort to be a security vendor, had a "bug"
that messed up certain Symantec applications? Hmm, should we? Probably not,
but we do like to cause trouble when we can.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments
You might say that Microsoft's record on getting fixes out to its users is
becoming a little, uh,
patchy
.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments
It's "Fiji," for heaven's sake. This is a family newsletter! Anyway,
apparently, Microsoft's codename of Fiji -- which the company is using for a
forthcoming edition of Windows Media Center -- isn't actually going down all
that well in...Fiji. Mary Jo Foley
explains
.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20080 comments
All that noise MSPs have been making about how complicated unified communications can be? Apparently
it was more
than just noise...
Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments
What do companies look for when searching for an MSP? This fairly
comprehensive article
gives us an idea -- which could be useful both for MSPs and the companies searching for them.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20080 comments