Latitude Channel Portal Case Study The Extended Enterprise Delivered
Channel Builder Prototype
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Corporation, a leading $25B software enterprise, works with a large and diverse community of partners. With its operating system and software products maturing, Microsoft had adopted a growth strategy that targeted new markets, including small- and medium size enterprise markets. This strategy would require leveraging their strong partner channel. 1
The Business Need
As part of its growth strategy, Microsoft had recently made multi-billion dollar acquisitions of two companies: Great Plains and Navision. With these acquisitions, effective collaboration among Microsoft’s partners becomes even more critical in supporting Microsoft’s expansion into the small- and medium-sized enterprise market. Prior to 2004, different groups of Microsoft partners collaborated in different circles, each of which provided varying levels of effectiveness. Some partners interacted with each other through an assigned sales manager; others interacted through regular community events. Many of the more established partners through relationships gained over time by networking or partner. Microsoft needed an online community for its partners to build relationships with other partners and share skills, best practices, and resources to deliver better solutions for their customers.
Challenges
One of the primary challenges was migrating the diverse range of existing legacy systems into an integrated solution for a large Fortune 100 client. Information sources from different partner communities, built at different times, on different databases and code frameworks, with separate sets of internal owners and stakeholders, had to be reconciled to form a unified and consistent view of the partners.
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LATITUDE CONSULTING GROUP CASE STUDY
Channel Builder Prototype
In addition, the Microsoft Partner group needed a demo to showcase at the 2003 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in early October, less than five weeks away, and wanted a fully working prototype Worldwide Partner Conference, called “Channel Builder”. A working prototype was produced on schedule by the end of the year. The new system, based on the existing PartnerConnect community, helps partners: • Promote their own products and services through rich profiles • Find other partners and their products and services • Collaborate on projects by requesting or offering help
Solution
Latitude Consulting Group had been working with Great Plains, one of the Microsoft acquisitions, since late 2001 on a similar project, PartnerConnect, which was based on a Microsoft ASP. NET framework. The Microsoft Partner group reviewed the PartnerConnect web community against alternative systems currently existing within Microsoft, and selected Latitude’s as best meeting the requirements of the new Microsoft community, which included functionality, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, roleenablement, security, and use of Microsoft .NET technology. In mid-2003, Microsoft’s Partner group called on Latitude Consulting Group to produce a prototype web community for Microsoft partners by the end of the year. Working closely with Microsoft Partner team members and IT staff, Latitude migrated the PartnerConnect community from one enterprise division’s schema, rules, and architecture standards to another’s in just under six weeks to produce a working demo for the
Results
The scalable, secure, extensible, and role-based PartnerConnect platform will provide the following strategic benefits to Microsoft partners and customers: • Streamlined partner collaboration that better leverages the skills and capacity of all partners to deliver better solutions, more quickly and at a lower cost • A new, scalable, flexible Microsoft .NET platform to meet partner growth and com-munity needs more efficiently • A stronger, more responsive partner community
2
Latitude created a channel portal prototype that helped Microsoft VARs and other partners promote their products and collaborate more effectively with each other. The Channel Builder portal provides Microsoft with a stronger partner community.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Latitude at (888) 577-2797 or by e-mail to insights@latitudecg.com.