1Th e 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 acquisitiions effective collaboration among Microsoft’s partners becomes even more critical in supporting Microsoft’s expansiio into the small-and medium-sized enterprise market. Prior to 2004, different groups of Microsoft partners collaborated in differeen circles, each of which provided varyiin levels of effectiveness. Some partners interacted with each other through an assigned sales manager; others interactee 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 migraatin the diverse range of existing legacy systems into an integrated solutiio for a large Fortune 100 client. Informattio sources from different partner communities, built at different times, on different databases and code frameworrks with separate sets of internal owners and stakeholders, had to be reconccile to form a unified and consistent view of the partners. Latitude Consulting Group 888-577-2797 www.latitudecg.com Channel Builder Prototype Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation, a leading $25B software enterprise, works with a large and diveers community of partners. With its operating system and software products maturinng Microsoft had adopted a growth strategy that targeted new markets, including small-and medium size enterprise markets. Th is strategy would require leveraging their strong partner channel. Th e Extended Enterprise Delivered Latitude Channel Portal Case Study 2 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 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 communnity which included functionality, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, roleenabllement security, and use of Microosof .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 communiit from one enterprise division’s schemma rules, and architecture standards to another’s in just under six weeks to produce a working demo for the 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 serviice through rich profiles • Find other partners and their producct and services • Collaborate on projects by requestiin or offering help 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 bettte 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 LATITUDE CONSULTING GROUP CASE STUDY Channel Builder Prototype Latitude created a channel portal prototype that helped Microsoft VARs and other partners promote their products and collaborate more eff ectively with each other. Th e 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.