Advisory Call to the Rescue!
Colin works with the business development agency for his city’s local government, and looks after process improvement for the organisation’s IT department. He recently oversaw the deployment of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 in their environment, and he’s under a tremendous amount of pressure to make sure this newly upgraded platform is delivered without a hitch. Colin is fairly experienced with SCCM and feels pretty confident that smooth sailing is in store—however Colin does have some concerns related to the discovery and patching they’ve recently implemented. He’s less experienced in these areas but his supervisor nevertheless expects that Colin can produce a successful delivery of the entire upgrade project.
Anxious, Colin starts referring to his Microsoft Premier Support agreement and starts thinking about how he can leverage these services to give him the reassurances he needs. He starts reading through the latest Proactive training catalogue online (on the Premier Support Ireland blog!) and sees a lot of great courses covering SCCM monitoring, client health, troubleshooting and more. Although this information would be great to cover at some point, Colin doesn’t have time to focus on all that now—he really needs to just cut to the chase and focus in on the discovery and patching they’ve just implemented; he has a report-out meeting with his supervisor in 2 weeks and needs to impress! He calls his TAM straight away and requests a customised Chalk ‘n Talk session covering just discovery patching, and learns straight away that this will take a few weeks to get scheduled. Colin doesn’t have a few weeks and he now starts to panic. What can he do?? !!!
"Don't stress!", the Technical Account Manager reassures Colin. "A feature of your Premier Support agreement is the ability to have Advisory Calls with Microsoft engineers who are experts to specific platforms supported by Microsoft. I've got an engineer who can address those specific patching and discovery concerns you are having and offer advice to help keep you moving along with your SCCM roll-out. Let me get with the engineer and set up a phone conference to get those questions answered." With that Colin leaves the call with renewed confidence. He now feels relaxed and reassured that the meeting with his supervisor in 2 weeks will be a smashing success.
If you find yourself in a situation similar to Colin, get with your TAM straight away and they will find an engineer to come to your rescue, too. Or shoot an email to pssirl@microsoft.com for more information.