Introducing the Azure Partner Readiness Catalog
by Frank Campise
US Partner Technology Strategist for Microsoft Azure
Read the Azure Partner Community blog posts and register to join our next community call on June 18.
When Microsoft Azure was first released a few years ago, one of the most consistent areas of feedback from partners was that there was just not enough Azure technical training and readiness resources available. Fast forward to today, and the amount of information, training, and materials about Azure can be overwhelming. The challenge you now have as a partner is in understanding what Azure resources are available to fit the needs of both your business and the technically-focused individuals in your organization.
The new Azure Partner Readiness Catalog can help. It follows a crowdsourced, trusted contributor model to provide you with a current view of the many Azure readiness options available to partners.
Azure Partner Readiness Catalog guiding principles
- Serve the Azure partner technical audience – The intended audience for this website is partner individuals who are in technical presales roles and technical roles, and who are interested in building and maintaining their Azure knowledge and skills to stay current.
- Crowdsourcing – It’s difficult for one person or team to identify all of the great technical information, training, and materials. So, we decided to ask the Azure community to help ensure that the right information is posted.
- Trusted content contributors – Today, the content contributors are Microsoft employees from around the world who are in Azure-focused technical roles. In the future, we see the potential to expand our group of trusted contributors to include Azure MVPs and technical leaders at partner organizations.
- Timely information – A catalog like this is useful only if it is current and relevant. Many times, doing an organic search returns results that include older content that is no longer relevant. With that in mind, content contributors are asked on a regular basis to re-verify that their Azure Partner Readiness Catalog entries are still accurate and current.
- Catalog, not repository – This tool is not intended to be a repository for content. Instead, this is a searchable catalog that takes you to the original source of the content. Rather than replacing current Azure training and readiness sites, it’s a way to find those sites and take advantage of the wealth of offerings available.
Search capabilities
The Azure Partner Readiness Catalog offers these search capabilities to help you find the Azure technical resources you need.
- Free text
- Type – search by content format, like eBook, video, website, tool, etc.
- Technical level – search for level 100, 200, 300, or 400 content
- Language – the catalog is intended for a global audience, and while most content is in English, there are also listing for several other languages
- Source – search based on content source, like MSDN, Channel 9, Virtual Academy, YouTube, Ignite, etc.
- Feature/Service – Search for content about specific Azure features/services, like App Service, Azure Active Directory, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Web Apps, etc.)
Shareable URLs – one of my favorite features of this catalog is that your search information is encoded in the URL so that you can share that specific search with a friend, or save it for later use to check for new content. Click this link to see my search for Ignite 2015 level 300 sessions about Azure Active Directory or Azure App Service.
Give it a try
Go to the Azure Partner Readiness Catalog and give it a try today.
Give us your feedback – if you have general comments about the catalog, an idea for a new feature, or want to suggest a resource to be added to the catalog, click the Contact us link at the bottom right of the catalog site to submit it.
Azure Partner Community resources
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Previous Azure Partner Community topics
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- Part 1 – Introduction
- Part 2 – How CRM Online helps increase Azure adoption and usage
- Part 3 – How to start your CRM Online practice
- Part 4 – Dynamics CRM Online futures, vision, and customer studies with Azure
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- Part 3 – Signature Cloud Support for Azure
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- Part 1 – Introduction and RemoteApp
- Part 2 – Azure Site Recovery
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- Part 2 – Virtual Machine Management and developer tools
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