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Announcing Cortana Intelligence Solution Evaluation Tool

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NOTE: The Cortana Intelligence Solution Evaluation Tool has been discontinued as of May 2018. The process of onboarding eligible apps to AppSource has been simplified and we do not need results from this tool prior to onboarding Microsoft AI SaaS apps to AppSource. Some of the documentation below may have been removed and such links may no longer work as a result. 

 

This post is authored by Avi Bathula, Senior Program Manager Lead, and Jamie Olson, Senior Software Engineer, on the Microsoft Cloud & AI Ecosystem team.

Most of you know about Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence and how solutions/apps built with Cortana Intelligence are already helping organizations transform their data into actionable insights. As noted in the linked blog post, AppSource is a single destination for Business Decision Makers (BDMs) to discover and seamlessly try business apps built by partners and verified by Microsoft. In May 2017 AppSource onboarded Office apps, expanding its opportunity space to over 100 million commercial workers.

In recent months, the Cloud and AI ecosystem team has evaluated and onboarded ~26 Cortana Intelligence solutions to AppSource spanning various functions and industry verticals. For more information on onboarding and the evaluation process, see the Cortana Intelligence AppSource publishing guide.

Ensuring High-Quality Solutions for Customers

We’re excited to announce the public preview for the Cortana Intelligence solution evaluation tool – an automated assessment of advanced analytics solutions for Microsoft’s recommended best practices allowing partners to get actionable feedback on how their solutions fare and pointers to how to address gaps.

Thanks to Neal Analytics (see Neal Analytics Inventory Optimization), Saviant Consulting (see SEAP)  & Brillio (see Brillio Optimix) for giving valuable feedback and helping us bring it to market.

Going forward, we will need partners to run this tool against their solution and submit the generated report as part of onboarding to AppSource.

Simplifying Best Practices for Microsoft Partners

The Cortana Intelligence solution evaluation tool provides an easy-to-use workflow to ensure your solution is consistent with Microsoft recommendations across the range of Cortana Intelligence products and services. All you need to do is sign into your Azure account and identify an existing deployment of your solution, and the tool will assess that instance using your Azure account.

CIML_1

There are a variety of different assessment criteria that you can review here. The tool will identify the relevant criteria for your solution’s components and let you know whether you’re consistent with the recommendation. Any inconsistencies will direct you to the appropriate documentation.

CIML_2

So, if you have a solution leveraging Cortana Intelligence platform:

Jamie & Avi