Your Technical Evangelist Helps You Get Where You’re Going

Do you know which Microsoft Technical Evangelist your team is working with? If not, or if you aren’t working with a MS evangelist – perish the thought! – you’re missing out on one of the most valuable relationships an ISV can have with MS.

Technical Evangelists are amazing people – they’re talented developers with uncontrollable curiosity who immerse themselves in new technologies long before they ship, exploring technical nooks and crannies before there’s reliable documentation. They work with the MS program managers, developers and testers for their product to develop a deep understanding of how it works, and why the product operates this way instead of that. They write sample code to prove (or disprove) their own understanding of how things work (or don’t).

Then they gather audiences of developers in cities across their region, explain the product they’re working on, write code on-stage to demo early product builds that are very likely to crash, do their best to answer every question that’s thrown at them, and share their passion for their product with their audience. When they’re done, the evangelist jumps on an airplane and does it all again in another city. Continue reading →

Photo via Detective Gadget

(In Stack Ranking Hurts Partners Too, I explained why “the right person” – the individual or team of people at MS whose objectives align with your needs – keeps themself hard to find, intentionally, and promised guidance on how you can find them anyway.)

A discussion on LinkedIn, “Getting run around – NO answers from Microsoft – any suggestions?”, is about trying to add a client company to the list of partners on a web page affiliated with the Microsoft Health Solutions Group. Situations like this come up frequently when dealing with MS, so I’ll use it as an example for finding “the right person”.

A MS participant in the discussion provided some insights specific to that thread – a change in strategy yielding Caradigm, a joint venture by the MS Health Solutions Group with GE Healthcare – then offered, “If you are still stuck, let me know and I’ll help you personally.” Continue reading →