A while ago, we talked about Microsoft offering different certifications in the field of Microsoft technologies. We discussed how it is possible to get certified directly from Microsoft for higher certifications such as MCSE and even for smaller office automation software such as Microsoft Office. This post expands on the previous post by providing where to prepare for Microsoft certifications the best way. It explains what is Microsoft Learning Partner and how to become a Microsoft Learning Partner, the requirements and how to find one near your location.
- Microsoft Silver Partner Requirements
- Microsoft Silver Partnership Benefits Login
- Microsoft Gold Certification Requirements
- Microsoft Silver Partnership Benefits And Side Effects
Microsoft Learning Partner
Microsoft Learning Partners, as is evident from the name, are partners of Microsoft who provide training to people willing to excel in Microsoft technologies. The partners can be a company or an individual who has undergone vigorous training on different Microsoft products and technologies and after passing a tough exam, is now certified to provide training directly in person or via online technologies.
The Silver and Gold logos are only available to Silver and Gold partners, respectively. The listing is standard for Action Pack and prioritized for Silver and Gold partnerships. Microsoft Partner Incentives: Microsoft offers incentives to increase its partners’ profitability and growth. You’ll get these incentives regardless of whether you do your business on the cloud, on-premises, or elsewhere. Microsoft Hikes Gold Competency Fee by 38 Percent. Microsoft will raise the fee required for U.S. Partners to achieve the gold level of most competencies on Nov. 19 to $5,260. The new price represents a 38 percent increase over the old fee of $3,800. The fee for a silver competency in the United States remains $1,850. May 03, 2011 The Value of Silver. Benefits are greatly enriched such as free deal support (pre-sales) for deals $3K as well as additional deployment support. Pre-sales support can quickly give you the confidence to discuss capabilities, value props and key benefits of Microsoft products and solutions. Did you know that there are there over 650,000 partners. Partner Advisory Hours. As you can see in the chart above, partners earning the Silver Small Business competency will receive 20 Partner Advisory Hours and those earning the Gold Small Business competency will earn 50 Partner Advisory Hours. This of Partner Advisory Hours as currency used to access certain key services offered to members of the Microsoft Partner Network. License Tables for Competency Partners. Refer to the Microsoft Partner Network programs guide for important policy details regarding license use rights and limitations about each software product or online service. Your organization must comply with the use terms outlined in the Microsoft Partner Network programs guide. The Microsoft Partner Program offers software and developer license benefits for partners via MSDN subscription. In alignment with the Visual Studio® 2005 with MSDN® Subscription launch, the Microsoft Partner Program will reflect the new offerings to partners, with the intent of providing a neutral or positive change in these benefits.
There are a range of exams offered by Microsoft partners and almost all of them are online. Microsoft Learning Partners offer help and training to students willing to appear for the examinations and assist them in taking exams for being certified.
Benefits of Learning Through Microsoft Learning Partners
Microsoft Silver Partner Requirements
Although it is true that you can prepare for the exams independently, there are certain benefits available only to the students learning under Microsoft Learning Partners.
Read:Benefit of Microsoft Certifications.
It takes less time to prepare for examinations. Microsoft says it takes one to five days for learning a skill without missing out on the essentials of any software. Obviously, this statement seems valid for one application, rather than a suite of applications required in higher Microsoft certifications. The students will gain a level of proficiency that is available only via hands on labs, simulations and real-world applications of skills.
Students will be learning more than what the syllabus covers and without any additional stress. Learning from Microsoft Learning Partners will provide you with material that you can access long after you have been certified or passed the examinations.
In short, the Microsoft Learning partners are provided with tools that other institutes cannot lay hands on – such as training material straight from Microsoft, internal tools and more. They use these tools to train you on the type of certification you wish. Thus, they are better than learning individually or by joining just any institute that provides similar courses.
Besides the tools provided by Microsoft Learning Partners, you can visit the Born To Learn community and get access to many other resources that you might use in preparing and consulting for the exams. You can discuss with fellow students and check out how your progress compares to others.
How to find a Microsoft Learning Partner near you
Microsoft has a page dedicated to locating Microsoft Learning Partners in your area. You have to enter the details such as city, province, zip code and the range of perimeter within which, you wish to locate a Microsoft Learning partner. You can access the Microsoft Learning Partner Location page by clicking here.
How to become a Microsoft Learning Partner
If you have good command over Microsoft technologies and a flair for training, you may consider becoming a Microsoft Learning Partner to provide training to students aspiring for Microsoft certifications. Learning Partners are classified as Silver Partners and Gold Partners. There are certain pre-requisites to become a Microsoft Learning Partner. If you meet the requirements, you can fill up the form and pay the required fee to start yourself as a Microsoft Learning Partner. The details on how to become a Microsoft Learning partner are available here. If you are already a training institute, taking up the program can enhance your business in many ways.
Now read:How to become a Microsoft Partner.
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Some questions that I get frequently from partners from time to time go something like these:
What licenses do we get as a Microsoft Partner
Which competencies get me access to which software licenses?
What is the difference in licenses included between all the levels in MPN?
What is the difference in licenses included between the silver and gold competencies?
The intention of this is to give you a comprehensive overview of Internal Use Rights. You can also download this guide by going to www.yammer.com/cdnwpc
What benefits are there to using these licenses?
One of the key benefits of subscribing to a Microsoft Action Pack or attaining a competency is the access to different internal use software licenses, enabling you to use the latest Microsoft on-premise, hybrid and cloud technologies. By assigning the licenses to as many relevant users in your organization as possible you will be able to:
- Help increase productivities of your sales and marketing teams
- Enable your staff to become familiar and knowledgeable about the products and increase credibility when talking to customers
- Perform internal development and testing on latest technology
- Reduce the cost of running your internal business
- Get dedicated Partner Support to help deploy your IUR licenses
- Sell approximately 3 times larger deal size compared to partners who do not use their IURs
What licenses do we receive as a Microsoft Partner?
As a Gold or Silver Partner you will receive licenses based on core and competency.
- “Core:” Partners receive a “core” set of software license benefits upon attaining their first Silver competency or Gold competency. Core software licenses (typically up to 25 for Silver competency and 100 for Gold competency) include the latest desktop, operating system and server software. Core and competency benefits are renewable annually upon re-enrollment.
- “Competency:” Partners receive additional, specific licenses that align to a particular competency once they attain that competency.
- “Total:” This is the total number of licenses you have access to based on the quantity you receive in your core set of licenses plus your competency specific licenses you receive based on the attainment of the specific competencies you have chosen in the tool.
See the table above: https://aka.ms/comptable
Microsoft Action Pack partners receive a set of standard licenses based on your enrollment into the program.
See the table above: https://aka.ms/comptable
The Microsoft IUR License table will give you an overview of which licenses you receive by which competency
Action Pack license table
Competency license table
Competency license table
How to find my license benefits and view the licensing statement?
How do you view your own specific licenses? You can do this by signing into the Microsoft Partner Network and accessing the License statement
To view your license benefits and licensing statement, you must first log in with a Microsoft account that has administrator permissions. Visit the Digital Distribution Portal. Once signed in, click Licensing Information and see the summary tab.
What program permissions do I need to access our Internal Use rights
To access your organization’s IUR benefits, you’ll need download permissions. Psp cfw 6.60 pro c2 download. These can be granted by your Microsoft Partner Network administrator.
The types of rights include:
- Software download: Ability to download software
- View keys: Product keys and tokens for online services
- View license statement: The organization’s software and online services license grants
- MSDN subscriptions: Access to MSDN subscription benefits
Non-program administrator
Once you are signed in, you can check what rights your administrator has set up for you, or you can contact your program administrator to request rights.
For complete details, refer to the following resource:
Program end-user guide
Program end-user guide
Program administrator
If you are a program administrator for your organization, learn how to assign the privileges required for access to software and cloud services.
How to locate a product key
- Go to the Access My Software page. This page requires a Microsoft account (formerly known as a Windows Live ID) to access.
- Click Software Download. This requires administrator permissions or an administrator to grant permissions through the Partner Membership Center.
- Click Downloads and Keys.
Tell me more about Azure Internal Use Rights
Microsoft Azure internal use rights (IURs) gives you the tools you need to develop, test, and deploy cost-effective storage, computing and networking solutions for your customers. With Azure, you’ll have access to Microsoft’s unmatched collection of integrated cloud computing services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web— to help your customers move faster, achieve more and save money.
By using your IURs, you’ll see first-hand how Azure tackles three essential workloads: storage, computing and networking.
- Azure lets you offer seamless integration of storage solutions that consolidate primary storage, archive, backup and disaster recovery, while reducing total cost of ownership by up to 80%*.
- With Azure, you can quickly and easily provision virtual machines and host apps in the cloud, allowing you and your customers to scale up or down as needed while paying only for the capacity that is actually used.
- Azure Web Services allow you to quickly design and deploy highly scalable, redundant custom web sites with zero capital investment.Use the Azure Calculator to determine the costs for your own usage scenario.Map this against your internal use rights entitlement using your Partner Summary ReportUse the following resources to start using your internal use rights today and participate in the AzureCon Challenge to win prizes!
Tell me more about O365 Internal Use Rights
Office 365 internal use rights give your team first-hand experience of the benefits of using the cloud to tackle real-world business challenges, and help them develop the confidence they need to sell, deploy and support the solution that has become Microsoft’s fastest growing business.
As one of your Microsoft Partner Network benefits you are entitled to at least 5 free seats of Office 365 to use within your business. You can check your Office 365 entitlement using your Partner Summary Report.
Benefits of Office 365
Enjoy a full Office experience across PCs, Macs, Windows tablets, iPad and Android tablets, and most mobile devices.
- Files are stored online, so you can share them with anyone, even co-author, in real time no matter where you are.
- With Office 365, updates are included in your subscription, so your Office applications are always up to date.
- Office Online lets you create and edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel documents right in a web browser.
- Deploy and manage Office 365 across your company with no IT expertise required.
- Cutting-edge security practices safeguard your data and protect your privacy.The following resources can help to activate and assign your licenses:
- IUR eligible partners can also use the SkyKick Migration Suite to migrate their business to Office 365 fast, easy and free. Find out more about this offer here or register for our Skykick webinar for more information and the chance to ask any questions that you may have.Tell me more about CRM OL Internal Use Rights
With IURs that give you access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you’ll have cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities that help your sales, marketing, and customer care teams work together to improve sales processes, deliver amazing customer experiences and maximize your revenue.
In addition to reducing your overhead costs and improving the performance of your own sales, marketing and support teams, using CRM Online IURs will allow you to show customers the real world benefits that come from extending CRM solutions to the cloud. You will be able to demonstrate the benefits of enhanced communication, more collaboration and increased productivity. For example, adding social and mobile access capabilities to CRM increases productivity of sales people by 26.4%.
Demand for CRM solutions is growing at double-digit rates as organizations of all sizes seek ways to shorten sales cycles, reduce administrative costs and improve customer experiences. Adding Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to your practice will give you a platform to demonstrate value-added CRM solutions that can give your business a profitable source of recurring revenues.
Benefits of CRM
- Maximize ROI by automating processes that nurture customer relationships and boost satisfaction across marketing, sales and service.
- Use mobile CRM apps and platforms to manage customer relationships on mobile devices.
- Integrate data and reporting from social media directly into your CRM application, and automatically create sales leads and opportunities based on social posts.
- Use analytics to identify patterns and make customer engagement predictive and personalize customer experiences.
- Streamline marketing operations and manage projects, digital assets, workflows, and approval processes all from a single platform.
- Enable customer service engagements across web, social, chat, email, mobile, and phone, including customer self-service and social care.
- Tell me more about MSDN
Do you want to build apps that run on Windows, Azure, SQL Server or other Microsoft platforms? Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription is the best way to get exactly what you need for your next challenging project (relevant to MAPS and competency only).
Learn how to activate MSDN subscription
Watch a video on how to activate MSDN subscription
Watch a video on how to navigate MSDN
Learn how to activate MSDN subscription
Watch a video on how to activate MSDN subscription
Watch a video on how to navigate MSDN
What changes have you made the to Internal Use Rights model?
Cloud Platform: Incrementally adding to the $100 a month both Silver and Gold receive, Silver partners have access to $6000 in bulk credits and Gold partners have access to $12,000 in bulk credits
How do other partners use their licenses?
We have some great insights from our partners on how they use their licenses to run their business, save costs, grow their business and so on. To read more about these click here.
Databind:
Activating the IUR has benefited us in several key ways:
Enabled us to greatly improve our internal systems while reducing operational effort/costs
Allowed us to gain invaluable firsthand experience about cloud adoption and usage
Enabled us to showcase cloud benefits to customers directly via our own adoption and usage
We use the IUR for all our operational needs, both internal (e.g. email, document management, project management, personal file storage, collaboration between team members, CRM pipeline management, etc) and customer facing (e.g. online meetings, extranet, etc). While we did have many of these systems implemented on-premise before, we have now wholly embraced the cloud and in addition to the obvious operational benefits offered by the cloud, we’ve found that it has enabled some new customer service modes such as our extranet for contract management and support
I would say that other partners should definitely activate their IUR ASAP – its arguably the most valuable MPN benefit. – Mike Hellinga, President, Databind
Imason:
Our MSDN subscriptions that come with our MPN membership are important to our developers for their own learning and internal development initiatives. It keeps our team current with Microsoft technologies – we can speak intelligently about the use of the tools with our customers. We can all demo the breadth of the productivity tools. We can highlight opportunities for usage in key business scenarios when we are talking to prospects and customers. Our own team is more productive, can collaborate easily on project work and they can test solutions for customers in a ‘safe’ environment within our own domain.
It saves us money, allows us to stay on the latest and greatest technologies from Microsoft and we can try the newest solutions out generally before our customers do. this allows us to pre-empt any problems they may face when upgrading. Our organizational philosophy is to “always lead”. This means we need to keep current and by using our IUR we do just that. - Vicki Thompson, Managing Partner, Imason
What offers are available to help me deploy these licenses internally?
SkyKick O365 Offer
What is SkyKick?
Microsoft Silver Partnership Benefits Login
SkyKick’s Migration Suite is an application that automates 90% of your migration to Office 365, from planning to PC set up. Because data migration and set up are done prior to moving the DNS record, there’s no downtime, less risk, and you maintain control of the project and your data. The SkyKick Outlook Assistant updates your users’ computers, migrates local data, retains your users’ Outlook settings, and connects to Office 365 automatically. From an end-user perspective, the move is seamless, with no downtime. See the video.
Five benefits for partners
Microsoft Gold Certification Requirements
- Reduce the overall time of a typical migration from 40 hours to 4 hours
- Plan and manage multiple migrations at the same time from a single platform
- Data migration is done in advance, mitigating risk and giving you more control of the project
- Deploying the Migration Suite internally prepares your team to deploy Office 365 for your customers with the same speed and ease
- Using Office 365 internally will help your team become familiar with the solution, resulting in increased efficiencies, sales, and profitability
How do I get started
- Begin by activating your activating your Office 365 IURs
- Visit the SkyKick Migration Offerpage and follow the prompts
- Migrate!
Need help? See SkyKick’s FAQ at the bottom of the page, here
- Learn more about this offer: www.skykick.com/IUR
Azure IUR SkyKick Cloud Backup Offer
Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) has teamed up with SkyKick to give you FREE use of the SkyKick Cloud Backup for Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.
Start
Activate your MPN IUR benefits. Then activate and setup your Azure storage tenant. Need help? Follow a step-by-step guide.
Register
Sign up for instant access to SkyKick Cloud Backup. Get questions answered fast with the Learning Center and SkyKick webinars.
Backup
Start using SkyKick Cloud Backup for Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business!
Learn more about this offer here: https://www.skykick.com/azureiur
I still have more questions, who do I speak to?
If you have questions that have not been addressed here, refer to the Frequently Asked Questions online. You can also refer to the Partner Support Community page, or contact your local Regional Service Center @ 1800 MPN SOLV
Troubleshooting and Support
Troubleshooting download issues
Microsoft Silver Partnership Benefits And Side Effects
Use the FAQ to find answers to your questions about downloading your Microsoft software benefits, including how the digital distribution program works, physical media choices, and important policies.
Troubleshooting post-download issues (product key, activation, etc.)
For partners with competencies:
For partners with competencies:
Which products require product activation? What do I need to know about product activation?
Product activation is required for Windows Server and client operating systems and all Microsoft Office client applications. Product keys for these products are issued with a finite number of activations. This means that each time a machine is activated, one of the product activations for that particular product key is consumed; this includes situations in which the same machine is reimaged and activated. For this reason, the number of licenses your organization is entitled to and the number of activations it has been assigned are not the same. You should not activate learning, development lab, and demonstration computers that are frequently reimaged. Instead, for these computers, you should use the initial grace periods combined with the rearm functionality. For specific details, refer to the Partner Volume Activation Guide.
For Microsoft Action Pack subscribers:
What happens after I have activated the product key?
The product keys provided with the Action Pack subscriptions allow a limited number of activations. Licenses are consumed when a product key is activated in one of the following ways:
- If the software is installed on the same machine with no changes made to the hardware, the product activation counts as one license.
- If the software is installed on the same machine with changes made to the hardware, the product activation counts as a new license.
- If the software is installed on a different machine, the product activation counts as a new license.You can also refer to the Partner Support Community page, or contact your local Regional Service Center @ 1800 MPN SOLVMore Links and information
Your Microsoft Partner Network page is your best resource for all your partnership information. The new guide to Partnership covers a host of topics. Here are some links below to continue your IUR journey.