Hot off the press: updated Gold Competency Revenue Guidelines.

The big news is that in order to ensure that we have the most accurate revenue measurements in place, we are delaying measuring gold competency revenue until October 2012 (as opposed to beginning in October 2011). This delay will also give you more time to prepare to meet the gold competency revenue requirement. Detailed information is in the updated Gold Competency Revenue Guidelines.

What does this mean for you?

This means that until October 2013, you will continue with the same process that is in place today – agreeing to meet a minimum Microsoft revenue amount based on your respective geography and gold competency. Agreeing to the revenue amount will still take place during the gold competency enrollment process.

What happens when the requirement goes into effect?

Beginning October 2012, we will start to measure actual gold competency revenue attainment. Partners will need to meet the revenue amount by their next membership renewal date that occurs after October 2013, for which there has been a year to measure revenue achievement.

For example a partner with a membership renewal date of January 2014 will need meet the actual gold competency revenue amount by the time of membership renewal in January 2014 (as competency revenue begins to be measured starting October 2012 and this partner will have had a year to achieve the revenue amount).

Other changes include:

• Slight changes to minimum revenue amounts
• Eligible products for each competency are now listed in the Appendix of the Guide
• More detailed answers have been provided to the frequently asked questions

Questions? Contact your nearest Regional Service Center or your account manager / account specialist.

Q8 campaign by These Days runs on Windows Azure

These Days, a respected and well-known innovative digital marketing agency in Belgium and Microsoft partner, realized a campaign for the petroleum company Q8. Customers can register online and win free petrol.

The campaign is available through www.q8fuel.be. You simply need to register and for every fill at a Q8 station you get an additional chance at winning free petrol. If you’re lucky, you could even get one year of free petrol at Q8 ! All prizes add up to more than 50.000 € of petrol.

In order to secure the scalability and availability of the web application, These Days made advantage of the Windows Azure Platform to build, host and scale the application.

The Windows Azure platform allows to focus on development and not infrastructure: there’s no need to buy servers or dedicate resources to infrastructure management and automated service management shields you from hardware failure and routine maintenance.

These days has profound existing skills with Visual Studio and .NET to build compelling applications so they went for a complete Microsoft stack. Nothing stops you however from building apps in Java, PHP or Ruby using Eclipse or other tools.

Everything you might want to learn about  the Windows Azure Platform is also bundled in one single training kit with videos, demos, code, labs, etc.

If you want to get started with the Windows Azure Platform but still have questions/remarks, don’t hesitate to contact agency@microsoft.com.