Below the level of enterprise partners who negotiate custom contracts with Microsoft are hundreds of thousands of partners whose basic relationships with Microsoft are governed by the Microsoft Partner Program (MSPP).

The MSPP has evolved from more than 10 years of formal Microsoft partnership programs and is the most ambitious effort yet to provide a structure for Microsoft partnerships. (For a look at earlier versions, see the sidebar “A Brief History of Microsoft Partner Programs“.)

The current program was announced in 2003, and 2004 was a transitional year in which partners were automatically members of both the old and new programs. That enabled them to see how the two programs compared and to see any steps they would need to take to maintain their current relationship with Microsoft when the new program officially started on Jan. 1, 2005. Some partners were grandfathered at their partner tier in 2005, but after Jan. 1, 2006, all partners have had to follow the general partner program rules to qualify or requalify at a particular partner tier.

Below the level of enterprise partners who negotiate custom contracts with Microsoft are hundreds of thousands of partners whose basic relationships with Microsoft are governed by the Microsoft Partner Program (MSPP).

The MSPP has evolved from more than 10 years of formal Microsoft partnership programs and is the most ambitious effort yet to provide a structure for Microsoft partnerships. (For a look at earlier versions, see the sidebar “A Brief History of Microsoft Partner Programs“.)

The current program was announced in 2003, and 2004 was a transitional year in which partners were automatically members of both the old and new programs. That enabled them to see how the two programs compared and to see any steps they would need to take to maintain their current relationship with Microsoft when the new program officially started on Jan. 1, 2005.

One significant exception was the group of partners engaged in sales of Great Plains business management products, which were incorporated into a new division called Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) after Microsoft acquired the company in 2001. Although the Microsoft partner program had relatively low barriers to entry and partners made most of their money from deployment and consulting services rather than software sales, the Great Plains channel had higher fees and strict training requirements for partners, who generated most of its software revenues. A similar situation existed for partners of Navision, a Danish business management software company Microsoft acquired and incorporated into MBS in 2002. These acquisitions resulted in a smaller group (approximately 6,000 worldwide) of highly qualified partners for whom software sales were a significant portion of their overall revenues. Because of these differences, Microsoft has moved slowly in integrating the MBS partners into the MSPP, and their transition will not be completed until mid-2005. (For more information about the MBS transition, see the sidebar “MBS Partner Transition“.)