Early Adoption Programs Aid Product Development

Many Microsoft customers download betas of upcoming software for testing purposes, but only a select few are invited to participate in earlier and deeper testing and evaluation. Participants, who include both end customers and partners, get an unparalleled opportunity to influence the direction and feature sets of new software, and competition to get into pre-beta programs is often stiff. Participants who are selected must make a serious commitment to testing and feedback, and may be required to supply hardware and run beta software in production environments to give Microsoft the feedback it wants.

Early Adoption and Deployment Programs

For some time, Microsoft has used its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) to get early feedback on new products and give important customers a heads-up on what the company is doing in their areas of interest.

In general, TAPs occur earlier in the product development cycle than RDPs-usually, a TAP begins when product teams are seeking early feedback on which features are most important to customers. For example, the team developing Office Communications Server 2007 (which Microsoft sometimes refers to as “OCS”) started a TAP at about the time the team was considering how to work Voice over IP (VoIP) technology into the product and wanted early customer feedback on that scenario.