The initiative will be announced this week as Microsoft prepares to release Service Pack 2, a significant update to Windows XP, later this summer. "It's a huge service opportunity for a partner," said Hassall, noting that Microsoft wants to dispel customers' notion that what they have on the desktop is good enough. "We're only at 30 percent of [Windows XP] licenses being deployed to date. The majority [of corporate customers] have licenses for Windows and Office [upgrades], but they haven't deployed it."
To that end, Microsoft plans to launch sub-competencies and other tools and prescriptive guidance to reduce the cost of deployment, one major obstacle to adoption.
The first sub-competency will qualify enterprise partners on a solution accelerator for business desktop deployment that vastly reduces the cost of PC deployment and provisioning for Windows XP and Office 2003. The enterprise edition, as it is known, will enable a "zero-touch" deployment for large customers that is fully automated using Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 and requires no manual intervention by customers.
The second sub-competency is a "lite touch" deployment accelerator for solution providers serving customers in the midmarket space.
The company also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.
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