‘Gold’ is soaring in value

No, not just the metal that backstops our currency, but also Microsoft “gold” partner status.

In November, Microsoft completely revamped its partner program to make it more meaningful and selective. They did away with the old, general “gold certified” classification and replaced it with a program that’s much more rigorous. They still use the term gold, but they’ve dramatically reduced the number of gold partners they’ll approve and made explicit where each partner’s expertise lies.

NewsGator is proud to announce it is among the first handful of companies to earn Gold certification under this new, more demanding program.

Microsoft partner certification is now broken into 30 competency categories. Just last week, we attained Gold in the independent software vendor (ISV) category as well as the in the portals and collaboration category. It wasn’t easy. We completed two months of meticulous testing to prove what everyone already knows: that NewsGator Social Sites is deeply integrated with SharePoint. We provided references to testify yet again to the social business results our customers have achieved with Social Sites. We opened up the books to document that more and more organizations are in the process of buying our products. And our people took written tests to demonstrate they’ve mastered the fine points of Microsoft and SharePoint.

In a sense, our achievement is hardly new. Our close and tremendously successful relationship with Microsoft is well documented. For years, we have been a depth-managed Microsoft partner, which is jargon for, well, Super Gold on Steroids.

But if someone’s raising a bar, we’ll jump at the chance to hurdle it. Because it’s important to us that you remain confident in your investments, be they gold or social computing solutions. Or in this case, both.