Two Microsoft Partners Receive Best In Show Recognition

The awards were presented during Friday's keynote address at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. CRN worked with Microsoft's partner team to recognize a special cadre of partners, based on almost a dozen criteria -- most notably customer satisfaction and solutions innovation.

It was difficult to choose from among the innovative awards entries, but two stood out in terms of innovation and their acute focus on the needs of the customer.

The first, Best in Show - Small Business, was awarded to IdealSoft, a Singapore-based solution provider that has been in business since March 1996. Not only did IdealSoft bring its customer, a waterproofing company called Uniseal, into the computer age by computerizing a set of manual accounting and operations processes, but it also helped it leap into the mobile world with an innovative wireless data-collection component. According to the customer, the solution has helped improve close rates, allowed it to tap new customer segments and dramatically cut administrative costs. Specific products used in the implementation included Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server 2000, Visual Studio .Net Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Great Plains, Hewlett-Packard iPaq PDAs, an Agere wireless access point and Nokia wireless cards.

The second award, Best In Show - Enterprise, was even tougher to pick. But what put Toronto-based DapaSoft's solution for the Province of Ontario on top was its ability to provide its solution under incredible time constraints - just three weeks. The patient screening system designed by DapaSoft for the Ontario Air Ambulance Base Hospital Program was developed to cope with crisis earlier this year surrounding SARS, or Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Healthcare facilities in Ontario now use the system to handle patient transfer requests through the hospital system.

Under the previous paper-based system, it took several hours to process these requests. The automated application provided by DapaSoft can provide responses in a matter of seconds for up to 1,200 transfer requests per day.

The solution was adapted from a mobile application being used for different purposes and is available to 1,000s of health-care workers in Ontario via Web browser or handheld device.

In the future, the solution is being extended with Microsoft MapPoint, to provide enhanced geographic reporting.

Microsoft recognized 16 partners at the conference this year with its own annual awards.

Next year, Microsoft executives said the company plans to introduce two new sets of awards: Customer Experience and Winning Customers awards. The first set of 35 awards will recognize solution providers delivering a high level of customer satisfaction while the second series will focus on competitive wins for certain types of solutions including server consolidation projects, Unix migration work, small business accounts and point of sale deployments.