So there's been a lot of noise around the place lately about the SBSC PALs that have been "appointed" by Microsoft. There's not yet been an official announcement yet - I believe this will be coming around September. I figured it was time I came clean and 'fessed up that I'm the Australian SBSC PAL for 2007/2008.

What does this mean? What is an SBSC PAL? What does this mean to you? - All good questions.

There has already been a fair bit of explaination of the SBSC PALs by other PALs around the world so rather than regurgitate all the great work they've done you can read their view of things on their blogs. See:

Vijay Riyait blog: http://www.iqubed.biz/blog
Mark Crall: http://sbsc.techcareteam.com/

Elisabeth Vanderverlt: http://elisabethcanadaiamcp.spaces.live.com/

There are more blog sites for the other PALs - I'll need to update my list as I get them together.

You can also listen to this Vladcast I did on July 30: http://www.vladville.com/2007/07/vladcast-episode-9-pal-program-with-vijay-riyat-and-dean-calvert.html.

Essentially I don't see my role in the IT community changing radically. I will continue to work hard to improve the overall IT community as best as I can (with what available time I have) but I guess now I can have a bit louder voice into Microsoft about what we all want to see done to improve things for SBSCs and ultimately for our clients.

For the Australian SBSCs out there, I want to hear from you about what you would like to see changed to make it easier for you to serve your clients. Be realistic here - if I go back to Microsoft telling them that the SBSCs collectively had said that giving them a million dollars each is going to make things truly amazing I think we'll lose some credibility!

I communicate regularly with the other SBSC PALs around the world (we're using Groove at the moment - very cool stuff) so we can certainly get some momentum going around the world that could see great change.

SBSCs - it's time for us to raise our collective voices and be heard. Let me know what you want and we'll see what can be done.