Meet Microsoft Australia's new Office 365 boss

Microsoft Australia has appointed 15-year veteran Sharon Schoenborn as its new director of Office, as part of a reshuffle of some top partner executives.

Schoenborn joined Microsoft in 2001 following its acquisition of Great Plains Software, which became Microsoft’s Dynamics GP business. During her time with the software company, she has worked across a breadth of markets, including commercial, consumer and public sector.

Prior to the Office move, Schoenborn was Microsoft's state director for Queensland and the Northern Territory, and most recently director of sales and marketing for OEM channel.

Meanwhile, the role of Microsoft SMB and hosting director, which had been held by Samantha Zammit, has been split in two, with Zammit appointed hosting director of focus on MSPs and former Office boss Steven Miller now the SMB director.

"Given the importance of managed service provider growth that we are seeing, particularly with CSP [the Cloud Solution Provider program], we took a decision to separate that back out again," said Microsoft Australia director of partner business Phil Goldie.

Microsoft product marketing manager Michelle Markham has also moved into the channel team, being appointed as a partner sales excellence lead.

Office focus

Schoenborn, who spoke to CRN during the vendor's Australia Partner Conference (APC), said she was most looking forward to customers looking beyond providing a collaboration platform and into the opportunities in organisational change management.

“In terms of our value proposition, there are three million customers in Australia that have access to the Office 365 platform today, so I think that’s a great reflection of just how our customers have responded to our capabilities,” said Schoenborn.

“When I think of that, that’s opportunity for our partner channel to help those customers consume across each of the capabilities beyond the core workloads of cloud email, but into collaboration with Yammer, Skype for Business and the more advanced capabilities that are helping to change the way people are working together as teams.”

Looking ahead, Schoenborn said she’s looking forward to Office 365’s new capabilities around cloud voice, particularly with Microsoft’s push to reinvent how businesses conduct meetings.

“When you think of how the intuitive nature of Skype for Business and being able to schedule a meeting within Outlook and knowing that people inside the organisation and outside connecting naturally and then having that as a video conference, combined with our Surface Hub, thinking of having that in the meeting room…those are just some of the examples of being able to make people feel as though there are no barriers of distance placed in the way when we look to collaborate.”

Schoenborn appointment creates a vacancy for an OEM channel director, and Microsoft is currently recruiting to fill the position, hunting someone with "extensive deep channel experience", according to the job advertisement.

The OEM channel director will "own and build relationships with silicon partners as well as the China technology ecosystem", read the advertisement.

Microsoft is currently on a recruitment drive as part of the new global strategy to build 'practice development units' that will help channel partners diversify into more profitable areas.

The authors attended Microsoft APC as guests of Microsoft.