There’s so much happening in the channel, it can be hard to keep up. But that’s what we are here for, delivering your top stories countdown at the first of every month.

Our most popular articles in July run the gamut. First, “people on the move” proved to catch your eye; new channel chiefs – both familiar names – took the reins at Masergy and Vonage. You wanted to know how their decisions will impact their respective partner programs.

Speaking of personnel, you were surprised to learn that a big channel exec at CenturyLink stepped away. Also, we honored the top executives of 2020 in our second annual Top Gun 51 list.

There is other news here — some good, some not so great. ScanSource announced 200 layoffs, and you wanted to see in particular how the news might impact master agent Intelisys. Elsewhere, on the technology front, Microsoft got ready to roll out a new function for its popular Teams unified communications offer. Let the UC wars continue!

But those are just a handful of stories you can expect to see on our top stories countdown from July.

Want to know how we determine what qualifies for our top stories countdown? It’s simple. We review online page views and combine the results with the popularity of articles in our weekly newsletters. That means if you want to “vote,” if you will, sign up for the channel’s most popular newsletter. We deliver it to your inbox on Wednesday mornings.

Click through our gallery below to see which story was No. 1 in July. Then, if you missed the previous month’s top stories, click here to see our most-read posts in June.

Follow executive editor @Craig_Galbraith on Twitter.