Many of our clients have employees that need to be connected to their mailboxes and their content stored in SharePoint at all times. More and more companies are moving to a distributed workforce, serving clients and their offices nationwide on a project basis. As this trend grows, the technology supporting it becomes the center of the business.

Last week I spoke with two employees of DiscoverReady, an interesting professional services company that is assisting their clients in their need to streamline the process and management of discovery. DiscoverReady has a unique team of process-driven attorneys, project managers and technology integrators committed to bringing order and efficiency to the challenging world of discovery. The company provides law firms and legal departments with effective discovery management solutions delivered by highly skilled professional resources. Founded in 2005, DiscoverReady is headquartered in New York City.

Discovery needs of the fortune 1,000 and now SMB’s are exploding thanks to new laws and increased regulation and oversight. Recent rulings known as The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are regulations governing civil procedure in United States district (federal) courts, that is, court procedures for civil suits. The most recent revisions, which took effect in December 2006, made practical changes to discovery rules to make it easier for courts and litigating parties to manage electronic records.

For hosting providers these new laws mean several things, including the need for clients to electronically store and archive their email files while having the ability to search them when needed. With the explosive growth of information being stored – it is estimated that over 80% of all corporate information is now in digital form http://www.onlinesecurity.com – and the platforms to store them on, the services that hosting providers enable, are often at the center of these investigations.

DiscoverReady uses Intermedia's SharePoint collaboration hosting platform to distribute and share information across the organization. With employees and client offices all over the U.S., SharePoint has become the critical link that ties the company together. The project manager that I spoke to creates the document workspaces and templates for storing project related files and reports. The technology and legal teams each have their information accessible wherever and whenever they need it.

DiscoverReady chose SharePoint as it not only suits their collaboration needs but is also cost-effective and integrated with their hosted Microsoft Exchange mailbox users, making it easy to have a secure and backed-up platform. With more and more business working online from disparate locations across the country, SharePoint is becoming an increasingly essential business tool. Microsoft recently announced year-over-year growth in SharePoint revenues of 35%.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform! Customers have been actively using SharePoint to enhance their businesses ability to collaborate, and enhance their business processes for years. WSS v3 takes the platform to the next level. If you have not looked at SharePoint in the last few years or at WSS v3, I encourage you to have a look.

This week I spoke to an Intermedia.NET Windows SharePoint Services customer. Cybernetic Learning Systems (CLS), a product technical training company, has been using Windows SharePoint services to manage consulting and training engagements with customers. They specialize in developing training for sales & marketing management, product management, and technology at global 1,000 companies. Today it is common for large corporations to bring in professionals to develop and implement a training program. CLS is also a vendor for other companies that need to supply a training component during an implementation.

If you can imagine, CLS is managing many projects and training programs for many companies at one time. One of their core uses of Windows SharePoint Services is to track projects, tasks and people. WSS is a world class, yet affordable solution that was simple to implement for the company. The templates included with SharePoint allowed CLS to quickly get started with managing their projects and clients. A SharePoint project site is a key component of each of their engagements.

They also use SharePoint to share documents with their partners and clients. Many of their clients already have intranets, however gaining access and creating a shared documents library can take a long time for a large company's IT team to set-up and create access profiles for. A secure WSS document sharing site can be created in a short time by CLS.

CLS has been an Intermedia.NET customer since the late 1990's. They have continued to evolve and grow and chose hosted Windows SharePoint services to solve a need. They told me that their core competency is training, and not managing servers and applications.

So, do you think SharePoint is a hosted application? To me, SharePoint is the ultimate SaaS platform - it's got all the core plumbing and features that are needed to build customizeable and scalable applications. With WSS v3, SharePoint has become a viable alternative. I attend the SharePoint user group meetings in NYC, and the buzz, user & developer interest and attendance is at the highest level ever!

I recently spoke to one of Intermedia.NET's customers, a Greenhouse & Nursery Pesticide Manufacturer. Our primary contact and the company's HR manager and Microsoft Exchange administrator was a great example of how the hosting industry is becoming more important and accessible to companies and end users every day.

Many companies in our industry tailor their marketing, products, support materials and user interfaces to one of three different end user groups - the technical professional, the non-technical small business owner or a combination of both. While some business models require one of these to be the primary target, it's important to consider the reality of modern business. Sometimes, the end user at a customer can change - in this case, from a grad student with a technical background to a non-technical HR manager. The hosting industry's audience is wide, so we should be doing more to design our products and services for a wider audience.

This particular customer's business is totally decentralized. They have employees all over the country, and one primary office. The management team and sales people are empowered to communicate from anywhere at any time through their BlackBerrys. With Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Web Access and BlackBerrys, Intermedia.NET is enabling the company to function in a virtual way - saving costs and increasing the productivity of a distributed workforce. The company contracts with another provider to assist with other services, such as desktop/application support and back up.

Our contact indicated that Intermedia.NET is always there when an employee needs assistance with the services we provide. The other provider is always available to assist when an employee needs desktop support. This customer depends on Intermedia.NET to run their business. Luckily for the company, its HR manager is interested in learning more about IT products that aren't necessarily within her position's domain.

However, there are a number of companies out there who must ask their office managers, HR departments or administrative employees to manage their outsourced technology and some of these people aren't as eager and able to learn as quickly as this particular HR manager. It is these people that the industry should really be keeping in mind when designing our products and services.

Do you, as a hosting company professional, see your company as providing more than just "Web site hosting" and "Email hosting"? Do think of your company as "The IT department"?