New product ideas come from everywhere—customers, vendors, sales teams, competitive pressures, government regulations…you get the idea. Your product dreams are often bigger than your ability to productize and bring them to market. There is a proven way to see through the clutter and prioritize the winners: Listen to your customers.

At Intermedia, we help Web hosts, MSPs and other IT service providers bring their customers’ demands for better email, Web mail, wireless email and lightweight business applications to market. We prioritize new features and products based on real customer problems articulated to us. It sounds obvious, but too many companies launch new products and features that are not solving even a single problem for their customers. The product, and in some cases the company, are doomed to slow growth and failure since the market messaging never strikes a tone with a customer.

What drives Intermedia? Customer feedback about their business challenges. Two business problems we are asked to repeatedly assist with are productivity and security—primary issues that all businesses struggle with today. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo and AIM are great tools for communicating with others. We all use them, but using them at the office is becoming an issue for many businesses. From productivity problems to security problems to intellectual property leaks, public IM access at work is a problem.

After listening to our customers’ frequent requests, we recently launched a secure instant messaging solution based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This product idea was driven directly from our customers and is driving rapid adoption of this new service. In the end, this product will be successful because we are solving fundamental business problems with secure, business centric, instant messaging.

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!