Recently, I spoke to an employee at Point MultiMedia, a pre-trial consulting firm that specializes in audio and video services for law firms and court cases around the country.  The company is small, yet has wide experience and thousands of hours of experience in video depositions, to in-court technical support.  They are a customer of Intermedia’s messaging and collaboration services. 

Point MultiMedia has employees managing several clients at locations across the US at all times.  They depend on their access to email, to communicate with each other and their clients.  They use several different devices to connect to the Exchange 2007 service including Microsoft Outlook 2007, Outlook Web Access,  and BlackBerry’s.  All of these connections are secure, easy to use and reliable.  They also use Exchange’s public folders features, to store documents, files and have a company calendar.  They have also created distribution lists to consistently handle communication across the company’s employees. 

Recently Point MultiMedia signed up for Intermedia’s Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services account.  Doing so entitled them to a free copy of Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007, which was recently shipped to them.  While they have not yet built out a SharePoint site, they do have plans to do so in the near future.

Talking with this customer highlighted that existing customer's can sign-up for new services, yet take some time to start using them.  This demonstrates the benefits of communicating with existing customers on a regular basis.

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%.

Web and Application/SharePoint hosting is not a true "utility", like many seem to refer to our industry as. It's an evolving set of technology enablers that allow for the constant evolution of Web content and productivity applications to be developed. I can't think of any utilities that innovate at the rate that hosting companies, and the platforms that we enable for our customers, do. Both Microsoft and the open-source community continue to evolve the tools, frameworks, languages and applications that hosting customers use to develop new Web sites and applications.

Web 2.0 is here and many say Web 3.0 is here or just about to start. Web and application users around the world are becoming more sophisticated and have become accustomed to very rich interactive experiences as they interact with Web sites and Web applications. Today Web content needs to be interactive and driven by the AJAX experience. Web applications must be easy to use and engage the user. No longer will simple HTML pages and forms with frustrating validation interaction models suffice.

Yesterday I attended an event that Microsoft is sponsoring in three cities. (You may still be able to attend in Denver or Los Angeles). The massive Web 2.0 strategy that Microsoft has in place was neatly presented in a one-day event. There is no doubt, in my or the attendees' minds that Microsoft is just finishing the launch of the key technologies for the next generation of Web based experiences. Microsoft is once again re-invigorating the world of the designer and developer. The new Web 3.0 tools that they have recently launched are revolutionary. Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, IIS 7.0, the Expression Studio and its applications, some of recent plug-ins for Visual Studio 2005, and the pending next release of Visual Studio (code- named ORCAS), all have the potential to create a whole generation of Web sites and applications.

The toolset may just be the biggest enabler of the future. Designers and developers have always worked somewhat independently. For example, Photoshop and Visio designs and mock-ups did not always make it to a live implementation. But now with the Expression tools, all of these foundational technologies are accessible by both designers and developers, enabling them to work together. The new workflow that these tools enable between these two very different disciplines has the potential to bring about a whole new model for how Web sites and Web-based applications are developed. The beneficiaries of the results will be the Web hosting customer.

New beautiful and engaging Web sites. New beautiful and engaging Web-based applications. All to be hosted by Web hosts.

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!

This week I spoke to an Intermedia.NET Microsoft SharePoint hosting customer. The company specializes in training sommeliers and restaurateurs in the art of selling and upselling beverages to their clientele. They create customized training sessions, materials, wine lists and reports to help their clients increase profits and service quality.

They use Microsoft SharePoint to store all of the base materials that are used to customize the training program for each client. A separate SharePoint site is created for each client and in some cases the client is granted access to the SharePoint site. This assists the restaurateur to provide each new employee with a location to go to download, learn and keep track of the customized training materials.

Document storage, access and security are all important features for the client, and Microsoft SharePoint meets their needs. Because SharePoint is simple to use, and many hosting companies make SharePoint available to their clients, small businesses are able to access what was once only available to enterprises - expensive content management systems.

This customer has relationships with three companies in our industry. Their purchase decisions were all about timing - they bought what they needed from the provider that met their needs at the time. In this industry our customers depend on us to create a suite of services that work together while being the best in class solution available to them.

With the tremendous number of choices, in both providers and resellers, the best way to grow our business is through trust. Build trust with our customers and they will listen to us and buy from us. The services we provide are critical to the companies that we provide them to. Web sites, email, intranets and applications, and the technologies surrounding them, are all mission critical now. If we deliver on the promises we made at the time of sale, customers will buy more from us and hopefully move all of their accounts to one provider.