What Is Hosted Messaging?
Hosted Exchange is a rich messaging service you host using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The target market for Hosted Exchange includes small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs), small office/home office (SOHO) businesses. With tools for flexible business modeling, you can offer a broad range of services that go from basic e-mail up to higher value services, such as providing additional storage, hosting personal domains, and calendars.
What Is Collaboration?
Collaboration services enable users in your customer organizations to work together more efficiently. Version 4.5 of the solution provides Windows SharePoint Services Hosting, which allows you to host team Web sites for customers to use for sharing documents and other information.
Version 4.5 of the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration can enable service providers to offer the widest range of messaging services, starting with a basic, e-mail-only Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) client experience, and then adding incremental functionality in multiple OWA feature bundles up to a full Microsoft Outlook client that will run over the Internet through existing firewalls and routing infrastructure. This range of services will provide a flexible services path to drive incremental upsell value for every mailbox provisioned on the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration platform.
Version 4.5 of the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration also includes collaboration through the service enablement of MS Office Communications Server 2007 for PC to PC calling services and web conferencing.
Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5 offers service providers three key features:
Messaging:
Hosted Exchange is a rich messaging service that service providers host using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The target market for Hosted Exchange includes SMBs, small office/home office (SOHO) businesses, and individual consumers. With tools for flexible business modeling, service providers can offer a broad range of services that go from basic e-mail up to higher-value services such as providing additional storage and hosting personal domains and shared calendars and contacts.
Enhanced communications:
Office Communications Server 2007 manages all real-time (synchronous) communications, including instant messaging (IM) and audio and video conferencing. Office Communications Server 2007 also powers presence, a key benefit of Microsoft unified communications that unites all the contact information stored in the Active Directory service with the ways people communicate. With presence, users can see at a glance if someone is available and contact that person with a click using instant messaging, a voice call, or a video conference.
Collaboration:
Collaboration services enable users in customer organizations to work together more efficiently. Version 4.5 of the solution includes Hosted Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1, which allows service providers to host team Web sites that customers can use to share documents and other information. By using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 as a hosted solution, SMBs have the opportunity to take advantage of business application templates delivered to them as a service. The addition of these customizable application templates can be a significant differentiator for service providers who want to add value and create new revenue streams.
