Cobweb

25gb Mailboxes – who needs them?

Interesting to see that BPOS is offering 25gb mailboxes with their latest offering of Online Exchange. Having been in the Hosted Email business for 9 years we have a pretty good understanding of the market and many of our customers are getting more and more concerned with the important company data that is stored in the silos that are the employee's mailboxes. This is why we have a strong uptake for our email archiving services that take a copy of every mail and store it in a separate location that is, controlled, searchable (with strict access permissions) giving the company at least some power over their data. So why would you give your people 5 or 10 times the space to make the problem 5 or 10 times worse. Many of our customers use the mailbox restrictions as a blunt instrument to control this and this is often a drive to go hosted. At Cobweb we have a saying for the technology we use "right tool for the right job", i.e. should you use Excel, word or InfoPath to capture data? Should you use Word or PowerPoint to share data, and more importantly should you use Outlook or SharePoint to store and share company data? - In my view Outlook (with Exchange) is the best business grade communications tool around, but is not a data management tool, searching in Outlook? – I will say no more.

And now for the technology – 25gb Mailboxes on Exchange 2007? – Microsoft's own admission is NO! You want a 25GB mailbox on BPOS then you will have to use OWA. Outlook 2007 has a 100,000 item limit. It will NOT work with a 25gb mailbox. That's why ALL Hosted Exchange providers limit mailbox sizes, it's not because we are to mean to buy more disks for additional storage it's because the user experience degrades as the mailbox sizes increases. Exchange 2010? Let's wait a see...

So a marketing gimmick? Until 2010 for sure, to compete with Google, so sure, giving their customers what they need, absolutely not. Cobweb shall carry on providing our customers with the best support around, a range of SaaS services both Microsoft and perhaps ever more importantly non Microsoft and connect and engage deeply with our customers to provide a overall service level that Google and Microsoft don't even understand, let alone dream of delivering

Mark

 

BPOS Price cuts – Desperation or Strategic?

Microsoft have announced today that they are cutting the price of the online services bundle including email, SharePoint and live meeting, known as BPOS by 33%. But in the fight to compete with Google is Microsoft missing the point. "Best practice" for picking and having a fight with a competitor dictates that you have the fight on your own terms and territory. For Microsoft in this space this would be to fight with Google in terms of application features, security, and Partner support of the solutions and interoperability of known and accepted de-facto office applications. For sure, the price difference cannot be too much but our sales team have been selling the value of our premium services for the last 5 years – and we are the biggest Hosted Exchange provider in the UK. So does this mean that Microsoft are setting their stall at the lower micro business, pro-sumer and small SME end of the business? If so, great, this leaves a space clear for Microsoft's Partners to carry on doing what they do best and service a segment that sees the value in high class service, support, integration and business process support. My big fear is that the "giants" give the whole industry a bad name, we are already seeing regular outages from Google, and more worryingly their attitude for Customer support, but if Microsoft are losing large amounts of cash on BPOS, and this price cut is going to make break even about 33% further away than it was, the service becomes poorly managed or becomes unreliable then all the doubters about the whole SaaS sector will have a field day and send businesses running back to on-premises deployments. Microsoft has made it much harder for everyone with this price cut. Traditional Partners who are selling on-Premises solutions will now be more challenged on price for solutions that can be delivered in both models, small hosters will be forced out of the business as they find it impossible keep re-investing for smaller returns and the larger hosters will continue to find alternative non-Microsoft applications as they search for margin and differentiation to avoid being collateral damage.

Mark

Cobweb Self Service - Support in your hands!

As part of Cobweb's endeavours to improve the customer support experience, we have implemented a pilot scheme for our new Self Service Portal; together with the Cobweb Knowledge Base it forms part of a series of tools to assist you in managing your cases.

What is the Self Service Portal?

The Self Service portal is based upon CRM Accelerator technology and allows customers to view, modify and close any cases that are open with us. It provides a fast and easy to use interface accessible via any web browser or internet-enabled mobile/PDA and automatically notifies our experienced support personnel and the customer of updates and resolutions via email and online.

Self service and support communication tools are fast becoming an essential part of the customer support experience, both empowering customers who currently utilise internal ticket management systems mirroring those of our own and reducing the 'lost in translation' factor inherent in complex problem management. These systems are often costly and demand resources that can often be taken up by the Managed Service Provider as part of their support desk tools, offering a mutually beneficial ROI for both provider and host. A comprehensive article on the assimilation of such tools can be found here.

One can access the Self Service portal via a set of encrypted logon credentials, submitted to you on initial provisioning. You are then able to raise cases and view updates placed by our service desk agents:

 

If you wish to become part of this pilot scheme, please contact the Service Desk.

Pete Baughan

Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

Twitter

Sharepoint Solutions & Field Job Tracking

From a consultant perspective, I'm frequently asked how Sharepoint 3 can be utilised in specific business contexts; both existing and prospective customers have wildly varying business processes that can benefit from the system. I'd like to take a second to detail a common scenario that can be configured within this powerful piece of software and propose how we can help our customers bin the paper based method in favour of a secure, reliable and accessible online medium.

Field Job Management

One area of your business that may be reliant on a manual paper-phone-text method is that of job tracking and communication with field technicians, for example. Currently a large proportion of businesses utilise their Outlook calendar to create appointments which are then either printed out or sent via email to engineers in the field.

Sharepoint can:

* Offer a one-stop business management system, with an online calendar directly linked to user tasks and  job tracking sheets

* Directly link to your current Outlook client to integrate with your current appointment system

* Help you create a form template, that once completed kicks off a workflow informing both engineer and managers that a new job has been created

* Inform users via email, calendar, text directly to most modern mobile phones of pending jobs and appointments - no paper job sheet required

* Email the client with a proposed appointment time

* Send a digital map directly to the user in the field

The field engineer can then mark any job as 'completed' on their mobile or laptop (connected to Sharepoint) which can then trigger an invoice workflow.

In summary, Sharepoint can be configured to save time, money and resources as well as being able to offer clients the reliability and scalability inherent in a Hosted Service. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.

 

Pete Baughan

Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

Twitter

43 million tricked by ‘scareware’

You may have seen or heard this scary statistic in the news today - Symantec have revealed that 43 million people have been scared into purchasing fake anti-virus software. I've seen a couple of instances of this simple scam/trick myself, where a very believable pop-up informs you that your PC has been compromised and prompts you to purchase software to fix the issue.

In a way, it's a fraudulent/phishing technique also, as Con Mallon, from Symantec, told BBC News - "Obviously, you're losing your own hard-earned cash up front, but at the back end of that, if you're transacting with these guys online you're offering them credit card details, debit card details and other personal information," he said.

Now, there's no accounting for people that fall for fraudulent schemes, a quick look at the 419 victims will tell you that, but there are genuine ways to protect yourself against these internet-based threats. The MessageLabs Web Protect service protects you from malware and providing URL filtering on a permanent basis. Everybody has anti-virus for their PC, and you probably have a quality virus & spam filter for your email too (if you're using Cobweb Hosted Exchange then you're protected by best in the world – MessageLabs!). It makes sense that your internet connection is protected to the same levels too.

If you're interested in protecting your organisation against web based threats, talk to Cobweb as we can help you – 0845 223 9000

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

MessageLabs publish their SLA performance

MessageLabs make some big claims regarding the effectiveness of their SLA, and here's the data to back that up.

This is data taken over the last 6 months, so it will be smoothing out any bumps that may show up on a daily/monthly basis.
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/sla_performance?culture=en-US

They are being brave in showing this, many organisations don't, so to that end... Cobweb are next. Watch this space.

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Connected IT Solutions can help businesses to improve efficiency

Cobweb is delighted to announce the launch of our ‘Connected IT Solutions’ promotion which focuses on helping UK businesses to reduce IT costs and improve communications.

 

The key message of the campaign is to promote Connected IT Solutions for UK SMEs – its more effective and efficient to have all your IT solutions with a UK based, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, who can deliver Hosted Exchange Email, Hosted SharePoint and Hosted CRM to all businesses, no matter how large or small on a pay monthly, scalable basis.

 

During September and October, Cobweb are offering all local businesses the chance to sign up to this bundled offer and get a fantastic 33% discount when purchasing all three elements.

 

To find out more all business are invited to attend a FREE Breakfast Briefing which is being jointly presented by Cobweb and Microsoft on ‘Connected IT Solutions’ at 08:30am on Tuesday 20th October 2009 at the Microsoft Offices, Thames Valley Park, Reading.

 

 

For more information or to register go to www.cobweb.com/connectedservices

 

 

For those who can’t make it we are holding an online webinar on Thursday 22nd October at 15:00hrs. To register visit www.cobweb.com/connectedservices

 

 

Cobweb will also be available to discuss this fantastic offer at the Business Link ‘Be Inspired’ event (http://www.beinspired09.co.uk/) which is taking place on the 1st October in Basingstoke. 

 

Cobweb will have an exhibition stand (Stand 7 in the IT Zone) and will be presenting a workshop session at 3pm on Connected IT Solutions. 

Exchange Server 2003 is end of Mainstream Support, what next?

It's a fact – Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2003 still have the majority share of Exchange deployments around the world. However, with Exchange 2010 hot on the heels of Exchange 2007 there's a dilemma now about upgrading.

I know I need to move from Exchange 5.5/2003, but do I upgrade to 2007 which is understood, tried and tested now, or jump to Exchange 2010?

Early adoption of Exchange 2007 was difficult; firstly it required the move to a 64-bit platform, remember - in 2007 you still had to make the purchasing choice and pay a premium for 64-bit hardware. Also, Exchange 2007 saw a technological shift from Exchange 2003 with a different storage model, new clustering and availability technologies, and new roles with CAS/HT etc. Organisations need time to understand this – there are technical skills to develop, architectures and roadmaps to develop, and projects and budgets to fit in with. This caused slow adoption of Exchange 2007 by the mainstream corporate market. You can see this from the big Exchange marketing push that Microsoft made in the summer of 2008 – the pace of adoption for Exchange 2007 was below expectations.

While 5.5 and 2003 may have their limitations, they are trusted and reliable email platforms which organisations depend upon. But, here's a new problem... mainstream support of Exchange 2003 has now come to an end. What's the difference between Mainstream Support and Extended Support? When a product moves into Extended Support, Microsoft will provide for Paid Support and Security updates only. You do NOT get Non-security hotfix support, no-charge incident support, warranty claims, or support for any design changes and feature requests. Beyond this you have access to online self-help support only, i.e. the Microsoft Knowledge Base, or you have to pay for support. (~£140/hour, help yourself - http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy) or you can buy Custom Support from Microsoft if you have a dependency on Exchange server.

OK, so that's not the end of the world, in fact it went into Extended Support in April 2009 and you didn't even notice! If you don't mess with it, an Exchange server will keep running 24/7 and will continue to provide enterprise email and services to you users for many months or years to come. However, you will need to move sometime – after don't get caught out on an unsupported and ineffective platform. Overtime, the upgrade options available to you become harder to swallow – moving from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007 isn't so simple.

As ever, there are many options available if you're at this crossroads. One to consider – go hosted by moving your Business Email to a provider of Hosted Exchange. You can even make considerable savings on your Microsoft licensing agreements too!

 

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Silicon Cup 2009

Cobweb entered a boat in the 2009 Silicon Cup, a charity sailing event for IT companies in the Solent. It was impossible not to take part this year given that the Solent is on our doorstep (and a playground for many)

We did ok - third in our class of 14 boats and we ended up collecting a trophy. This isn't a bad show given that we had a mix of sailing part-timers and first-timers!
We'll be back next year to take on the big Microsoft boats in class-1

Thanks to our friends at Attenda, Microsoft and Equinix for the event sponsorship. Over £50,000 was raised for children's sailing charities.

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Microsoft CRM Webinar - sales automation within Cobweb hosted CRM

Join us for a FREE webinar to look at how sales automation with Cobweb Hosted CRM can benefit your business.

Speaker: Allan Connolly, Cobweb CRM Guru

 

Agenda: Thursday 24th September at 3.00pm (BST UK)

1. An introduction to Cobweb

hosted Microsoft CRM

2. Typical challenges in sales

3. Lead and opportunity management

4. Account management

5. Sales analytics and reporting

6. Business benefits and the Cobweb offer

7. Q&A session

 

Attendees automatically receive

• Free 30 day trial
• 13 months for the price of 12
• 1/2 day of professional services absolutely FREE
• Plus, buy online and save £50.

To register for this FREE webinar http://www.cobweb.com/crm