SoftCom Corporate Blog

This post assumes you know a little something about Windows SharePoint Services. If you’ve never heard about SharePoint but you have, at some point, had a need to set up a secure, password-protected site to store documents with version control, collaborate, back up files off site, run project management software, a knowledge base or a whole host of productivity applications, you should check it out (and then read this).

One of the things we do that’s unique is provide unlimited sub-directories with every SharePoint site we provision. What this means in SharePoint speak is that you can have unlimited number of sub-webs, each with it’s own function and potentially its own membership.

For example, say you signup for a SharePoint site under the domain http://team.mycompany.com. At that top level you can add users and assign permissions (Read, Contribute, Design or Full Control ) and provide those users access to documents at that level.

But then you can add a Wiki (as an admin, go to Site Actions > Create > Sites and Workspaces ) as a sub-web. This would now appear as http://team.mycompany.com/wiki . This sub-site can be part of the navigation or not – your choice. And this sub site can inherit the same users and permission – with a single click – or have an entirely unique set of users and permissions.  

Another really cool feature – sub-webs can be created in a different language. Keep in mind not all the languages offer application templates (click here for a list and description of application templates) but all 25+ languages supported include the built in templates like Wiki’s and Blogs.

Maybe you want to run a project that not everyone is involved in, this too could be quickly added and not even included in the navigation if you want to keep it private (eg. http://team.mycompany.com/projectx/ )

There are a couple obvious advantages to using sub-webs as I’ve described. First, it saves you money – you don’t have to buy multiple SharePoint accounts to accomplish what I’ve proposed. Second, it’s more practical. Employees or members of your organization aren’t likely to remember multiple SharePoint domains, but they are more likely to remember and use one SharePoint domain - particularly if it’s loaded with content.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

I often get asked what I think is the most cost effective way to get mobile data. Should I get a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync supported device? (e.g. Windows Mobile, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson – look here for a complete list of supported devices)

Unfortunately there is no easy answer.  What I think is the most cost-effective relates to a combination of the device I use, my personal usage and most importantly, the data plan I subscribe to.  Data plans (GPRS) vary widely from carrier to carrier.

A lot of carriers offer great deals for data but sometimes those deals are limited to a specific device. AT&T/Cingular data plans come as low $19.99 for use with a select number of SmartPhones but to use the Samsung Blackjack you need to pay $39.99.  T-mobile offers a plan for $29.99 but neither of these include voice plans. The average cost for voice (minimum plan) + data seems to be between $60 and $80 per month.

That is if you stay within the data limits. Virgin Mobile in Australia launched a great plan, offering 300MB of data transfer per month for $10. Go over that allowance and you pay a rate of $15 per MB or almost 500 times the original rate.

So just how much data do you need to use the Internet over your mobile device? I get approximately 100 emails a day, have a massive inbox which I search regularly, have a fairly full calendar and a number of tasks I sync regularly. Using an ActiveSync device I use about 17 MB of data per month.  But because I have a very low data transfer allowance through my carrier, I avoid surfing the web unless absolutely necessary.

I have often been told that BlackBerry is much more efficient in its use of data as it relates to transmitting email, calendar data, tasks and related PIM information (most data usage, less what you use when surfing the web).  But if my usage is typical or even high, blackberries efficiencies may be irrelevant as the true cost of mobility relates to web traffic.

The true cost of ownership for a BlackBerry is really difficult to pin down:
- Are you on a personal plan or a business plan with a minimum user commitment?
- What is your contract duration?
- How much data do you want?
- How many voice minutes do you want?
- How many text messages do you need?

Almost all the carriers provide a complex pricing matrix for you to work with.  An informal poll suggests a range of $100 to $150 per month in North America and even higher in other parts of the world. Vodafone.co.uk will take you through a fairly complex wizard before letting you know you may need a 2nd mortgage to get a BlackBerry.

That said, there are a number of other reasons – outside of cost – why someone might prefer a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync-supported device. If the choice of the best device was an easy question to answer there would be a clear market leader, and that just isn’t the case. 

Only personal experience will tell which is right for you.  The good news is, with our Microsoft Exchange service you can use either technology.  ActiveSync is included free with our Exchange service and BlackBerry service is only $9.95 per month – a small price to pay once you’ve made the initial investment  into a mobile device. 

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

I was at HostingCon in Chicago last week and I heard someone comment about whether “email was still the killer app.”

Besides being a slightly useless thing to say, it occurred to me that email never was a killer app. A text message is a message.  Rather it’s the tools used to manage messaging in combination with the protocol that makes for the better experience.

Truth is a lot of people I speak to don’t understand the difference between POP3 email, IMAP4 email and MAPI services. As a result, they don’t understand why Microsoft Exchange is so expensive (Microsoft Exchange email is based on MAPI) and so useful.

Let’s start with POP3. That’s the basic email that comes with most hosting plans or is provided by your ISP or cable company. The most important thing to understand about POP3 is that your messages are stored on the email server until you access them through a common POP3 client like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora. 

When you connect to your POP3 email account through one of these clients, all your unread email messages are downloaded to your local machine for you to read. They are removed from the server.

The one exception is checking your POP3 accounts through the mail2web.com email retrieval application (mail2web.com). This webmail application allows you to preview your messages, on almost any remote mail server , before they’ve been downloaded. 

We get a lot of complaints from mail2web.com users who think we’ve deleted their emails. What actually happened was someone opened Outlook on their desktop and downloaded all their messages off a POP3 server.  Now those messages reside in someone’s office / home PC and can’t be easily accessed.

IMAP4 is different in that email is stored on the server. There is an added bonus of being able to create folders to manage your messages. When you connect to an IMAP4 account, the messages are not downloaded to your local computer but instead are previewed for you, recording what has been read and what hasn’t and allowing you to move messages to folders you created. 

This is important as IMAP4 accounts give you the ability to access your email from multiple locations and computers and maintain a synchronized copy.

 All the email accounts provided with hosting plans on myhosting.com are both POP3 and IMAP4 compatible. Apple’s iPhone uses the IMAP4 protocol for email syncronization which you can use with our Exchange hosting plans or our myhosting.com email acccounts.

But the killer app is Microsoft Exchange based on the MAPI protocol.  Okay,  I hate the term ‘killer app’ . . . but it’s the best messaging platform on the market.  MAPI is an ‘aware’ protocol and by that I mean it is constantly listening for changes on the server and then communicates those changes to you, however you are connected (browser, desktop, mobile device). If you are running Outlook with a full Exchange account (our Professional account) you don’t have to constantly click send and receive to see if you have new messages. Changes are pushed as they are recorded on the server.

Like IMAP4, all messages are stored on the server but Exchange also stores your calendar, contact, journal, tasks and much more. All this data is ‘aware’ of changes and communicates those changes immediately. You can also share real-time data with others in your organization and collaborate in a way you could never do with POP3 or IMAP.

Of course all this enhanced functionality requires extensive hardware to support. While diskspace costs have gone down considerable in the past 5 years, even the best SCSI drives have a maximum rate at which they can read or write data.

Exchange hits this maximum quickly with very few active users. And that’s just one of the reasons why Microsoft Exchange is so much more expensive than POP3. Microsoft’s monthly license fees – charged directly to Exchange hosters - also adds to our costs.

But it’s still much less than what your business pays for phone service and in my opinion, just as important and effective for running an efficient business.

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and the Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Today I want to tell you about a really exceptional promotion we just launched in conjunction with Microsoft. For a limited time we are bundling 1 year of SharePoint Hosting (version 3) with a full boxed copy of Office SharePoint Designer 2007. The way this has been priced, you essentially get 1 year of hosting services free with the purchase of SharePoint Designer 2007.

I’ve written about SharePoint hosting services in the past but if you want to learn more, click here. At the simplest level SharePoint is a password protected website, instantly provisioned and designed to store and manage documents. On a more complex level, SharePoint can be used as a powerful platform for developing sophisticated workflows and online applications.

SharePoint Designer 2007, however, is boxed software – the exact same boxed software you would purchase from a retail vendor. And we will ship it to your home or office at no additional charge.

The primary use for Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is to customize SharePoint sites (but not bad with basic websites either – good alternative to FrontPage for some).

SharePoint Designer 2007 gives you the powerful tools you need to:

If you want some more details about SharePoint Designer here are two good links that provide an overview:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 top 10 benefits

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 version comparison

We still offer our monthly hosting packages but if you want to get the most out of your SharePoint site take a closer look at our offer.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

Over the last couple years we have had a lot requests for a reseller program for our Microsoft Exchange services. We spoke to these customers to find out what features they wanted and ultimately they just wanted to be able to offer the services to their customers, allow the customer to manage some aspects of the service, and charge the customer directly what they deem is fair. Of course to do that and ‘mark up’ our prices, they need to be able to hide our brand.

Here’s what we came up with:

White-labeled control panel: A lot of our competitors use a third-party control panel, or have developed one themselves that can be branded. What we did was build the end-user controls into the OWA (Outlook Web Access). Customers use this interface already to check their account so we built in some additional, unbranded pages, that allow them to do basic functions like change their password, download Outlook 2007, get ActiveSync and email settings and more - all directly from the OWA. We also have our own control panel for direct customers and account admins that provides much more advanced functionality.

Unique OWA Login Url and design: A unique and brandable OWA login page for each Business Exchange account (based on a custom domain) can be accessed via the accounts domain (eg. owa.yourexchangedomain.com). The reseller can select from several templates or get direct access to the HTML and create a completely custom page. Further, a company logo can be uploaded to the OWA interface so that the entire experience can be branded.

White Label settings: All technical settings like the Server Name, SMTP server name or ActiveSync settings are all based on your accounts’ domain or through a generic domain, unrelated to mail2web.com. The mail2web.com url doesn’t appear in any of the end-user account settings.

Manage multiple domains through one account: Resellers can create and manage multiple domains under a single account with fully consolidated billing. The reseller can bill their customer whatever they think is fair.

Set unique privileges for each user: You can easily grant a user under the domain as a “Domain Administrator with Billing Permissions” or a “Domain Administrator without Billing Permissions”. The first allows the user to manage other users including changes that result in a billing transaction, whereas the second can only make changes that are not linked with billing.

Of course the one thing all resellers want is a volume discount. We believe our retail prices are very competitive. But if you are a large reseller, you get your own account manager. Your account manager will provide you with additional benefits like being able to provide even more competitive pricing than our posted rates, if you grow beyond 100 seats. You will also be able to pick up the phone and call your account manager to answer any questions.

We are committed to help you grow, both technically and financially.

Ultimately what we offer is reseller functionality, not a reseller program. Getting started is easy as you don’t need to sign up for a separate account specifically for resellers. If you already have an account, you can add another domain and using the above functions, sell our services to others.

If you are a value added reseller of web services you should consider adding our Exchange services to your product portfolio. If you provide additional value to your customers (eg. assisting with migrations, desktop setup, manage SPAM settings, ect. ) you will be able to resell our services at any price you wish - and think is fair – and hide the mail2web.com brand.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Hello,

There’s a cool trick you can use to push almost any email account (POP3 or IMAP4) to a mobile device.

It’s not actually a trick but a few features we’ve put together into a 3-step process that will allow you to use a mail2web.com Personal Exchange account to handle almost any POP3 or IMAP4 account – like a gmail or yahoo email account.

By default, all our mail2web.com Exchange accounts are capable of pushing your mail2web.com email account using ActiveSync, RoadSync (good for Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson users) or Blackberry.

But what if you want to push an existing email account you use to your mobile device?

All you need to do is sign up for a Personal Exchange account. You’ll get an email address under mail2web.com (eg. your_user_name@mail2web.com). Once you’ve signed up, go into the mail2web.com control panel and under ‘Manage Account’ you’ll see a link at the bottom page that says: “NEW FEATURE: use this account to handle another email address.”

This will take you through a 3-step process that doesn’t take more than 2 minutes to complete. The first step is to specify the alternate email address you want to use. We have a quick method to verify that you are the rightful owner of this email account.

The next step asks you to either forward your email to your new email account or use our email aggregator to automatically collect email from that account in regular intervals. Forwarding is a better option if your provider offers this but the email aggregator is easy to set up, free to use and works quite well.

The last step just verifies that you want to change your ‘From Address’ – the address your emails will appear to come from. Once you’ve completed these steps, all email from your original account is now directed to your mail2web.com account. Any email you send will appear to come from your original account but now you can access those through your mobile device as well as through the Outlook Web Access interface. You’ll also get the added bonus of the personal calendar, contacts and tasks that comes with our Personal Exchange account, all of which can be sync’d with your mobile device.

John Carthy
V.P. Sale and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

When we started back in 1997 mail2web.com was the best way to access your email from any computer anywhere, any time. Now, ten years later we still offer millions of people a safe, secure and reliable way to quickly access their email. Now we have added a new Vista Sidebar Gadget and a Google Homepage Gadget to make it even easier to access your email.

You can check them out here.

If you want to download our gadgets they can also be found here Vista Sidebar and the Google homepage.

Enjoy!

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

We get a lot of inquiries from prospective customers asking what the difference is between our Microsoft Exchange offering  and that of our competitors’.  A perfectly reasonable question given the fact that we are all selling the same core software, but how that software is packaged makes an enormous difference.

First, the obvious points:

• Price
• Provisioning – is your account created instantly?
• How much diskspace is provided – make sure to compare what is included + what is charged for additional space!
• What are the service levels like?
• What is the support like

I know we excel on all the above points but what’s often overlooked when looking for a hosted Exchange provider is the management interface. Essentially how easy is it to manage your account after you’ve paid and signed up?

Today, and over the next few weeks, I want to cover some of the things that we do that I feel are really unique in the market. Things that make our offering outstanding.

The first are some enhancements we’ve done to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) – the web-based option of Exchange for accessing your email, calendar, contacts and other personal information - that comes with all of our Exchange offerings.

Our customers can log into the OWA either by going to 

a. http://exchange.mail2web.com or
b. http://exchange.<yourdomainname>.ext ( an option for Business Exchange customers only).

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a stack of buttons on the left-hand navigation. We have added a button at the bottom of the stack, called “My Email Settings”. Click on this button and, while still within the OWA, you will now see a page that allows you to manage your account.

Rather than having to log into a separate control panel to access management functions, you can accomplish most tasks, like changing your password, display name or downloading your copy of Microsoft(r) Outlook(r), directly from the OWA with a single click.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers even have the option of creating a unique OWA login page. The account administrator can even select from a variety of design templates, through the mail2web.com account control panel, to customize the OWA login page.

Check out mine: http://exchange.carthy.ca  

This is very handy if you are setting up an account for someone else and want to give them access to basic management features without exposing the mail2web.com brand (you may also want to customize the logo displayed in the upper, left-hand corner which can be quickly uploaded through the mail2web.com control panel).

We’ve made a ton of other improvements that we’ll continue to write about in the coming weeks.

And of course, if there is a particular feature you want to see, please leave a comment.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Hello,

mail2web.com offers a lot of things but our flagship product is a gateway to check your email. By entering your email address and password we allow you to see the contents of your inbox, send, receive and delete messages as well as a host of other features. We don’t save your password or share your information with any third-party.

That’s obvious to many users but not all. Here are some common questions we get:

Q: I need to change my password.

A: We can’t if we don’t host your email. For example, if you are using a hotmail address, gmail or an address provided by your cable company, you must contact them to do administrative tasks like changing your password (or sign up with myhosting.com and we’d be happy to help:-).

Q: You deleted all my email. Please restore it immediately!

A: Well this isn’t exactly a question but we try and be polite when we respond. We don’t delete email. We can’t as we don’t have the password. Typically this happens when someone (or someone in the office / household) opens their desktop email client and ‘POPs’ their inbox. At this point all email is downloaded to the client computer. When logging into mail2web.com we display what is on the server and in this case it’s empty.

Solution: see if your provider can get you what is called an IMAP4 email account. We offer it at myhosting.com and it stores all email on the server so this would never happen.

Q: How do I view email messages that I have sent?

A: Unfortunately we can’t provide that functionality with mail2web.com. Again, we are only accessing your account for the time you log in, and have no ability to keep track of messages you have sent.

Solution: get a free account with mail2web.com LIVE. This is a feature rich, browser-based email account with calendars, tasks, contacts and more. And yes, it will keep track of your sent emails and even send email to a mobile device that supports ActiveSync.

When mail2web.com started our slogan was ‘It’s all about checking your email anywhere’ and to a large degree, that is still true. However, then ‘everywhere’ meant kiosks, internet cafe’s and anywhere you could access a web-browser (even through a PDA via http://mail2web.com/PDA).

Now, ‘Anywhere’ truly means anywhere your mobile device has access. And it’s not just email people want to access but all their PIM data (Personal Information Manager) like appointments, contacts, notes, journals, tasks.

To address the variety of mobile devices in the market we provide Blackberry, ActiveSync and even RoadSync options with our messaging solutions, but mail2web.com is constantly looking for new mobile technology to offer to our customers. If you are a vendor of a Mobile, ‘Push email‘ technology, we’d love to hear from you.

And yes, that wasn’t 10 questions but I hope you got the point.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

In the past couple weeks, our customers on mail2web.com LIVE and mail2web.com Personal Exchange plans have experienced some service interruptions. I want to take the opportunity to discuss these problems and try to explain what we have done to remedy these issues.

From the initial onset of these issues, our Engineering team has been working closely with product engineers from Microsoft to analyze our environment. Following the analysis of the system data, we were able to identify specific issues in the Microsoft Exchange Product code that caused the service lapse. At the time of this post, these issues have been fixed and proper service has been resumed.

In addition, we have deployed additional Exchange server capacity and we have been migrating affected mailboxes in the off-hours. With these actions, we have further diversified our system resources on our Exchange platform to minimize the chance that these Exchange code bugs will reoccur.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers were not affected by this issue so if you are experiencing any problem, please contact our support team and we will investigate your specific case.

I apologize for the inconvenience and want to assure you that we have taken every effort to provide our customers with highest quality of service. Again, if you would like to discuss about your specific case or provide us your valuable feedback on your personal experience of our service, please feel free to contact us through our support team (support@mail2web.com).

Thank you,
Kaan Bora Soran
Chief Operating Officer.