A while back, Microsoft made an announcement about their new ‘LIVE’ initiative. It wasn’t clear then exactly what this meant and I’m not entirely sure now. The basic message was they were going to provide free web-based services to small businesses and consumers. Those services would be ad-based and would come in the form of email, domain registration, personal home pages, messaging ect.

Here’s a definition I found for Windows LIVE: Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Okay . . . still a bit vague but it begs the larger question, why? Collectively Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are building two of the largest datacenters the world has ever seen so I suspect there is a bigger plan for world dominance of online services. To speculate on the tactics would require many additional posts.

But there is no mystery to why we offer free services.

We’ve been offering free web-based, ad-supported services for years. We’ve been running our mail2web email retrieval service for almost 10 years. We run some advertisements to help pay for the service but other than that there is no hook. It’s anonymous and secure; we don’t collect passwords or SPAM people.

We do it because we love online technology. We thought it was really cool to provide a service that allowed our customers access to their email from any internet-connected device.  And we hoped that people would appreciate this, recognize our competence and maybe sign up for our other paid services. With Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as competitors you have to do some pretty unique things to survive.

That was the thinking when we launched mail2web.com LIVE. We’ve been working with Microsoft Exchange for years and thought we’d launch a free, web-based version so people could see the interface and some of the features. We embedded an ad to help pay some of our overhead costs (like Microsoft licenses) but ultimately we wanted to showcase our expertise with Microsoft Exchange and allow people to try the product and service. We hope some might upgrade to a paid version of the product – we have several – but with any of our free offerings, there is no requirement to do so and very few limitations on the functionality.

I hope our message is clear. 

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

Sharepoint: I’m starting to see the point

I saw a blog post the other day in reference to Windows Sharepoint Services. The author complained about the lack of tangible messaging around Microsoft Sharepoint Services. The post, entitled, “What The heck is Sharepoint 2007”, by John Newton, contained the following: 

“You are not told what Sharepoint is; you are told what Sharepoint does . . . I don’t know. No one does, and Microsoft isn’t telling. I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you once you pay. You see, that’s how proprietary software works: pay first, struggle with it later. Buy before you try.”

Well this is bit cynical and honestly I haven’t quoted all of article but he has a point. I see words like ‘collaborate’, ‘share’, ‘increase productivity’ which could easily be used to describe almost anything, including several other Microsoft products. And who could argue with those virtues? The only person I know who isn’t inclined to share, collaborate or be productive is my two-year old son.

Today we launched a Beta of Windows Sharepoint Services 2007 (the hosted version not to be confused with Portal Server), so I think I’m in a position to tell you what it does:

1. Windows Sharepoint Services is a platform used to host password-protected sites.
2. Those sites are designed primarily as secure, document repositories – has anyone in your organization ever said, “we need an intranet”, well that’s what Sharepoint does very well and it doesn’t require programming.
3. The administrator can decide who has access and how much access (just read or can they modify a document), and everyone can be informed when a document has been updated via email notification.

Of course there’s a lot more to it but that’s the basics of Windows Sharepoint Services 2003. The latest version, 2007, goes much further. Coming in January, Microsoft will be providing tons of ‘templates’ but I think that’s a misleading name that doesn’t do it justice. Templates imply ‘skins’ or design layers. The templates Microsoft is releasing are actually applications. There’s a CRM application coming, an HR application, a product management application, and many more, each developed with a specific function in mind.

The market for these functions are small-to-medium-sized businesses who don’t need, or can’t afford Enterprise applications. They need a subset of the features saleforce.com offers and have a fraction of the budget.

With this release of Windows Sharepoint Services I think Microsoft is truly delivering on the SaaS promise (Software as a Service) and making it accessible to those who need it the most. And contrary to what the above author says, Microsoft isn’t going to sell this to you, it’s hosting companies like us who have no interest in ‘tricking’ you into a sale when you can cancel as easily as you signed up. Services on demand can be cancelled on demand.  

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