With all the recent fanfare from Microsoft about Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 the release of the latest version of Windows SharePoint Services flew in under the radar of most people.

In previous versions SharePoint has failed to gain wide adoption I think mostly due to a disconnect of the product and the market. The needs of customers were not entirely met by the features of Version 2.0 and more importantly few people were aware of what SharePoint was or how it could be leveraged. With the launch of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 there is a huge opportunity to change all that.

 What is SharePoint?

Even to those who have used it that is a question that is not easily answered. There is of course a technical answer that covers things like secure storage in SQL database and availability and reliability based on a Windows 2003 platform.

The real questions are what can it do for me? And how do I use it?

These are the questions that if the platform is going to become widely used need to be answered. If someone asks me what is Exchange Email? The simple answer is the engine that makes Outlook more than just desktop software to check email. Similarly SharePoint take Microsoft Office beyond the desktop application.

There has been a lot of talk about SaaS (software as a service) or web based applications that offer function of the desktop with the accessibility and cost savings of the web. I am excited by the potential of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to deliver the platform to make SaaS both accessible and affordable for our SMB customers.

What our small and medium businesses customers tell us they need are solutions that are easy to use, protect their data and fit into the budget!

With the new On Demand Business Solution built on the SharePoint platform I belive those needs are met.

• Solutions that are ready to use as deployed and can be customized to the needs of your business.
• Functional integration with the Microsoft Office suite that you use and are familiar with.
• Information that is secure, password protected, highly available via the internet on your PC or mobile device.
• No setup or hardware cost just a predictable monthly fee for storage and access.
• Unlimited users and document level security permissions so you can share information both internally and with supplier and customers.

The complete solution will be ready for the market in early 2007 but you can check out our online demo or signup for a beta site now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

This holiday season I’m not going to be coy about what I want. I want a PalmOne Treo 750v. It’s the latest Palm device out and like its predecessor, the PalmOne Treo 700, it runs on Windows Mobile 5.2 and not the Palm OS.

Why do I want one? Easy, I want the ultimate smart phone for personal use. I have a Blackberry for work but if I un-holster that bad-boy when I’m at a holiday gathering everyone knows I’m still at work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Blackberry but this new Palm has some great consumer features – touch screen, High-Speed Data GPRS, speaker phone, camera, and a bunch of other ‘fun’ features. With the latest design they even dropped the antennae giving it a much sleeker look.

Running Windows Mobile 5.0+ means I can take advantage of ActiveSync, and in combination with an Exchange 2003 service with SP2 installed, get my email and other data pushed to my device as fast as the Blackberry. If you don’t believe me, sign up for our mail2web.com LIVE service (FREE) and try it out.

This begs the question – what is better, a Blackberry or a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5.0?

Obviously for a question of this magnitude I need to refer to Paris Hilton. Below is a shot of Paris with a Blackberry 8700. Of course she is famous for having a Side Kick phone, having it hacked and then having her nasty messages leaked on the Internet.

I would suspect the reason she moved over to the Blackberry is for security reasons. Blackberry certainly wins when it comes to security. Rumor is Madonna has one too.

But notice that Paris is never seen with her Blackberry in a holster. She’s always got it clutched in her hands, eagerly awaiting some very important, probably dirty message. But she’s missing a very unique feature of the Blackberry that makes it the choice of many businesses and fleets. The Blackberry behaves differently when holstered and uses alerts and receipts when messages are sent and received. I think this helps organizations armed with Blackberry’s stay better connected.

Me, I want to join the current trend in Europe, who average more than 1 mobile phone per person, and have one mobile for work and another for play.

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

We get a lot of questions about our Blackberry service. The most common one we see is usually phrased something like this:

“Why do I need your Blackberry service if I already got one from my provider? – I even got an email address that works on my Blackberry”

What most people get from their provider is the actual Blackberry device, a data plan so they can surf the web and send and receive emails and an email address under the providers domain name.

This is the ‘BIS’ or Blackberry Internet Service. A keen user will even discover that they can also redirect an existing email account to their Blackberry and use that as their ‘from’ address.

But the BES or Blackberry Enterprise Server does much more. This service is always bundled with an Enterprise messaging solution like Lotus Notes or Hosted Exchange – solutions that go way beyond email and provide more workflow and time management functionality to your desktop. Unlike BIS, BES allows you to syncronize all those additional features to your Blackberry.

As far as I know Lotus Notes doesn’t have a ‘hosted’ model. Microsoft Exchange does and the feature set is way to large to expand upon in this post. But not only can you use any email address you like with Hosted Exchange, with the combination of Hosted Exchange and the BES service, you can synchronize your entire desktop including your calendar, contacts, tasks, journal, notes and much more, with your Blackberry.

Add another user to your domain and you can share all this data, view each other’s calendars (or keep it private), accept meeting requests and basically do everything you would do when working with Outlook at your desktop.

And whatever you do on your Blackberry will be in sync with your desktop and vice-versa.  

With some patience your thumbs get pretty nimble and pretty soon your favorite PC becomes a permanent fixture on your hip. 

So while the BIS service is perfectly adequate for many individual users, the BES service used in combination with Hosted Exchange is a must for the power user or the business user. Once you actually experience the difference you’ll understand the true meaning of the term ‘Crackberry’.

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