BURLINGTON, MA – March 26, 2008 – groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the leading provider of private label hosted software services including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, today announced the availability of Service Pack 1 for hosted SharePoint 3.0 delivering additional stability and performance enhancements.

groupSPARK resellers can now offer their customers hosted Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 with all of the latest feature enhancements and upgrades. This industry-leading collaboration tool enables small and mid-size businesses to increase productivity, teamwork and efficiency. Acting as a central repository, employees can share project schedules, create lists of data, update files, and share ideas. Hosted SharePoint’s web-based interface enables departments, project teams and remote employees to work together by utilizing their hosted SharePoint site as a central location from which to disseminate data and information. Users can also launch and maintain web pages, intranets and photo libraries.

As businesses grow, open additional locations and even expand to other countries around the world, the need for a centralized location to store and manage data becomes increasingly important.

groupSPARK resellers will now be able to offer hosted Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 to businesses previously unwilling to use the initial version of hosted SharePoint. “Many businesses traditionally do not jump right into new versions of software. They wait until the first service pack is released to take advantage of the upgrades and enhancements that Microsoft makes available,” said Ravi Agarwal, chief executive officer of 123Together.com. “Our resellers now have the opportunity to offer hosted Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 to those companies who have previously been reluctant to use the earlier version.”

About groupSPARK

Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK is a leading provider of SaaS services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services v3.0, and Dynamics CRM, which can be completely private labeled and resold by partners as a part of their own product offerings saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

Its partners utilize groupSPARK’s turnkey private label platform to provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners are able to address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK’s 100% uptime SLA, private label 24×7 U.S.-based support and proactive hardware and software monitoring capabilities.

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The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Hosting Providers welcomes Apple’s announcement of support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync in the beta release of iPhone 2.0 software as it offers direct push technology whereby iPhone users can access email, contacts, calendar and IT administrators can do remote wipe if device is stolen..

iPhone is still sold through Mobile operators and unfortunately Apple is struggling to clinch a deal with other operators outside US.Though there is a limited availability in few countries in Europe.

How about Asia? Looks like operators in this region are still thinking about a best business model which suits to the users in this region. However, receiving a share of the revenue generated per handset is still Apple’s underlying business model. Whatsoever, this translate to lesser sale volume for Apple compared to Nokia..

Initially when Apple came to the market with iPhone, Nokia and others had little fear, but actually this gave them a hope of a new business model which many had never thought about it. Apple realized the potential of a converged mobile equipment and tactfully managed to negotiate a good deal with operators in US where it receives a percentage of the revenue generated per handset. In reciprocal to this deal, operators get a great deal of discount of iPhone from Apple when they sell it.

In Europe, there is a modest reception in Germany and UK. Apple is yet to formalize a deal in Asia where the mobile market is huge, especially China & India. Japan, Korea & Singapore users will be very keen to have iPhone because of the gadget love. iPhone synchronization with Hosted Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync allows companies to get the best from this device now.

What is the impact to Hosting providers?

Those customers who would like to standardize their mobile device with iPhone and have international presence especially in Asia will have impact. Alternatively, they can choose other devices which support ActiveSync. You can find more details about these devices in my previous post…

Apple’s recent announcement for its iPhone’s ability to synchronize with Hosted Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enables the organization to achieve its best from wireless devices. IMAP feature in iPhone will not be that relevant for Exchange Server with the availability of true wireless synchronization using ActiveSync. So by having iPhone 2.0 and Hosted Exchange services, you are pretty much be able to synchronize emails, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks over various wireless medium such as Wi-Fi and GPRS network.

Exchange Hosting  Providers now can offer a bundle of choice to its Mobile business users between a Windows Mobile Device, iPhone, blackberry and Good Messaging Server for full wireless push email. There are also a number of other vendors got ActiveSync ready wireless devices in the market, namely, Treo, Nokia, Motorola etc. These protocol licensees are adding functionalities quite frequently.

DataViz’s RoadSync application provides secure, wireless and direct push synchronization with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 & 2007. Some of the key Exchange 2007 features has been added into Roadsync are email flags, Exchange Server Search, UNC file access from SharePoint etc. RoadSync offers broad range of mobile device coverage. Details can be found here.

Helio models are innovative and they have recently released “Mail for Microsoft Exchange”, a downloadable client for the Helio Ocean providing Direct Push of email, contacts, and calendar, GAL lookup and support for Remote Wipe. Ocean Device is the world’s first dual slider device with a full QWERTY keyboard and a separate numeric pad. Details can be found here.

Nokia recently released version 2.3.0 of its “Mail for Exchange” product - added functionalities are Task Synchronization, Global address list Lookup, and accept/reject meeting requests from calendar. Nokia keep increasing its support for “Mail for Exchange” to their N-series models, apart from the existing E-series models. Downloaded Mail for Exchange ver 2.3.0 from this link and more resources can be found here.

Sony Ericsson’s feature-rich mobile phones such as Z750i, P990 Smartphone and M600 now support the Exchange Active Sync protocol. Users can synchronize their e-mail, calendar, and contacts information while on the road. More details can be found here.

Palm’s decade of mobile computing experience now gets even better with built-in Microsoft’s direct push technology in its selected Treo models. It has recently added GAL lookup. Details can be found here.

..And goes on with BlackBerry Enterprise Server & Good Messaging Server…

Lisa Masiello
123Together.com
781-273-6245 x652
lmasiello@123together.com

MONTREAL, (March 10, 2008) – SherWeb, a leading hosting provider of Microsoft Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, proudly announces it will support the iPhone 2.0 wireless synchronization with its Hosted Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Service. The iPhone synchronization service allows small, medium and large companies to wirelessly synchronize their devices to their Microsoft Exchange messaging system in real time, wherever they are.

In today’s business world, full mobile wireless synchronization of emails, contacts and calendar is a must! With Microsoft Exchange being the number one business class email solution on the market, phone makers have no choice but to allow their devices to sync with the most popular collaborative software. The iPhone, popular with the general consumer’s market, has now increased its appeal to the business community.

“SherWeb is excited to be able to offer iPhone lovers the rich capabilities of Hosted Exchange. With this new software, business users will now have the choice between a BlackBerry, a Windows Mobile Device or the iPhone for full wireless push email.” stated Peter Cassar, CEO of SherWeb

Advantages of the wireless synchronization

iPhone synchronization with Hosted Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync allows companies to get the most out of their wireless devices by avoiding the duplication of certain tasks. With wireless synchronization, there is no need to connect to the Exchange server using IMAP anymore. You can say goodbye to cables and waiting around to manually synchronize your Outlook to your mobile device. With the iPhone 2.0 and Hosted Exchange, emails, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks will synchronize wirelessly in real time over the Wi-Fi or EDGE network. ActiveSync provides users with true push technologies so that they stay connected and up to date wherever they go. This way companies can save time, be more productive and get a better return on their investment.

About SherWeb

Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a leader in Internet hosting solutions and provides shared Web hosting services, dedicated servers and hosted messaging and collaboration systems. The company is currently serving thousands of customers from more than 25 countries around the world. SherWeb’s hosting solutions are modular and scalable in order to ensure that customers can grow their businesses without having to invest additional time, capital or other resources into their Web and messaging infrastructure.

***

Pierre-Olivier Descoteaux
Marketing Director
SherWeb Inc.
1-888-562-6610 extension 229,
(819) 437-5500 mobile,
www.sherweb.com/exchange

Now there is an answer for long wait - the new agreement between Apple and Microsoft will enable the iPhone 2.0 for Exchange ActiveSync. This is the reflection of Apple’s acknowledgment for Microsoft on how popular the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007and its mobility features. The popularity of Exchange Server 2007 in the enterprises forced many of the mobile device makers to support Exchange right out of the box, and the last one to enter into this bandwagon is none other than Microsoft’s rival Apple. What that means is, Apple will build Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync into the iPhone - this allows iPhone users to be able to access Exchange Server and enjoy the mobility features from Microsoft. Apple now the recent addition to Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson, Symbian and many others that license Exchange ActiveSync for mobile devices.

Apple thinks this move is essential because more and more enterprises are moving to Exchange Server (especially to the new version - Exchange Server 2007) and also, there more mobile devices coming to the market that equip with Microsoft ActiveSync feature. It is true to some extend that to be considered as win-win deal, but on the other side iPhone market share will explode and becomes threat to blackberries.

Although iPhone 2.0 supports ActiveSync, the true Windows Mobile experience is not guaranteed. In other words, true Outlook experience on a mobile phone and some of the key enterprise device management policies are not in the iPhone 2.0

The Microsoft Effect

I remember when iPhone launched it became a hot selling stuff in the market though majority of the enterprises banned this device from its networks for very many reasons such as “no support for Exchange Server”, security etc..Sounds like Apple took this lightly though the fact is Exchange Server market share of close to 50% in the enterprises.

Exchange Hosting Providers can now rejoice too. I remember some of them were providing IMAP access when iPhone was initially launched.

Top-Rated Business Email Hosting Provider Offers Expanded Options to Clients for Increased Productivity, Collaboration and Security

DENVER – March 4, 2008 – Top-rated business email hosting provider USA.NET announced today that it is using the advanced features and capabilities of Microsoft Exchange 2007, SharePoint Services 3.0 and other state-of-the-art software applications and utilities to provide its clients with a more fully integrated eMessaging experience.

“Our latest expanded integration is part of our commitment to provide our clients with the best solutions and service available on an ongoing basis,” said USA.NET President Doug Howard.

“We work closely with our technology partners to provide integrated solutions that meet our clients’ custom messaging and collaboration requirements. “When any of our partners upgrade their services, as Microsoft did with Exchange 2007, we upgrade our client base. In fact, we haven’t charged our existing customers for an upgrade to Exchange since we began offering the service in 2000.”

At the heart of these integrated applications are Microsoft Exchange 2007 and SharePoint services, which provide advanced collaboration capabilities – from organizations spread across a building to those spread across the world. They also provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with an organization’s content, processes, and data.

Hosted Environments can Deliver More Cost-Efficient and Foolproof Integration, along with Risk-Free Upgrades

A significant advantage for organizations that use hosted services instead of in-house solutions is hosting providers’ ability to quickly meet an organization’s business requirements with a comprehensive selection of turnkey enhanced services.

“It is becoming common knowledge that the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model delivers more predictable costs, enhanced security, reliability, continuity, compliance readiness, and full-function integration for mobile and remote employees,” according to Howard.

The already growing trend toward SaaS and hosted eMessaging has accelerated because of the complexity and cost of upgrading to applications like Exchange 2007 and SharePoint services — including a required upgrade to 64-bit hardware for Exchange 2007.

Upgrading such systems in-house can be draining on internal budgets and resources, can create a great degree of uncertainty and, at times, can be beyond the capabilities of an in-house operation.

Hosted Integrated Solutions go beyond eMessaging

Email doesn’t have to be a stand-alone application. USA.NET can further streamline a business by integrating a company’s email with its other important applications, cutting down on the frustration and loss of productivity involved with moving information manually from one application to another or engineering integration in-house. Such integration of data can result in a huge productivity boost.

“At USA.NET, we are continually assessing ways to streamline our clients’ businesses by integrating our messaging solutions with their mobile devices, existing personnel directory, provisioning processes, web portal, fax services, and many other applications,” Howard said.

Quality of Integration is Dependent on the Exchange Hosting Provider

As eMessaging software applications become more complex and the management of security, compliance, continuity, upgrades and patches, and mobility become more difficult, the quality of the solution depends more and more on the quality of the hosting services provider.

Companies choosing a provider of hosted Exchange should look for:

· High touch customer support

· Email hosting track record

· Change management, implementation and migration expertise

· Customized and tiered services to fit clients’ requirements

· Enhanced services to boost productivity and collaboration

· Robust architecture and proven email security controls

· Proven Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

USA.NET Provides Audited Results, Financial Strength and Service Flexibility

USA.NET provides clients with a unique set of processes and controls that have been confirmed annually by SAS 70 Type II audits. The company’s ability to deliver 99.9% guaranteed reliability is also enhanced by 10-plus years in the email hosting business and USA.NET’s high level of financial viability, which assures the company has appropriate resources in place for successful upgrades. Finally, USA.NET offers a great degree of flexibility. Clients purchase only the capabilities they require for each employee and can avoid paying for services they do not use.

On-Demand Webinar Detailing Benefits of Hosted Exchange 2007

To enable organizations to learn more about the benefits of hosted Exchange 2007 and SharePoint services, USA.NET provides an educational on-demand Exchange Hosting webinar.

About USA.NET
Cited as the “Top Player” for the hosted business email market by The Radicati Group, Inc., USA.NET, The Global Secure eMessaging Service Provider®, is the only hosting provider that is SAS 70 Type II Audited, Microsoft Gold Certified, a member of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for Exchange, and winner of the 2006 Microsoft Excellence Award for Exchange Hosting Solutions. USA.NET eMessaging solutions are modular and infinitely scalable to ensure customers can grow their business without having to invest additional resources, time or capital into their mission-critical messaging infrastructure. USA.NET is a wholly owned subsidiary of Perimeter eSecurity. More information about USA.NET visit www.usa.net or call 800-653-0179.

About Perimeter eSecurity
As the only provider of complete security on demand, Perimeter eSecurity makes security easily available and affordable for all businesses. Perimeter’s on demand security services protect thousands of computer networks nationwide, offering more than 50 different services on a subscription basis in the areas of: Vulnerability Defense, Intrusion Defense, Network Defense, Email Defense, System Defense, and User Defense. With the proliferation of security threats and technologies, clients benefit from a single-source provider that offers all services through one pre-integrated platform and web portal.

Perimeter’s security SaaS services are continuously expanded, enhanced and upgraded for current and future regulatory compliance. With seven geographically distributed technical offices and three redundant data centers, Perimeter’s complete, on-demand and affordable security services are always available and have been validated by multiple independent third parties. For more information about Perimeter visit www.perimeterusa.com.

BURLINGTON, MA – March 4, 2008 – groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the leading Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of - hosted messaging and collaboration services such as private label Exchange Server 2007 and private label SharePoint 3.0, announced today that it welcomes Microsoft’s further entry into the hosted services market with the beta release of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs).

Microsoft’s beta release of the Exchange Online and SharePoint Online hosted services further validates groupSPARK’s core vision: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3 while being the best-in-class messaging and collaboration applications are difficult for SMB’s to setup and manage and best utilized as hosted services. Additionally, Microsoft’s anticipated Q4 launch should have the effect of not only increasing the market share of Exchange Server mailboxes from 135 Million worldwide, according to the Radicati Group, but also cause many SMBs to look at hosted alternatives such as Microsoft’s and groupSPARK’s offerings.

Microsoft’s offerings, which seemingly compete with groupSPARK, are incomplete at best, as they lack critical third party services such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) – this makes the Microsoft offering a non-starter for most businesses. More importantly, the Microsoft Online services will be sold exclusively through partners but without any partner branding. The lack of partner branding reduces the partner’s relationship with the end customer as the customer realizes that the partner is not adding any value and simply reselling a commodity service.

groupSPARK, on the other hand, is a best of breed provider and offers not only current and previous versions of Exchange and SharePoint servers but also access to critical non-Microsoft services such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server for two way mobile synchronization as well as industry leading Postini for spam and virus filtering and archiving services. Additionally, groupSPARK’s partner program empowers its partners to own and extend their customer relationships by fully private labeling groupSPARK’s offering under their own name and brand – the customers never realize that the ultimate provider of the service is groupSPARK – and thus create customer loyalty. To maximize revenue, groupSPARK’s resellers set pricing for all of their customers and can even create custom hosted Exchange offerings to sell differentiated offerings in the marketplace.

“We welcome Microsoft’s new entry into the hosted services market and are encouraged that SMBs will realize that hosted software services are a key tool in increasing corporate productivity and growing their business,” said Ravi Agarwal, chief executive officer of groupSPARK. “Currently only 1.5 million users use hosted Exchange worldwide. Microsoft’s entry into this market will cause awareness of hosted Exchange to grow and will cause this market growth to accelerate. groupSPARK is uniquely positioned to help channel partners to take advantage of this explosive growth opportunity and maximize revenue.”*

About groupSPARK

Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK is a leading provider of SaaS services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM, which can be completely private labeled and resold by partners as a part of their own product offerings saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

Its partners utilize groupSPARK’s turnkey private label platform to provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners are able to address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK’s 100% uptime SLA, live 24×7 U.S.-based phone & email support and proactive hardware and software monitoring capabilities. http://www.groupspark.com/

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^*Hosted Messaging Trends 2007-2010, Osterman Research, August 2007.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Info:

Lisa Masiello
groupSPARK
781-273-6248 x652
lmasiello@groupspark.com

Once you have selected your Exchange Hosting provider, give some time on analyzing your hardware desing, though this part is done by your hoster. One of the key design elements which ultimately can improve the efficiency of Exchange is by isolating the Exchange database and the Exchange logs onto a different hard drive volume. This is because logs does write operation & databases read mostly. Hence separating these elements onto different volumes increases server performance substantially. This best practise should be followed even in smallest Exchange server implementations.Below figures shows some examples of how the database and log volumes can be configured.

On Server1, the OS and logs are located on the same mirrored C: volume and the data base is located on a separate RAID-5 drive set, although in a different channel. OS partition is cornerstone, doing many type of operations and consume more processing power. Putting Exchange logs along with it is not a good idea.

On Server2, the configuration has gone to very next level, by having OS only on C:, the logs on D: and the database on the RAID-5 E: volume.This is good, but there is a room to improve.

Server3 below considered the optimal configuration, by separating volumes for each database and volume for the log files. The sideaffect is more complex drive configuration. However, the most important factor that must be remembered is to separate the Exchange databse from the logs wherever possible.

Understand a littile bit on the Exchange databases and Storage Group

The Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server 2007 not only enables databases of larger than 75 GB, it also enables the creation of multiple separate databases on a single server. This concept gives great flexibility in design while enabling reduced downtime and increased performance. A storage group is a logical grouping of databases that share a single set of logs. Each Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise edition can handle a maximum of 50 Storage groups per server. Each storage group can contain a maximum of five databases each, although the total number of databases on a server cannot equal more than 50. If you have a plan to use cluster continuous replication (CCR), it only supports a single database per storage group. Also, Microsoft recommend no more than 30 databases on a server running CCR.

Following are the various scenario where multiple databases can solve come customer’s concern.

• Reduce database restore time - smaller databases take less time to restore from tape. This concept can be helpful if there is a group of users who require quicker recovery time (e.g. senior management).
• Provide for separate mailbox limit plocies - each database can be configured with different mailbox storage limits. e.g, the standard user database with 200-MB limit on mailboxes, and the management database with 500 MB limit.
• Minimize the risk by distributing user load balance - distribute user load across multipel databases. e.g., if a single database is failed that contained all users, no one would be able to mail. If those users were divided across 4 databases, however, only one fourth of those users would be unable to mail in the event of a database failure.

For more details on storage design, watch the following Webcast: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDeta...ode=US

Following are some nice articles on this topic:

• Choosing the Right Storage for Your Exchange Server
• Disk Geometry

Technorati : Exchange_Storage Designing_Storage Exchange_Server_Performance