Steve Winter's Blog

Yes.. and while you thought that there is not much to see on the blogs around and when everyone is ‘busy’ on vacation and such..

Attn: Administrators, Teachers, Professors, Student and Parents

 

Wanted: An easy way to track OUR progress

 

How: Well don't we all have more questions then answers of "how to get our vital educaton information on-line?

 

Many of you may have fallen in love with visions of the Microsoft Learning Gateway over the past few years with the integration of collaboration for your teachers and students, business intelligence and analytics focusing of assessment, and the power of management of information.  BUT that astounding question was “HOW do we get there” – particularly with limited time and budget.  It was a question for schools, adminstrators and businesses that support schools.

 

I fell in love the LGF program and what it could do. What it could show. How it could help.  I wanted to help schools get to that solution.  I wanted my school and community to provide that type of solution to my neighbors and myself. I wanted to help business partners on how to deliver the solution. The problems were how do I help anyone get there.  While at Microsoft I tried to educate not only the partners that would deliver the solution, but the school administration and technology departments on what was needed.  Many times there were huge gaps – in information, in processes, time and most importantly money.

 

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is a great product. SharePoint Portal Server provides a great total solution.  But the leap to the solution is too great.  The leap is too defeating. There are those clichés – ‘you must crawl before you walk; and walk before you run.’  Well, over the last 6 months or so – I went back to crawling.  I went back to fundamentals.  I went back to look at Windows SharePoint Services, or WSS.

 

Hmm…does everyone know that Windows SharePoint Services is delivered as part of Windows Server 2003?  That means free.  That means I can start to play around with a product that may solve my problems of sharing documents without it costing me any money, just my time.  Or solve my problem of letting diskettes, CDs or requests for VPNS into my network.  OR….  As stated on the Microsoft Education web site – Microsoft SharePoint Services can –

 

Easily deploy websites for individual classrooms or learning communities where students, teachers, parents, and administrators can share documents and publicize important events, resources, and tasks – as many as you like for FREE

 

Provide management tools to help teachers and administrators secure site content and monitor site activity

 

Facilitate effective collaboration by providing document control capabilities such as document check-in/check-out and version control

 

Integrated with the Microsoft Office System, so students can access documents stored on a SharePoint site, determine the online status of other class members, and communicate easily with class members from the Shared TaskPane of the desktop tools they use everyday

 

And……so much more as a start to managing the many many documents there are in my school….

 

So here is a service of Windows 2003 that can help you do so much to provide collaboration, the power or management, the links to other areas – and in the future of your skill level allow you to provide business intelligence.

 

Have you looked at it?  Do you want to look at this and do this?  And many, many teachers and students can do and develop a site on their own – after a little framework and minimal guidance.  But once again ‘How do I get there?’  My suggestion - Invest a day or two to learn.  As a technologist you love to play and learn.  If your plate is too full, invest a few days with a partner.  And your Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services can take you and your school a long way into making the most out of your technology investment in the Windows platform.

Why should the SMS leverage SaaS?

First, let’s discuss the market in general.  What is the target market for SaaS?  The SaaS offering actually has a wide variety of markets.  SMB customers should, would and will utilize the complete array of SaaS products.  Small Businesses have a need for an “IT Utility Company.”  A place to go to get reliable service a la carte.

The real SaaS product is not software, but the utility service.  I like to compare SaaS with the local power company.  Information Technology is typically dealt with as a cost center much like the electricity service.  Can you do without Electricity?  Information Technology is often operated in house by a professional staff.  However, IT departments are overloaded, often understaffed, and/or lack skills to deliver high end services. And are not often a great way to deliver Line of Business (LOB) services.

Here are some examples:

·         SMB companies less than 50 employees often outsource IT or hire desktop engineers.  There is a need for SMB’s to have the same toys as the big boys, but you need system engineers to perform these tasks….  IT Utility Providers (SAAS based Companies) have high end engineers with proven records included in the monthly fee.

·         The business of a small business is their core competency.  A small business must focus on providing and servicing directly its client base with more efficient services and continue to find more better ways to market and sell these services.  Developing and maintaining a customer relationship system, billing system, order entry system etc are not their core function.  The requirement to learn how to build these applications and then maintain them only distracts critical business resources (time/money) from servicing the core business driver. 

·         Learn everything again for the first time.  When you deal with a SaaS company/ISV whose primary focus is to serve a certain market with a certain application they become experts on the fine data points of this application.  We have an ISV customer who focuses on providing back office online services to small and independent Insurance agencies.  These guys really know there stuff on the ins and outs of the requirements of the Insurance echo system AND they understand how to make technology meets those needs.  Instead of the small business needing to learn all this new the first time they can leverage the knowledge and learnings of this ISV for a much smaller use of the SMB resources (time/money)

In a nut shell, the real product of a SaaS provider is Information Technology in a Utility package.   The selling of “Software as a Service” is weaker marketing than offering an Information Technology Utility.    The positive of SaaS is having a provider do the hard work and the customer writes a check for the service.  Small and large companies alike have a need for an IT Utility and the SaaS Services bundled into packages. 

Of course this whole discussion could and should lead to the question of “shouldn’t a hosting provider create an echo system of targeted ISVs providing online applications. This hoster could then offer a menu of SMB applications from ONE Source on ONE Bill.  Great question and I will discuss this in upcoming Blogs.

A few years back I went on a tour to visit many of our customers in Europe.  I wanted to visit those who had used my company extensively as well as though who had leveraged my organization in a light way.  What I found out was very interesting.  Those customers who knew going in that they could not or should not do their own deployments were of course very pleased to have all design efforts and customization efforts done for them.  However, those who were looking to self deploy they were trying hard to do all the design and specification themselves.  As we spoke more I began to realize just how wrong this was.

There reasons mostly centered around 2 reasons

 

1) If we are going to do it ourselves we better understand what we are building

2) How would we go about engaging with your company as consultants if we do the larger deployment

 

So reason #1 makes sense but only if you believe that as a chef you don’t need a recipe only "guess" at the ingredients and measurements.

When a chef goes to learn a new dish they learns from others who have done it before or have lots of time to experiment.  In IT and in particular hosting there is NO time and very little money for experimenting.  Why not get help from the "been there, done that" team?

 

To this end we developed a solution called Online Consulting.  This allows a customer to provide us pre-deployment designs and questions that our team of experienced architects and developers can and do answer. This allows our Online Consulting customers to add an experienced architect to their team at a very low cost.  They still self-deploy but with the confidence in knowing their design is sound.

 

I would like some feedback and thoughts on this that anyone may have

 

Hi All,

 

eQuest, a Division of Planet will be having quite a presence at the upcoming HostingCon in Vegas.  In addition to the required gambling, eating, and golf we will also be sponsering some events and a very important session.

We really are hoping to see everyone there so if you are going to attend please drop me a note.

 

Conrad will be giving a session on Windows Web Hosting with 2003 and we are sure it will get the same great scores from the audience that we got last year with our session on HMC.

 

Details are below:

 

Windows Server 2003 for Shared Web Hosting WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2006 - 10:15-11:00a Session #SSH-301 - Location: Events Center C3

This session will provide ?real world? examples of how Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Service 6.0 are used to offer web hosting services. During this session, we will cover a variety of topics that both new and experienced web hosters should know as it relates to Microsoft based web hosting technologies. This session will cover the following core topics: * Comparison of shared, virtual, and dedicated web hosting * Overview of the Microsoft platform for web development (i.e. ASP.NET 1.1, ASP.NET 2.0, FrontPage, SQL Server, etc.) * Understanding how customer content management applications (i.e. Visual Studio, Front Page, FTP, etc.) impact your environment. * How customer profiles impact the number of Application Pools, Sites, and IP addresses that can be hosted on a single physical server * Local versus remote storage for content * Securing customer web content

Conrad Agramont, Senior Architect, Planet Technologies, eQuest division

Hi All,

 

Today, we (eQuest, a divison of Planet Technologies) announced that we are now offering HMC 3.5 (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration) and MPS (Microsoft Provisioning System) training in our Maryland Training Facility.  The demand for this training in a group setting has really been huge over the past few years and we are positive that everyone will really enjoy the classes.  As many of you know we have been offering these classes on customer sites for years and we are really excited to have our own facility to provide this training in.  It is going to allow individuals and organizations who only want to send a few folks to training, a cost effective way to do it!  The HMC Course is 3 days and the MPS is 5.

 

The initial instructor is going to be Conrad Agramont.  I think many of you have worked with Conrad before but truly no one is more prepared to offer great training and some real gotchas.

 

If you have any questions just drop me a note or email training@go-planet.com

 

Thanks

 

Steve

 

The Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5 has now been released to the web!

http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessaging.mspx

Now that it’s released, I’ll upgrade my lab and report back on what I find.

Without going into great detail, here is a quick list of some of the improvments from HMC 3.0:

1. Support for Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (including the new Mobility features provided with the SP2 update)
2. Integraiton with "Microsoft Identity Integration Server" (MIIS) to enable "Single Password" support between a corporate customer and their hosted services.
3. Migration Tools that enable migrating a customer from their current Exchange platform to easily migrate their data to their hosted service.
4. Improvements to the MPS Deployment Tool.

Here is a link to an MS site that defines what's new in the solution: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessagingnew.mspx

 

Our company has a series of new services, both custom and fixed fee/fixed scope to support the deployment or migration to HMC 3.5.  Let us know if we can help!