discussUC

Authors: Julia White

The new year is starting off with a bang – a great new set of Notes customers decided to Exchange and SharePoint.  At this rate, 2011 could be one of our biggest Notes “switcher” years, yet.    With IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference starting next week, it means that Notes customers...

Authors: Julia White

I’m excited to announce a new release update of our online email protection service Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), which makes it easier for customers to manage hybrid email environments.  Many of you already know that Forefront is Microsoft’s line of protection, access and identity management...

Authors: Julia White

A year ago, Microsoft and HP undertook a challenge to provide our customers with solutions to deliver faster business results.  Our approach would be to create new appliances for key IT workloads, including virtualization and management, business intelligence, and email.  We called this partnership...

Authors: Julia White

In November 2009 Cisco Mail was introduced to the world, but yesterday Cisco announced that they were abandoning this hosted mail service.   It should come as no surprise that we have been watching the coverage with some interest and have some thoughts of our own to share.

The Wall Street Journal, in Cisco Pulls Plug...

Authors: Lync Team

Email continues to be the lifeblood of business communications so it should come as no surprise that vendors of all shapes and sizes want a piece of the action.  The fact remains, however,

Authors: Julia White

It was just over a year ago that I had the privilege of launching Exchange 2010, standing on a stage in Berlin demoing some of the great new features in Exchange.  My enthusiasm has only grown in the past year.  Up to that point, I had already been on Exchange 2010 for over a year, and I was eager to see how

Authors: Julia White

What a fun week on the UC Blog!  We saw lots of spirited comments from the Notes community, especially in response to my Monday post.  Certainly, there is a lot of passion among Notes users.  There is

Partner Opportunities to Address Email Archiving Needs with Exchange 2010 SP1

Last year at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2009, we talked to our partners about the new business opportunities made possible by our addition of integrated email archiving and discovery with Exchange Server 2010. In November, we launched Exchange 2010, one of the most successful and exciting launches in Exchange’s history. This week at WPC 2010, we’re focusing on how enhanced email archiving in Exchange 2010 SP1 continues to expand partner business opportunities.

Partners agreed that email archiving and compliance presents a tremendous opportunity to deliver new services to their customers while driving adoption of the full platform capabilities of Exchange; for example, consulting engagements that average $30-$40K in new services revenue.

Moreover, partners gave us great feedback on how we could make the feature set even more compelling: we needed to give customers the flexibility and choice of tiered storage (storing the archive mailbox on a different Exchange database from the primary), support for Outlook 2007, and additional e-Discovery capabilities, like search de-duplication.

We listened and very rapidly provided these improvements in Exchange 2010 SP1, which we disclosed just five months after launch in April and released a beta at last month’s TechEd North America.

Shipping later this year, SP1 adds the functionality partners told us they needed to more successfully position Exchange 2010 archiving, and help customers eliminate PST files, simplify email retention for compliance, and drastically lower the cost for email e-Discovery. Both analysts and customers recognize the importance and value of archiving:

“Generally speaking, companies will not have to wait for SP1 to deploy Exchange 2010 — but they should be mindful of the changes in SP1.  The most significant elements of SP1 relate to the archive feature, which will support multiple tiers of storage for primary and archive mailboxes provisioned on separate Exchange databases.” - First Service Pack for Microsoft Exchange 2010: Finishing the Job, Gartner (May 4, 2010)

“PST files are quite a nightmare for IT to manage. We look forward to Exchange 2010 negating the need for supporting PSTs. It’s going to take a lot of headaches away for us,” said Ronald Loewenthal, Customer Service Manager at Super Group, a supply chain management firm.

Our SP1 enhancements are demonstrative of our investments and ongoing innovation at a rapid pace and provide key opportunities for our partners:

• For Large Account Resellers (LARs) and Value Account Resellers (VARs), there are now more benefits to land the full value of platform capabilities with your customers that include enhanced archiving, voicemail, information protection and control functionalities.

• Delivering even more value over pure messaging engagements, Systems Integrators extend messaging services with new revenue generating offerings including email archiving and voicemail practices.

• And ISVs can leverage the extensibility APIs (like the e-Discovery web services API) to enhance the native functionality in Exchange 2010 with advanced compliance and discovery tools.

Read our Archiving and Discovery, Voicemail and Compliance White Papers to learn more.

Thanks,

Kristin Murray, UC Partner Marketing

Codelco, the world's largest copper mining company is 'All In' with BPOS!  Today on the MS Online blog we are proud to provide a guest post by Marco Orellana, CIO of Codelco. You can also watch a great video interview between Marco and Chris Capossela, SVP of Microsoft Business Division.  Codelco is a Chilean State owned copper mining company formed in 1976 with headquarters in Santiago. It is the largest copper producing company in the world with more than 18,000 workers and pre-tax profits of over $4 billion in 2009.

There is a great storyline's here with this customer win.

Codelco has taken advantage of the Microsoft Online 'deskless' product to provide email to mine workers who were once disenfranchised from IT because of cost.  This is EXACTLY what Forrester analyst, Ted Schadler wrote about in last years report,  "Tier Your Workforce To Save Money With Cloud-Based Corporate Email; Forrester Finds Customers Can Save “$1.3 Million Annually With Exchange Online Deskless Worker” Given the flexibility of the BPOS suite, customers can buy solutions that map to their needs.  If you want just mail, Exchange Online is available.  If you want just SharePoint, we'll support that as well.  And if you have workers who need to participate in the flow of information and replace the 'bulletin board' in the break room, we can support a lighter weight solution for them via the deskless offering.  NET.

They selected BPOS because as opposed to other solutions in the market, you don't under-buy for your core Information Workers with 'good enough' or over-buy for the task, deskless worker with huge inboxes, video, IM, etc.  IT can meet business needs in a agile and cost effective way by managing all the workforce on one central system and bring the workforce together so they can focus on mining not stitching together IT across disparate solutions.  Win-Win.

Authors: IBM