In an initiative supported by Microsoft, Emantra have provisioned a free-of-charge Hosted Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007 demo portal for pre-sales use by Microsoft Partners.
Emantra’s objectives in providing this service are:
- to provide Microsoft Partners with a ready ability to demonstrate MOSS 2007 in a real world environment,
- to promote Hosted MOSS as a viable alternative to in-house implementation, and
- to promote Emantra as potential hosting partner.
Microsoft Partners should contact Emantra on 1300 728 953 to access the service.
The service is designed for Partners such as system integrators or developers who might not otherwise have ready access to a production environment.
Eligible partners will have a MOSS 2007 site allocated to them, within which they can create their own sub-sites for individual customer trials and demonstrations.
Emantra is proud to offer this service to the Microsoft Partner Community. The hosting infrastructure underlying it is robust and will present MOSS in a very efficient and realistic way.
True integration between voice telephony and digital communication such as email and instant messaging will move a step closer with the release later this year of Microsoft’s Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007. OCS 2007 integrates with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and the user’s existing telephone system to deliver Unified Communications without starting from scratch.
Microsoft has paid a lot of attention to making this new technology work with legacy phone systems and to understanding exactly how real users work. The convergence of telephony and IP is inevitable and over time I believe it will become as essential for business as email is today. OCS 2007 is really leading the way forward in this direction.
For example, with OCS 2007 a simple phone call can become a conference call or a video conference on the fly. Voice-mail and faxes move over the network like e-mail and will arrive in the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 inbox where users can sort, prioritise, and forward them, just like any piece of e-mail. Users on the road can dial in over any telephone to hear their e-mails and appointments.
Emantra recognises the strong potential for managed services around OCS in combination with its existing Hosted Exchange 2007, Windows Sharepoint 3.0 and MOSS 2007 services. We’ve had OCS running internally in a pilot and in federation with Microsoft since July 2007. It is stable but complex software that will demand skilled and disciplined attention.
Emantra plans to offer a fully managed and outsourced pay-by-the-month service encompassing both Exchange 2007 and OCS 2007 from November 2007. Different layers of capability within the service will be offered for different needs. Smaller companies like the hosted model as often the the ownership and operation of such technology, hardware and software, is out of their technical and financial reach. Larger corporate and government entities are attracted because of the speed with which the hosted model can hit the road, as well as the reduced distractions and risk of having the service externally managed.
We also see interest from very large organisations, traditionally not users of hosted services, who will utilise the software-as-a-service model to minimise costs and risks during the “proof of concept” stage. Interestingly, we retain much of this business in the long term.
The price for using Emantra’s hosting model for OCS 2007 will be less expensive compared to a company buying and installing the software in-house, and then writing off the capital and operating cost over three years. Businesses communication systems just have to work properly all the time. By implementing a hosted version of OCS 2007 through Emantra, customers leverage the investment that Emantra has made in skills, systems, network and data centre facilities to have OCS delivered to an agreed and guaranteed service level.
Microsoft has more in store for this technology over the next few years. You’ll see products such as the RoundTable 360 degree video conferencing camera, IP-phones with Outlook embedded, and improvements in voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities. From a service provider’s perspective, it’s exciting to see Microsoft’s recently announced alliance with Cisco in this area, which means those two leaders can build on their respective strengths rather than fighting it out in the trenches.
Emantra feels right up to the challenge of maintaining our edge in technical strength and support as the release date for this new technology nears.