IN THIS ISSUE

:: Increase Revenue!
:: Get to know a groupSPARK employee
:: Spam Filtering and Exchange 2007
:: Sales Tip!
:: groupSPARK and WebHost Automation Partnership
:: groupSPARK To Offer Dynamics CRM 4.0
:: Conference Recap

Greetings,

Welcome to the September newsletter. This month we’ll be focusing in on dedicated server opportunities and the best ways to close them. We will also look at additional revenue opportunities through our affiliate program.

- Duane
Duane Batista
Partner Manager

Increase Revenue!
Become a groupSPARK affiliate

In addition to the revenue you are generating by reselling our services, you can now generate additional revenue by becoming a groupSPARK affiliate. Do you have a reseller who utilizes a great deal of your support resources or resellers for which you do not wish to manage the billing function? Don’t lose that revenue - become a groupSPARK affiliate.

We pay 10% commissions for the first 6 months of revenue you generate for each client you refer to us. We have partnered with Share-A-Sale to ensure that there is a neutral 3rd party tracking these sales. To sign up, simply go to http://www.shareasale.com/shareasale.cfm? merchantID=13730 to being the process. There is no cost to sign up, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. For additional information on our affiliate program please contact apm@groupspark.com or call 781-273-6248 x638.

Sales Tip!
Selling Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers generate recurring revenue for your company, provide 40-50% margins, allow you to create your own plans with custom disk space quotas and decrease churn. When discussing the benefits of a dedicated server with your customers these are some of the benefits you will want to promote:

• Theirs is the only company on the server.
• They have much more granular control of user access & mailbox limits.
• Users can be classified into policies, which lets them change disk space and access levels very quickly by just making changes to the policy and not users individually. For example, they can restrict POP3/IMAP/OWA/ActiveSync features for users by creating policies.
• Mailboxes up to 15GB at no additional cost

Should you be interested in discussing how you can promote the benefits of dedicated servers to your customers, feel free to contact our sales department at 781-273-6248 or http://news.groupspark.com/sales@groupspark.com.

groupSPARK and WebHost Automation Partnership

groupSPARK recently announced that we have integrated our private label SaaS platform into WebHost Automation’s leading Windows Web hosting control panel, Helm. As a result of this partnership, WebHost Automation’s customers can now sell hosted Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Dynamics CRM and mobile device services to their customers. As is the case in a hosted Exchange environment, no investment in infrastructure or personnel is required. Helm Web hosting providers are now able to significantly grow their revenue while providing their customers with anywhere, anytime access to their messaging and collaboration data.

groupSPARK To Offer Dynamics CRM 4.0

Resellers and customers alike are eagerly anticipating the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 by the end of this year. The key feature of this new version of Microsoft’s customer relationship management solution is its multitenant architecture. This new architecture allows Microsoft CRM to be located on shared servers providing SMBs with the full features and functionality of CRM without having to pay the additional cost associated with a dedicated server and signing a yearlong contract. The current version of CRM is only available to dedicated server customers.

September Dedicated Server Special

 

 

Not sure if SharePoint or BlackBerry Enterprise Server will work for your customers’ needs? Now is the time to see! They can use the voucher towards the monthly fees for: BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Good Messaging, Postini, SharePoint, Archiving for Compliance, Extended Backup Options, or Hard Drive upgrades!*

Not sure if SharePoint or BlackBerry Enterprise Server will work for your customers’ needs? Now is the time to see! They can use the voucher towards the monthly fees for:Requirements:

1. Contract and initial payment must be received no later than the close of business on September 28, 2007 to take part in this month’s special offerings.
2. Cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer or discount.

* The voucher cannot be used on setup fees for these services. For more information contact sales@groupspark.com.

Get to know a groupSPARK employee
Robert Mitchell

In each issue of this newsletter we would like to introduce you to a different groupSPARK employee. Today, we would like you to meet Robert Mitchell. Rob joined groupSPARK in February of this year and has become an integral member of our technical support team answering a wide variety of Exchange, SharePoint and CRM questions and helping to resolve any technical issues that arise. Some of you may have already gotten to know him. In addition, he also assists in the configuration of the dedicated servers ensuring they meet the specific needs of each individual customer.

Prior to joining groupSPARK Rob spent 6 years at Comcast as part of their Advanced Technical Services department providing technical support to Comcast employees in the field. He also spent 2 years at Getronics providing in-house logistics services.

Rob enjoys spending his free time with his young family and is a huge Boston Celtics and New England Patriots fan. The next time you contact our technical support department be sure to say hello to Rob.

Spam Filtering and Exchange 2007

When speaking to your customers about spam filtering for Exchange 2007 remember that Postini server-side spam filtering is the only anti-spam solution available. Microsoft IMF is not currently available on Exchange 2007. Both IMF and Postini are available for Exchange 2003.

Conference Recap
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference & HostingCon

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
On July 10, 2007 over 7,300 Microsoft Partners, including groupSPARK, converged in Denver, Colorado for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. It provided all of us with a wide range of valuable resources including networking opportunities with other partners and the Microsoft team, hands-on labs, panel discussions and presentations and exhibits to examine the latest technology. We look forward to seeing everyone at our booth in 2008.

HostingCon
We had a fun time in Chicago, Illinois from July 23-25, 2007 for HostingCon. The event brought together both executives and system administrators to learn from industry professionals on how to grow their hosted services business. We enjoyed meeting everyone who stopped by our booth and entered our Home Run Derby for a chance to win a Nintendo Wii. Congratulations to winners Stephen Tadman and Stephen Casazza.

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We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading our September 2007 Partner Newsletter and that you found the information useful. As always, please feel free to let me know if there is anything that you would like to see in the newsletter. 

Sincerely,

Duane Batista
groupSPARK
email: dbatista@groupspark.com
phone: 781.273.6248
web: http://www.groupspark.com

Check the status of our services

In our continuing effort to help you support your customers, we have launched the new Status Page for groupSPARK (http://status.groupspark.com). Now, if a problem is reported by one of your customers, you can easily refer to this page for any information that we hay have about it.

To make things even easier for you, we have created a page that has no branding which you can incorporate into your website if you would like : http://status.groupspark.com/Server_Status.php. You can point your users to the unbranded page, or enclose it in an iframe as part of your own site

groupSPARK is the first Hosted Exchange messaging and collaboration provider to provide this important tool to their partners.

Windows SharePoint templates are out-of-the-box customized web pages that address the needs and requirements of specific business processes and sets of tasks. They allow for the easy customization of SharePoint services to any business situation for SMBs though SharePoint can be used in organizations of any size.

Even though Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 is a powerful standalone tool, application templates can be plugged in to help customize for specific situations such as:

The Competitive Analysis Site – The Competitive Analysis Site application template helps individuals and teams organize competitive information. The site provides useful document templates helping users perform useful competitive analysis techniques. Links to industry, company and product news can also be included making the site the central location for all industry and competitive news and information.

The Employee Activities Site – The Employee Activities Site application template helps manage the creation and attendance of events for employees. Users can submit event profiles and create event calendar items while other employees use the site to sign up as well as track their full activities list.

The Employee Self-Service Benefits Site – The Employee Self-Service Benefits application template provides a location to inform employees about available benefits as well as enabling them to enroll for each benefit.

The Sports League Site – The Sports League application template helps an intra-company league administrator manage a sports league. The site tracks team information, players, captains and scheduled team activities (including off-field activities). Team members can enter in game results and perform analysis at a team, game or individual player level. The site also enables discussions between league members through a League Discussion board.

In response to some recent suggestions from our Partners, we have begun to institute a Partner Notification System, which will provide our partners updated information on the health of our network. The first phase in implementing this system will be to expose our new Status page, located outside of our network, that shows the current condition for each of the services we run. This Status page should be available to you by the middle of the month, so keep an eye out for more information.

Outlook 2007 is our focus this month. We wanted to give you a few selling points and educate you on some of the cool new functionality you and your users will see with this release.

Advanced searching capabilities – The new Instant Search tool allows users to not only conduct keyword searches of their Outlook 2007 messages but also within e-mail attachments.

Centralized communication management – Users can now read and manage Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and blogs right from within Outlook 2007. This allows users to organize and manage more of the information they use on a daily basis from one central location.

Less junk mail and improved phishing protection - To help protect users from divulging personal information to a threatening Web site, Outlook 2007 has an improved junk e-mail filter and has added new features that disable links and warn users about threatening content within an e-mail message.

Integration with SharePoint Services 3.0- Users can connect and access SharePoint Services 3.0 documents, calendars, contacts, tasks, and other information through Outlook 2007, giving them a central place to manage information.

Just about everyone in the world has to pay for Outlook 2007 - except for your users - giving you a chance to offer a very compelling reason to use Hosted Exchange mailboxes. Right of the bat, you are offering them a savings of hundreds or thousands of dollars! As a cost conscious SMB, this is very attractive. Take advantage of this in your marketing pitch.

Technically, this isn’t just a promotion for February. Free Outlook has been a perk of partnering with groupSPARK from the beginning. Offering anything for free is going to make people pay attention to what you are saying. When you say you will give away software that would normally cost them around $100, this should really make them take notice.

We’ve been working hard on improving our BlackBerry Enterprise Server Infrastructure. Our upgrades have been significant and will make our BlackBerry service even more robust. We wanted to share some of what we’ve done with you:

• Upgraded Blackberry Enterprise Server Infrastructure by adding two additional servers
• The plan is to have one BES server for each Shared Exchange server, and a set of BES servers to handle just the dedicated servers
• We’ve seen, through our testing and analysis that restricting the number of users on a Blackberry server to approx 250, will drastically improve performance and reliability.