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.

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.

We’ve got plans to attend a lot of events this year.

• ISPCon (spring and fall)
• HostingCon
• The Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference
• The Hosting Transformation Summit

We’ll also be attending a variety of other shows with Microsoft. We’ll make sure and keep you up to date with our event schedule so if you’re attending a show we will be exhibiting at you’ll be able to stop by and chat.

Today more than 85% of all electronic mail traffic on the Internet is unwanted, malicious or offensive. SMBs are under siege from a variety of increasingly sophisticated attacks from hackers, spammers, and phishers. Being a small business doesn’t afford “security through obscurity.”

groupSPARK’s Postini solution blocks spam, viruses, and email attacks, and provides sophisticated message management and policy enforcement capabilities.

With Outlook 2007, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites, and create and manage sites for editing documents and organizing meetings. Outlook 2007 and Windows SharePoint 2007 support a new set of significantly enhanced functionality including:

 

• Read/write access to SharePoint items: calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents
• Synchronization of offline support of document library and lists
• Ability to check out and edit documents when offline
• Roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites
• Unified view of personal and SharePoint tasks in Outlook 2007

 

Exchange Server 2007 is obviously something that groupSPARK and our partners have been waiting for. There are significant improvements over Exchange Server 2003. Here are just a few of those improvements…

• Advanced Anti-SPAM and Anti-Virus protection
• New data replication capabilities
• Unified messaging with fax and voice mail
• Improved performance and scalability

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As with all Microsoft software releases, there are many improvements over the previous release.

Outlook 2007 has a redesigned look and feel of its messaging interface, which makes composing, formatting, and acting on information an easier and more intuitive experience. You now get all the Outlook 2007 rich features and capabilities in an accessible location, which makes it easier to navigate your options.

Users benefit from a new scheduling assistant that automates time-consuming calendaring tasks, the ability to schedule and customize out-of-office communications, and managed folders that facilitate compliance needs.

You can connect Windows SharePoint Services documents, calendars, contacts, tasks, and other information to Office Outlook 2007, giving you a central place to manage your information.

These are but a few of the major process improvements that you will see in Outlook 2007.

Dynamics CRM  Hosted Customer Relationship Management 
groupSPARK is now offering Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Dynamics CRM is a premiere Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software available in the marketplace today with an easy to use web-based interface and full Outlook integration.Cost and complexity of building and maintaining a Hosted Microsoft CRM solution have prevented deployment by service providers across the world. As the first Private Label Hosted Microsoft CRM solution in the marketplace, groupSPARK empowers you to instantly add Hosted Microsoft CRM to your suite of services. 

New Control Panel Same functionality - New look 
We have been working very hard these last few months to make improvements to our control panel. Based on feedback from you, we have made significant changes that will improve usability and the overall look of the tool. 

As with our previous control panel, this one is fully private labeled, but we’re included much more flexibility in changing the appearance of elements like fonts, colors and styles. 

SharePoint 2007 
groupSPARK will be one of the first private label providers to offer SharePoint 2007. This is a another great opportunity for you to be the first providers in the nation to offer SharePoint 2007.

New functionality in 2007 includes the ability to implement team-based blogs and wikis, enhanced integration with Outlook 2007, and the ability to easily create new application templates (you will find that the 60+ templates we already provide will satisfy even your most demanding customers).

SharePoint is being used by more and more SMBs every day. If you don’t already offer it, now is the time to. You will be able to take advantage of all the additional marketing and PR coming out of Microsoft. 

ISPCon Santa Clara  Good to see everyone 
For those of you that attended this year’s Fall ISPCon in Santa Clara, CA, we wanted to thank you for stopping by our booth. Events like ISPCon are great opportunities for us to not only meet prospective new clients but also speak to existing ones and hear their success stories.