Microsoft OR Cobweb

Who do you want to host your applications?

Cobweb has been hosting Microsoft applications for nearly 7 years now and has around 4000 pretty happy customers. We know that our customers like the functionally of the applications they use as a service and they like the support we give them. So what happens when Microsoft start hosting the applications themselves?. A couple of recent articles here  and here show Microsoft's move into the hosting game. You can of course get Microsoft Live services for free or at low cost and it appears that if you are a business in the USA over with 5000 users you can get Microsoft to directly host services right now. But do you want them to? Having been a Service Provider to smaller business 1-1000 users for a while now we  know that whilst our model is one too many, all our customers do have individual requirements that a small business like Cobweb is ideally placed to service.  But I would be very interested to know what you think. The question is: Would you prefer place your business hosting of services like messaging and data management with a large corporate like Microsoft or a smaller Service Provider like Cobweb - Comments please

Mark

Comments

[James H]

I can't comment on the higher level services Microsoft is now offering on a hosted basis but I have been using OfficeLive quite a bit to help friends out with websites.

Based on experiences with this, I would suggest that Microsoft is rushing into this for fear of competitors' activities but not putting all the necessary pieces in place to support customers properly and having a lot to learn in this respect.

On the couple of occasions I have had to deal with Microsoft support around its OfficeLive services it has been very disappointing and clear that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

[Rene van Steenwijk]

I could'nt agree more with James H.

The times I have had to deal with Microsoft Support was horrible. One of the problems you see many times in large organisations, they are so huge, that it seems to be diffecult to trace things up or something like that.

I know for ourselves, that we love the relationship we have with Cobweb, cause we are actually able to get things fixed or done.
Things you will never succeed in, in a large company like Msft.

[Mo Warden]

Is English your first language or were you just typing quickly? I don't enjoy nit-picking but you might consider changing "themselves." to "themselves?", "business in the USA over 5000 users" to "business in the USA with over 5000 users", "do you want them too?" to "do you want them to?"

Also; "our model is one to many" might be read as "our model is one too many"

I'm interested to know how much control we would have over the blog... Can we block users? Edit comments? Only permit confirmed replies to show in the blog? Add pictures?
There is very little info available for us to pass real judgement at this time. Perhaps you could create a "demo" blog where we can test the interface and features before making the decision to use cob-blog (what a ghastly name) or not.

[Michael Frisby]

Having worked for both Microsoft and now Cobweb I know from personal experience that the personalised service available from companies such as Cobweb is one of the things that really sets us apart.

Any large organisation whether it is Microsoft, Google or BT designs services for use by tens of thousands of organisations and this has a BIG trade-off in the level of customisation possible and the quality of support for such free or very low cost services.

I speak with our customers everyday and the feedback that I get is that the quality of the support Cobweb offers, combined with the flexibility to be that little bit different when needed, is what makes a real difference for them.

[James H]

I would add to Michael's comments and say that it is certainly my understanding that a smaller, more focused, organisation like Cobweb will likely perform higher in areas such as security and privacy of data. This is mainly because a smaller, dedicated team, with typically less staff turnover than larger companies knows what is expected of them in ensuring process and proceedure is followed and customer data is kept secure.