Cobweb

Microsoft Hosting Summit 2009

We're off to the Microsoft Hosting Summit this afternoon, this will be our third year of attending and it's worth the travel time to Seattle.  It’s held in the business suburb of Bellevue, it's a well attended summit with hosting execs from around the globe.  It's a great opportunity for Cobweb to catch-up with our many friends and partners from the US and make new hosting and vendor partnerships too.  It’s also good to see who’s attending from the UK and there’s usually a good turn out from Microsoft too.

We’ll get some downtown Seattle action too – for sure we’ll visit our favourite restaurant Wild Ginger, take a walk along to docks and stop for a couple of Samuel Adams along the way.   A Microsoft campus tour is on the agenda too with a trip to the Business and Home of the Future – something we did two years ago, so let’s see what’s changed?

You can follow us - we'll be tweeting our progress and news -
http://twitter.com/dan_germain
http://twitter.com/MarktheMD

If you Twitter you can search for #mshostingsummit for more activity and news.

Outlook OST and PST performance boost!

On 24 Feb Microsoft release an cumulative update for Outlook 2007, which greatly improves performance and responsiveness when using OST (cached Exchange mode) and PST (Outlook offline mail store) files.

The update is available from, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=961752 and was originally intended for a future service pack, but the user experience is so much improved they have replaced it early.

Other enhancements have been added to:

- First startup
- Shut down
- Calendering
- Search

More information on the changes can be found here, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968009.

Cobweb Hosted Microsoft CRM Preview Event

Cobweb ran its first customer event at the  Microsoft Headquarters in Reading yesterday. Looking at the feedback from over 25 invited customers, the presentations including the great product demonstration by John went down really well, but, as always for me, it is the breaks where I get a chance to talk to in person to customers about real issues that offer the most value. Managing end customers in these tough times has become even more important and it amazes me how successful businesses manage to give great service to customers using the most basic of tools, normally an achievement of triumph over adversity. So it was encouraging to hear, once the attendees had seen the Microsoft Hosted CRM service that we will be providing, that without exception then could see how much this area of their business could be improved, we even had a couple of Salesforce users saying the same!

A good day all round  

Mark

It's not easy when the world's watching & waiting for you to fail...

Following Gmail's period of downtime today, I'm surprised that the issue today actually gained so much air time and coverage - it was on the BBC News frontpage for most of the day today. 

 

It is quite easy to feel the urge to turn against cloud computing or SaaS, but let's remember that on-premise solutions are prone to fail too, indeed they could be seen as being even less reliable - be it software issues, hardware failures, network problems or even human error. 

 

Gmail’s up-time record is actually pretty good, ~15 minutes out per month according to them today.  But if you're paying for a business-class service, even a few minutes offline can be disruptive to a business.

 

As the CTO of a hosted email provider I can feel their pain. It's important that services have guarantees for 99.9% uptime or better, access to a real person on the Service Desk when things go wrong, so you know problems are taken care of.   I know that our customers prefer the reassurance that a managed service provider gives, especially at times like these. Having customer service support 24/7 no matter where you or your employees are is vital for business sustainability. Global Giants with free or low-cost SaaS services are great when they work, but when things go wrong its nice to have someone on the end of a phone that can help you along.

 

 

Cobweb is Ranked No 8 in The MSPmentor 100: Top 100 Managed Service Providers

MSPmentor 100, the annual ranking of the world’s most progressive managed service providers, produced by Nine Lives Media Inc., is the ultimate guide to managed services and the leading global destination for managed service providers. The MSPmentor is an annual look at 100 companies that redefine MSP success.

Cobweb are very pleased to be ranked No 8 this year which we feel demonstrates our leading position in his exciting and fast changing market space

See the full list here

Mark

Parallels Summit 2009

For those who would like to see or hear Dan taking at the Conference, we will post the session here - as soon as we can.

The Parallels Operation Automation provisioning and billing solution is central to our services strategy and roadmap

Dan in Vegas

Dan presenting at the Parallels Summit 2009

Go Dan