Conrad Agramont's WebLog : Hosted Exchange

HMC and MPS Developer Bootcamps

Conrad — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:49:00 GMT

For those of you looking to get a quick and deep introduction to the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration 2.5 or get indepth training on developing against the Microsoft Provisioning System, you should checkout our latest courses and dates: http://www.go-planet.com/community/blogs/coolness/archive/2006/07/31/438.aspx

Last month we did the first MPS Developer Bootcamp out of our office in Germantown, MD and it was a lot of fun. We used the new MPS SDK and broke out in teams to solve real world development scenarios (I hate courses that have you sit there and do labs all damn day).

Anyhow, be sure to check these out and register today. To get a seat, please send an email to training@go-planet.com

Moving to Agramont.net (Hosting, ASP.NET IIS, Hosted Exchange, Microsoft Provisioning System, and Community Server)

Conrad — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:08:00 GMT

Now that I have my site working pretty well, I'm now going to do all of my blog posts over there (http://agramont.net/). I tried the cross-posting thing using the built-in features of Community Server (CS2 with ASP.NET 2), but it felt weird having the same content on two sites. From time to time, I'll post on this site a summary of the new content on my new site.

For now, I'm focusing the blog post on Hosting, ASP.NET, IIS, Hosted Exchange, Microsoft Provisioning System, and, Community Server..

New Blog URL: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/default.aspx

RSS Feed: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/rss.aspx

Summary of New Content:

Assigning Mailbox Quotas and Restrictions via Plans

Conrad — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:15:00 GMT

The “Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration 3.0” (HMC) provides a method for per user feature bundling via their “Plans System”. When provisioning new HMC users with mailboxes, Plans are used to determine what features and mailbox size a given user will be allocated. A default implementation of HMC and the Plans Database is the Quota values associated with a mailbox.

Post moved to: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2006/05/24/Assigning_Mailbox_Quotas_and_Restrictions_via_Plans.aspx

HMC 3.5 Boot Camp & MPS Developer Training

Conrad — Fri, 19 May 2006 20:58:00 GMT

As of today, we (Planet Technologies) are now offering an HMC 3.5 Bootcamp and MPS Developer Training at our training facility in Maryland. We have all of the labs (built on Virtual Server) and equipment ready to go. All you need to do is register and come get your brain jammed with Hosted Exchange, MPS, Active Directory, and lots more. The training class is less of a PowerPoint and Step-by-Step collection of labs, but is very interactive with whiteboard discussions, scenario based lab time, and learnings from real world deploymets! Did I mention the quality Foosball Table?

The first set of these hosting related courses will be taught by yours truly (uh, that’s Conrad Agramont for those of you who didn’t know me)!

For more details, please visit our training page at: http://www.go-planet.com/training/

Be sure to sign up today as we only have a few seats left for our first course on June 13th!

Exchange Hosted Service

Conrad — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 04:32:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced that their acquisition of FrontBridge Technologies will now be rebranded as “Exchange Hosted Service” (EHS). EHS offers a outsourced, per user, per month service to

Now if you’re a hoster, which most of you who visit my blog are, you’ll notice that this is pretty close to the naming of “Hosted Exchange” the solution. Sure there is no “Microsoft Solution for Hosted Exchange” any longer as it’s now just a component of the “Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration”, but most people still think of Microsoft offering Web Hosting (via IIS and some SQL) and Hosted Exchange.

Now that Microsoft has done this, what real issues will come of this? Small Business and Enterprise customers are still coming around to looking at outsourcing their Exchange platform to a hoster that offers “Hosted Exchange” as a service. Microsoft has “Exchange Hosted Services” that they host, but can also be hosted via a Service Provider offering or customer can use “Exchange Hosted Services” without “Hosted Exchange” as they host their own services. Confused yet?

Also, with Microsoft making a big push via their “Microsoft Live” services, I’m wondering when they’ll restart their “Hosted Exchange” offering themselves. Several years ago, Microsoft offered Hosted Exchange via their bCentral services targeted towards Small to Medium businesses. Microsoft is already targeting a hosted offering towards Small Businesses via their Office Live service (Email via Hotmail, Collaboration via new version of Windows SharePoint Services, and web hosting). I’m thinking they are only a few steps away from bringing Hosted Exchange back into the fold. This is all speculation on my part and Microsoft has not made any hits or announcements about this.

With that said, I still think that there will be much room for Service Provider to offer Hosted Exchange and other services provided by Microsoft. Why am I so optimistic about that? With Microsoft getting more into the space, they will use their Marketing might to educated customers about this service. But it will also teach Microsoft on how to make their products better to target the Service Provider scenario. As for the existing or future customer base of Service Providers, I think there will be many that don’t want to host their corporate data with a company that has a big hacker bull’s-eye on it and they’ll want someone who is within their same region, focused primarily in the Hosting space, or is offering services that you know Microsoft won’t offer (mySQL, Oracle, Linux, Blackberry, etc.).

Now with that all said, I think there will be many hosters looking to see how they can automate the process of signing up their Hosted Exchange customers to utlilize “Exchange Hosted Services” and perhaps get a discount (as the hoster will be doing the selling) via the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA). Or maybe this is something customers can do on their own, but still have their Service Provider host their Exchange Platform.

These are things I’ll have to add to my list of items to research. More on that (I hope) later.

Exchange Hosted Services: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/services/default.mspx
Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessaging.mspx
Office Live: http://officelive.microsoft.com/

I got published in PingZine: The History of Hosted Exchange

Conrad — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 03:16:00 GMT

It appears that my article on “The History of Hosted Exchange” made PingZine! It’s now available in their latest publication!

You can check out the cover here: http://www.pingzine.com/current.php
You can download the latest edition here (PDF): http://www.pingzine.com/pdf/ping_issue14.pdf

BTW, this is the same issue when they announce HMC 3.5. My article didn’t cover that as the solution features weren’t formally announced at the time.

Warning: HMC 3.5 install breaks with .NET 2.0

Conrad — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 13:07:00 GMT

We’ve found a semi-serious issue in the installation of MPS in the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5 (http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessaging.mspx). This has been found at 2 customer sites thus far and I’m sure we’ll see this happen with more deployments.

This post moved to: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2006/02/08/12.aspx

Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) Versions

Conrad — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 07:59:00 GMT

This post moved: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2005/12/28/Microsoft-Provisioning-System-_2800_MPS_2900_-Versions.aspx

Released to Web: Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5

Conrad — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:17:00 GMT

The Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5 has now been released to the web!

http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessaging.mspx

Now that it’s released, I’ll upgrade my lab and report back on what I find.

Without going into great detail, here is a quick list of some of the improvments from HMC 3.0:

Support for Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (including the new Mobility features provided with the SP2 update)
Integraiton with "Microsoft Identity Integration Server" (MIIS) to enable "Single Password" support between a corporate customer and their hosted services.
Migration Tools that enable migrating a customer from their current Exchange platform to easily migrate their data to their hosted service.
Improvements to the MPS Deployment Tool.

Here is a link to an MS site that defines what's new in the solution: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/hostedmessagingnew.mspx

Public Folders Provisioning via HMC 3.0

Conrad — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 05:23:00 GMT

Post moved to: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2005/11/04/28.aspx