Today I want to tell you about a really exceptional promotion we just launched in conjunction with Microsoft. For a limited time we are bundling 1 year of SharePoint Hosting (version 3) with a full boxed copy of Office SharePoint Designer 2007. The way this has been priced, you essentially get 1 year of hosting services free with the purchase of SharePoint Designer 2007.

I’ve written about SharePoint hosting services in the past but if you want to learn more, click here. At the simplest level SharePoint is a password protected website, instantly provisioned and designed to store and manage documents. On a more complex level, SharePoint can be used as a powerful platform for developing sophisticated workflows and online applications.

SharePoint Designer 2007, however, is boxed software - the exact same boxed software you would purchase from a retail vendor. And we will ship it to your home or office at no additional charge.

The primary use for Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is to customize SharePoint sites (but not bad with basic websites either – good alternative to FrontPage for some).

SharePoint Designer 2007 gives you the powerful tools you need to:

If you want some more details about SharePoint Designer here are two good links that provide an overview:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 top 10 benefits

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 version comparison

We still offer our monthly hosting packages but if you want to get the most out of your SharePoint site take a closer look at our offer.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 1 Comment

Greetings,

Over the last couple years we have had a lot requests for a reseller program for our Microsoft Exchange services. We spoke to these customers to find out what features they wanted and ultimately they just wanted to be able to offer the services to their customers, allow the customer to manage some aspects of the service, and charge the customer directly what they deem is fair. Of course to do that and ‘mark up’ our prices, they need to be able to hide our brand.

Here’s what we came up with:

White-labeled control panel: A lot of our competitors use a third-party control panel, or have developed one themselves that can be branded. What we did was build the end-user controls into the OWA (Outlook Web Access). Customers use this interface already to check their account so we built in some additional, unbranded pages, that allow them to do basic functions like change their password, download Outlook 2007, get ActiveSync and email settings and more - all directly from the OWA. We also have our own control panel for direct customers and account admins that provides much more advanced functionality.

Unique OWA Login Url and design: A unique and brandable OWA login page for each Business Exchange account (based on a custom domain) can be accessed via the accounts domain (eg. owa.yourexchangedomain.com). The reseller can select from several templates or get direct access to the HTML and create a completely custom page. Further, a company logo can be uploaded to the OWA interface so that the entire experience can be branded.

White Label settings: All technical settings like the Server Name, SMTP server name or ActiveSync settings are all based on your accounts’ domain or through a generic domain, unrelated to mail2web.com. The mail2web.com url doesn’t appear in any of the end-user account settings.

Manage multiple domains through one account: Resellers can create and manage multiple domains under a single account with fully consolidated billing. The reseller can bill their customer whatever they think is fair.

Set unique privileges for each user: You can easily grant a user under the domain as a “Domain Administrator with Billing Permissions” or a “Domain Administrator without Billing Permissions”. The first allows the user to manage other users including changes that result in a billing transaction, whereas the second can only make changes that are not linked with billing.

Of course the one thing all resellers want is a volume discount. We believe our retail prices are very competitive. But if you are a large reseller, you get your own account manager. Your account manager will provide you with additional benefits like being able to provide even more competitive pricing than our posted rates, if you grow beyond 100 seats. You will also be able to pick up the phone and call your account manager to answer any questions.

We are committed to help you grow, both technically and financially.

Ultimately what we offer is reseller functionality, not a reseller program. Getting started is easy as you don’t need to sign up for a separate account specifically for resellers. If you already have an account, you can add another domain and using the above functions, sell our services to others.

If you are a value added reseller of web services you should consider adding our Exchange services to your product portfolio. If you provide additional value to your customers (eg. assisting with migrations, desktop setup, manage SPAM settings, ect. ) you will be able to resell our services at any price you wish - and think is fair - and hide the mail2web.com brand.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

Hello,

There’s a cool trick you can use to push almost any email account (POP3 or IMAP4) to a mobile device.

It’s not actually a trick but a few features we’ve put together into a 3-step process that will allow you to use a mail2web.com Personal Exchange account to handle almost any POP3 or IMAP4 account - like a gmail or yahoo email account.

By default, all our mail2web.com Exchange accounts are capable of pushing your mail2web.com email account using ActiveSync, RoadSync (good for Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson users) or Blackberry.

But what if you want to push an existing email account you use to your mobile device?

All you need to do is sign up for a Personal Exchange account. You’ll get an email address under mail2web.com (eg. your_user_name@mail2web.com). Once you’ve signed up, go into the mail2web.com control panel and under ‘Manage Account’ you’ll see a link at the bottom page that says: “NEW FEATURE: use this account to handle another email address.”

This will take you through a 3-step process that doesn’t take more than 2 minutes to complete. The first step is to specify the alternate email address you want to use. We have a quick method to verify that you are the rightful owner of this email account.

The next step asks you to either forward your email to your new email account or use our email aggregator to automatically collect email from that account in regular intervals. Forwarding is a better option if your provider offers this but the email aggregator is easy to set up, free to use and works quite well.

The last step just verifies that you want to change your ‘From Address’ - the address your emails will appear to come from. Once you’ve completed these steps, all email from your original account is now directed to your mail2web.com account. Any email you send will appear to come from your original account but now you can access those through your mobile device as well as through the Outlook Web Access interface. You’ll also get the added bonus of the personal calendar, contacts and tasks that comes with our Personal Exchange account, all of which can be sync’d with your mobile device.

John Carthy
V.P. Sale and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

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So What?

Well that means that with a myhosting.com hosting account and MS SQL database plans you can build a dynamic, scalable website that is reliable and affordable.

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For more information or to signup click here.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ No Comments