Email -- Exchange, Outlook

Google reseller program on the way?

A Google reseller program seems to be in the works, according to this video posted Friday on YouTube.

The 14-second video features Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise president, and 10 Google employees standing behind him. Girouard says, “On behalf of the Google Apps reseller team, I want to say thank you for taking the time to learn about this exciting new program.”

The employees then yell, “Go Apps resellers!”

Google Apps Education Edition, which offers email, word processing, instant messaging and other programs for college students and faculty, is already gaining some traction in the channel. But there’s also concern that Google’s focus on Web-based applications could take away on-premise sales opportunities for solutions providers. Maybe this “Google Apps reseller team” will help address those issues.

UPDATE (7:04 p.m. Eastern): The owner of the video has removed it from YouTube. 

Microsoft-hosted ERP: Still a mystery

Microsoft has been all over the map about whether it will offer self-hosted ERP.

Company CEO Steve Ballmer some years ago told solution provider partners that the vendor would offer self hosted ERP and CRM applications as needed. It was all about customer choice, he said.

Continued »

Cisco’s Jabber acquisition heats up the collaboration race

Cisco Systems has acquired open source instant messaging and presence company Jabber less than a month after it picked up e-mail and calendaring software provider PostPath. The move signifies Cisco’s ongoing moves to reach out of the network and onto the desktop.

Terms of the deal have not yet been announced. Cisco executives were unavailable to discuss the impact of the deal on Cisco or Jabber partners.

Though Cisco already owns instant messaging and presence features, Jabber’s applications are open source and based on its own Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). These applications are therefore easier to integrate into emailing, calendaring and other Web 2.0 software across the board, giving Cisco a leg up in the collaboration race against Microsoft and IBM. Continued »

Domino is dead

So, once again, Domino is dead.

That’s the gist of Ron Herardian’s article in — get this – Dominopower.com. This may be trolling but there’s a lot of truth in what Herardian, a longtime contact and a Domino partner by the way, has to say.

Continued »

Microsoft makes another terrible song

Ever get the unstoppable urge to hear a piano ballad about Microsoft Exchange 2007? Me either. But that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from recording one anyway.

David Sterling, a senior software development engineer for Exchange Web Services, has released “The Autodiscover Song,” about the Autodiscover feature in Exchange. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Todd Bishop calls it an “Elton John-style musical treatment,” but he’s being way too kind. It’s slow, it’s not catchy, and for a song that’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek (I think), it’s not even funny.

Here’s the verse that really gets me:

Call it once for each mailbox of interest
Pair the link and mailbox for each request
If you encounter errors
Refresh once again
For more information search MSDN

Continued »

Zimbra wants to out-Outlook Outlook

 You have to hand it to Zimbra.The company, now part of Yahoo and seemingly unfazed by all that entails, is nothing if not aggressive. With Zimbra Desktop it’s now taking on the grand poobah of e-mail clients.

Yes, Zimbra is trying to out-Outlook Microsoft Outlook. The nerve!

  Continued »

Microsoft: We will cut partners in on our hosted infrastructure services

The word wafting around the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is that the company will at last outline partner rebate/commission structure for those partners bringing customers to Microsoft-hosted solutions including the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. BPOS consists of Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange Server and other services for small businesses, introduced last winter. Continued »

IBM vs. Microsoft battles rage on. Does anyone else care?

Colin Steele’s story this week on IBM taking on Microsoft’s SharePoint dominance with Quickr depicts just the latest skirmish in the continual war between two companies going way back to Microsoft Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3.

It started when Microsoft challenged Lotus’ 1-2-3 spreadsheet dominance with the aforementioned Excel. Then it went after Lotus’ Notes email-and-collaboration success.

Since then much has changed: IBM bought Lotus for big money, for example, but the rivalry continued.

Microsoft took on Lotus Notes in mail-and-collaboration with Exchange Server. Then it switched strategy, deciding to enlist SharePoint its proxy warrior in collaboration, irritating partners that had been encouraged to write tools for Exchange. Anyone remember XSOs?Or Office Designer? Didn’t think so.

A common parlor game each January before Lotusphere was anticipating what Notes-to-Exchange migration tool would be announce that week.

Now IBM says that Quickr can uproot SharePoint in portals/collab. That’s a big statement given how SharePoint has spread like kudzu — largely because Sharepoint licenses are included in volume license agreements.

Anyway, with this Sharepoint-to-Quickr push, what’s old is new again. But somehow it seems desultory. The big question is whether, in this economy and with stressed IT budgets, anyone outside the vendors and their partner partisans care any more about these melees.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Microsoft posts SBS, ‘Centro’ betas

On Tuesday, Microsoft is opening up beta test its small business and mid-sized business server bundles.

Early test versions of Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (previously known by the code name Centro) will be online Tuesday with a preview of Small Business Server 2008 to surface soon thereafter, said Joel Sider, senior product manger for the Windows Server Solutions Group.

Both products are due by year’s end.

The company also unveiled pricing for the mid-market bundle. Windows Essential Business Server Premium Edition (with Windows Server, Exchange Server, Forefront Security for Exchange, System Center Essentials management, Forefront Threat Management Gateway aka the new ISA Server) will list for $7,163 per server. All prices include five CALs. Additional CALs will list for $195 each.

The standard edition, which includes one less Windows Server license, will list for $5,472. ($81 per extra CAL.)

Microsoft has raised prices for Small Business Server.

The current SBS 2003 R2 Standard Edition lists for $599 and the premium edition was $1,299.  The new standard SKU will list for $1,089 with additional CALs $77 each. Premium is now $1,899 with each new CAL $189.

Sider said the price change reflects “additional value going into the server” and that per-CAL pricing has fallen. Before users had to buy a five-pack CAL license minimum for $489  but can now add CALs incrementally. “You can also buy a mix of premium and standard CALs –only buying CALs for the users needing to touch the premium servers. And, the CALs now extend to other servers on the network,” he noted.

As before SBS is for up to 75 users with a “sweet spot” of 10 to 50 users; EBS ranges up to 300 users.

As for another burning question surrounding the product family — that of naming conventions — Sider said there is no plan to change what some partners say is confusing branding.  Let it be noted here that “confusing” is a cleaned-up version of what some partners are calling the branding.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Family affair for Dell

This is a very interesting take on Dell’s buyout of MessageOne, the e-mail-as-a-service (phew!) company.