January 2008
In This Issue:
- Year End Update
- E2K7 Available!
- SharePoint Free Trial
- 1 GB Plan available
- Customer Centre Updates
- SLA increased to 99.9%
- BlackBerry Promotion
- Support Corner
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2007 is ending as a great year for ThinOffice and our Channel partners. There has been a great deal of effort leading up to year end that will make 2008 an exciting time for our Reseller community. In this issue, you will find out about platform changes, product introductions, promotions and offers.
Our market continues to heat up with what looks to be promising year as Microsoft focuses on Software + Services. They are shifting into high gear educating the market on how Hosted Exchange through partners is a cost effective, reliable and secure deployment solution for the SMB.
Here is how we are working hard to make 2008 the best year yet for our partners.
Starting the end of January, all new companies will be provisioned on Exchange 2007.
Our Network Operations group has been working diligently over past months to install and implement our new 64 bit architecture. It has been designed, implemented and tested with the same redundancy and security that you expect.
Fully managed with our reseller tools in the Customer Centre along with a rich selection of important Knowledge Base articles for Outlook 2007, Autodiscover setup and more!
We will continue to support E2K3 legacy customers on the existing infrastructure. With the release of E2K7 SP1, we will begin investigating automated migration tools to seamlessly move these organizations onto E2K7 with a target availability of Q4 2008.
We are also announcing general availability of SharePoint for our Resellers. We will be running a promotional period until March 1st where you will be able to offer free SharePoint services to your customers.
Our goal with this trial period is twofold, for you to get customers interested in the new service while building your own SharePoint professional services practice. Recall that we will be focusing on stable infrastructure and tools with our partners engaging in any lucrative professional services engagements.
During January and February, SharePoint activations will be simple additions at the company level with all users available on SharePoint. This is immediately available for E2K7 companies and launched for E2K3 companies in January.
We are adding a 1 GB plan that will cater to your Power Users where 500 MB of storage hasn't been enough. The same full Hosted Exchange features with more bundled storage. This plan is now available to all resellers for any new or existing companies through the provisioning portal.
For pricing and details, please refer to your ThinOffice plan documents in the Reseller FTP site.
This section will outline some of the recent features and functionality that have been introduced for our Reseller community.
- Organizational Groups: This feature will allow you to divide companies into different segments for easier management and security purposes. For example, a company may choose to have separate divisions each with their own administrator and Global Address List.
- Distribution List Management: The ability to modify distribution list membership directly from the Customer Centre is now available. For more details, refer to Customer Centre Help.
- Other Features:
- Digest authentication now disabled by default for new companies.
- Customizable Quarantine columns which will allow users to personalize their views
Interested in submitting a feature request? Let us know.
We have been reviewing our committed Service Level of 99.8% against the competitive marketplace. It is important to compare apples to apples, recognizing that we are different because we stand behind our SLA with credits for downtime. We aren't willing to sacrifice customer goodwill by offering an SLA that cannot be supported by the technology. This did get us to thinking… we are engineered for better than 99.8%.
As a ThinOffice partner, the infrastructure that you provide is a key market differentiator. With component level redundancy in our Toronto data centre and geographic redundancy for our critical front ends, our infrastructure is widely noted as the best in the marketplace.
For these reasons, we have decided to update our SLA metric to 99.9% well supported by our superior infrastructure … an excellent selling feature for our partners in the marketplace.
As Alliance partners, we have been working with RIM to help accelerate your mobility practices. As part of this effort, we are excited to be running a promotion for the first quarter.
For each new BlackBerry mobility upgrade that is activated during the promotion, you will receive $3. If you sign up 50 or more, you will receive an additional onetime bonus of $500!
The promotional period will run between January and March 31st, 2008. Promotional incentives will be determined once the promotion period ends and credited to your reseller accounts.
Here are some frequently asked questions that resellers have asked us.
How do Mailbox storage limits and warnings work?
When a User starts to get close to their mailbox limit (their quota), they will begin receiving a generic system email to contact their administrator. Their options at this point are to archive/delete email or add more storage. Once they reach their quota, they will only be prevented from sending emails. Currently mailbox warning messages are set at 80% of quota which will be changing to 90% at January month end.
What are 2nd line Support hours of operation?
Our Resellers can contact ThinOffice 2nd line support at any time with calls managed based on severity as discussed in our Support Agreement. Severity 1 and 2 issues will receive 24 X 7 response and resolution. For Severity 3 and 4 items, responses and resolution will occur during office hours from Monday to Friday between 8:00 AM until 6 PM.
When should I update MX records for a new customer?
Once the domain status under the Admin tab in the Customer Centre has been updated to active from pending; the domain is ready to go. So long as you have the customer email addresses created, you are good to go.
If you have any questions that you would like covered in our next article, please do not hesitate to ask.
Let us know what you think by emailing feedback@thinoffice.com.