Customer Scenarios
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Customer Scenarios
The Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration is intended for three scenarios:
- Pure-play hoster with small business customer: Hosters 'R Us and Three Sisters Crafts
- Hybrid reseller hoster: Apps & More
Pure-Play Hoster with Small Business Customer
Pure-play hoster Hosters R' Us provides the services in the following table to small and medium-sized businesses.
Table: Hosters R' Us Service Offerings
| Service | Current | Future |
|---|---|---|
| E-mail and calendaring | Offers rich e-mail and calendaring as a base subscription service to companies with 10-100 employees. | Plans to offer as part of the base package access to e-mail and calendar information via PC, mobile phones, and voice playback on standard handsets. |
| Data services | Allows customers to purchase Data Restore Insurance, with several service level agreement (SLA) options. | Plans to offer enhanced services, including team services -that is, secure areas for companies to share documents and other information. The information will be virus-scanned, stored, and maintained. Restore services for this data can be added as an extension to the base level Data Restore Insurance. |
Small business customer Three Sisters Crafts has decided to subscribe to the Premium Service from Hosters R' Us. Three Sisters Crafts is a small fine art business that includes both instruction and art for sale. The company has 10 employees but represents several hundred artists, some of which are resident artists to the studio.
Three Sisters Crafts needs:
E-mail and calendaring:
Three Sisters Crafts needs to supply e-mail to their employees and artists. The company has previously used a free e-mail service, but now would like to add calendaring and access via their mobile phones and standard handsets for when employees are at art shows or gallery showings. Three Sisters Crafts have made the business decision to have e-mail addresses that include the company name as an easy brand recognition feature.
Three Sisters Crafts staff and artists can be away from the studio for several days to a week at a time. The artists and staff need to check their e-mail and calendar information frequently through out the day while at art shows or exhibits. Laptops are not convenient; generally they take up too much space in the booth and rarely are there network connections available. By using the Unified Messaging service offered by Hosters R' Us, these customers can check their e-mail and calendar information from any landline phone in the exhibit hall, which is especially critical when mobile phone signals are weak or AirSync isn't accessible.
Data services
In addition to e-mail and calendaring, the company would like to have the ability to have common areas to share feedback from shows, photos, and proposals for future activities. They would like this common area to also provide a workspace that is beyond a simple file share. The information they store on this common area is critical to the business, so they will look to their service provider to offer a data recovery option as part of this service.
Hybrid Reseller Hoster
Hybrid reseller hoster Apps & More develops and sells office and patient management software to small regional hospitals and physicians' offices. They have a well-established customer base across the Southwestern United States. In addition to selling the software, they provide PC support and data backup and recovery services. Apps & More rents data center space in Phoenix, with satellite offices in other parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern Nevada.
Apps & More frequently receives requests from their customers to supply them with secure messaging. Athough Apps & More has sufficient staff and expertise, they plan on reselling messaging and collaboration services versus building their own infrastructure. They will develop the customer portal and provide Tier 1 help desk support.