Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

Well there is a solution for that now besides going to the web site and downloading them, it’s called Live! Yip, Microsoft’s hosted solutions, have the solution in two forms. Firstly there is a file listing page http://live.sysinternals.com which just lists all the files so in one click you can get the tool you need, but even better, it’s also published as a file share! So if you open \\Live.sysinternals.com\tools you can actually browse a file share for the tool you need.

• User Management: Active Directory
• Email: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Portal/Intranet: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Database: Microsoft SQL Server
• ERP: Microsoft Dynamics GP

This shouldn’t be a shocker of a list, in fact it’s kind of the standard shopping list for any Microsoft based solution but the problem is that some of these products don't easily allow multiple organisations to use them. So lets just start with the most commonly used item on that list: Active Directory, which in my view is also the like the least able to cope with multiple organisations.

Based on what I have seen most large companies, which have a need for multiple organisations in a single deployment, seem to set up a forest and trusts and connect multiple domains together in the forest. This lets each domain be individually named and managed and provides the security for central administration and prevents each domain from doing anything to other domains. The problem with this is that it is multiple domains, which means that the administration overhead is very high, I think I would need a server at least per domain, and I really only want one because I don’t want to deploy everything multiple times. Each service should be deployed once and used many.

Well Microsoft has actually solved this with an interesting solution named Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC), which is currently in version 4.0. HMC is developed by the same division as developed one of my other favourite technologies, Customer Care Framework (CCF). HMC shares the same thought leading as CCF.  What I mean by this is they are are taking very new or different ideas and providing a solution to deliver them. The solution for HMC is delivered in the same way as CCF, in that it is a guidance package.

Next time I will jump into what is HMC and then after that we’ll get back to how HMC allows us to to take one AD domain and put multiple companies into it.

So I haven't posted for way too long due to a massive new initiative which I have been involved in, namely setting up a hosting solution provider called VirtualBox. This has been a very enlightening experience in terms of many new skills which I have learnt and a much deeper understanding of the products I worked with. So as a personal outcome from that investment I have written a series on what I have learnt. 

This series is kinda different from my normal blog posts, for a number of reasons. Firstly this is one of the few times I have written the posts out long before posting them (normally I post as I think). This has given me the chance to re-read them and change them so hopefully the quality of this is higher (as a side I used Microsoft OneNote to write this). The length of each post in this series is also MUCH longer than my normal (average of 450 words per post) and lastly this is one of the few times I actually blog about what I doing at work and mention some of the exact products, customers and technologies I am involved with. The reason for this is not because normally I am not proud of what I do or who I do it with, but because I like to keep things separate, but this time I am so excited (kid on xmas eve type) that I really can't not share what has been accomplished by the small team who I feel privileged to work with on this.

Firstly what is a hosting solution provider? Well traditionally when you have wanted an application, like Microsoft Exchange you would go out buy a server, buy the licenses, get an IT Pro in to do the install and configuration. Well a hosting solution provider (HSP) changes the entire game by removing the buying from the traditional way. So you want Microsoft Exchange and you have it, instantly!

Why would anyone go this route? Well there is a couple of benefits for anyone such as turn around time of minutes from needing it to having it ready, getting proven systems in place from day one or having a guide on how your environment is setup which means as you bring on staff you just give them the guide and in a few days of reading and asking questions (and lots of googling) they have a wealth of understanding of the environment from the package (better yet if you can afford a few lab machines and run Hyper-V or Virtual Server they could even do the deployment of the environment to really understand it). But if you are a point haired boss type there is one very important business factor... MONEY.

So for the SME market the significant cost benefits come from them as paying for only what you consume. Licensing for Exchange for instance lets you purchase mail boxes with no support for calendars or tasks (i.e. Just mail) if that's all you need for just a few dollars per month. The HSP also will invest far more in hardware and staff thus providing faster, bigger, better (insert your favourite positive adjective here) that what the SME company could get themselves.

For the enterprise customer an HSP can be a very different route in that it allows an IT dept to move away from the traditional model and allows them to set themselves up as an HSP for the rest of the business. This means that they can lower cost of licensing, properly manage budgets between them and other departments, react quicker to business needs, and lastly once they have moved through the life cycle of setting this could actually allow them to start to offer the services outside the business allowing them to stop being a cost centre and start to become a revenue centre.

That's enough from me sounding like a business expert, so what can you expect in the series coming up? Well we will next tackle the overviews of the system, and then start to dive into some of the cooler technologies.

• Imports
• Data Duplication
• Workflow
• Logging into a IFD deployment via the forms login