New way of hosting...

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Hi...

Office Live made its way to Germany. Under www.officelive.com/germany you can get your own portal.

So what's the rocking part in it??

See, there are three levels offered. The Basics contains your own domain with a web portal and email addresses. The portal can be made out of several preworked components which sounds not to flexible. But in the end it is very powerful and will certainly satisfy the most interests. What is now the rocking part is: It is for free.

There are two more levels (Essentials and Premium) which come with some kind of fee. Think about this as a platform for what is called Software as a Service. And now you see why this offering is provided for small and medium businesses. It provides right that what such a business needs...

So, why should this be a new way of hosting? Compare it to traditional offerings. Compare first the entry investment and then the possible step ups. Compare the possibility for software vendors to produce plug-able components and for the customer to "shop" software and build their own "EAP" system. Compare the ease of use. Compare the possibility to combine on- and off-line...

As always don't take it to religiously: This will not be the end classical hosters nor for classical EAP systems (Remember when those analysts said that in the year 2000 there will be only web-based applications left?? Well I am using Windows Live Writer here, simply because of convenience. Not to mention that they said that there will be no more host systems in 2000...).

What this adds is another dimension. And at least an interesting one. Another interesting part is that the idea of combining offline (say client or even server based solutions) and online solutions is not only thinkable but in a technical sense do-able (which means it is prepared and easy to do).

My personal guts feeling is that at least here in Germany all Software as a Service systems will have to fight with a base line called trust. Is the solution trustworthy? Is it always available? Is it secure with my data? Germans are very sensitive on that... So maybe Microsoft as a brand puts an interesting effect into the equation. We recently won a price for the privacy policies of some services here in Germany which at least was very well noticed within the security scene...

Have a good week, guys!!

CU

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