Becoming a Reseller of Hosted Exchange 2007 and SharePoint Hosting

Becoming a reseller of hosted exchange and SharePoint hosting is a definite advantage as the market for hosted exchange and SharePoint hosting is very large and growing due to the new products MS hosted exchange 2007 and MS SharePoint Hosting with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0), now available to resellers.

Resellers, whether interested in selling hardware or reselling hosted exchange or SharePoint hosting, are looking to make reasonable income without a large amount of upfront or ongoing effort.  Resellers may also like the service to be private label with branding that could be custom to their business.  Private label functionality is important to leverage existing brand and client relationships and add enhanced services on top.

Resellers of hosted exchange and SharePoint hosting should evaluate a number of application service providers before they decide, as this decision is crucial to long term success.

These are the criteria hosted exchange resellers should look for:

• Does the provider offer the latest version of hosted exchange 2007 in reseller mode?
• Does the provider make the process of reselling hosted exchange easy by providing a web based control panel for resellers as well as end users?
• Can resellers insert their own branding into the offering?
• Is payment and billing integrated?
• Can one resell BlackBerry on top of hosted exchange reseller offering?
• Is Microsoft SharePoint hosting reseller offering available from the same vendor and does it integrate through the same control panel?
• Does the application service provider provide 24/7 support for the reseller’s requests?
• How is the price of Microsoft hosted exchange and MS SharePoint hosting compared to retail prices?
• How is the IT infrastructure of the service provider?  Resellers should expect 99.99 percent reliability.
• Does the application provider allow you to resell other products besides Microsoft exchange and SharePoint on a hosted basis?

Armed with these questions, resellers with little IT savvy will get a chance to expand their service offerings to include hosted Microsoft products such as hosted exchange and SharePoint hosting.