By Paul DeGroot [bio]
Posted: Mar. 24, 2008

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Microsoft's roadmap for hosted products includes updates to the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) platform that the company currently offers for use by hosting partners and for hosted services that Microsoft will offer directly to customers itself.

Hosting services for Exchange, SharePoint, and Communications Server are already sold directly to large customers, and will be sold through partner and volume channels as part of the Business Productivity Online Suite, in two tiers of services, a Standard tier and a more advanced Dedicated tier.

As Microsoft, for the first time, uses its own HMC platform to offer commercial business services, the company expects to build new capabilities that will be rolled out to partners in future HMC versions. In addition, the Business Online Services group will work with server product groups to make it easier to run servers, such as Exchange and SharePoint, in multitenant configurations (running multiple copies of the server side by side in a single OS instance), which current versions of the servers were not designed for.