Dynamic Data Center Toolkit and Alliance

Although the Communications Sector Group no longer promotes the Connected Services Framework, its ambitious offering for provisioning new and advanced telecommunications services, the group is still trying to help Microsoft’s hosting partners improve efficiency at the back end. The latest vehicle is the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, which offers tools and guidance for provisioning Windows Server, Exchange Server, and SharePoint, as well as other applications, for high-capacity hosting services.

The toolkit can help hosters and their resellers increase their revenue and customer appeal by adding services such as disaster recovery, hosted backups, and spam and antivirus filtering, to basic Exchange, SharePoint and other services. The toolkit also guides hosters who want to create on-demand and self-provisioning services, which enable customers to create hosted virtual machines and to manage and monitor them through a customer portal, using System Center Virtual Machine Manager for the back end.