Azaleos Pioneers Remotely Managed Services for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Business Wire, April 29, 2008

New Services Keep SharePoint Server Data Highly Available and Inside the Firewall; Offload Management and Maintenance

LAS VEGAS -- Azaleos([R]) Corporation, the managed Microsoft Exchange messaging services company, today announced the beta of a new remote monitoring service for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, called OneStop ViewPoint. This service offloads 90 percent of the tasks associated with SharePoint monitoring to Azaleos. The OneStop service allows organizations to deploy SharePoint without increasing IT staff, or to re-assign SharePoint IT personnel to other strategic projects.

Azaleos is unique in the industry for its ability to remotely manage Exchange Servers and Blackberry Enterprise Servers deployed on a customer's premises. The Azaleos management services include, but are not limited to, archiving, e-mail security and business continuity. With the addition of OneStop ViewPoint, Azaleos is expanding its portfolio to cover the entire breadth of the Microsoft enterprise stack and extending the unique Azaleos services value proposition to SharePoint Server customers.

Insource SharePoint, Outsource Management

iStar Financial Inc., a leading publicly traded finance company focused on the commercial real estate industry, relies on SharePoint to manage the collaboration process for financing projects that span multiple documents as well as internal and external contributors.

According to Chris Beach, Vice President of Information Technology for iStar Financial, "SharePoint helps us organize and manage documents and communications for complex business transactions that can take months to complete. However, monitoring and maintaining SharePoint is equally complex and requires significant time, effort, and expertise. We wanted to focus our core IT resources in other areas, so we turned to Azaleos. Their ability to keep our confidential SharePoint data and records on-premise and on our network was a key selling point for us."

OneStop Managed Services for SharePoint

ViewPoint adds SharePoint Services to the modular lineup of Azaleos OneStop Managed Services. OneStop offerings are delivered in conjunction with OneServer appliances, which serve as on-premise service endpoints inside the customer's firewall. Azaleos offers a virtual OneStop server appliance as well as several physical appliance options for both Exchange and SharePoint.

ViewPoint provides end-to-end proactive monitoring for SharePoint 2007 and other systems that are associated with the SharePoint environment, including Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Active Directory, VMware Host Server, applications, and storage. Azaleos developed software allows ViewPoint to gather and deliver to the Azaleos network operations center approximately 2000 data points per minute related to the entire SharePoint configuration. This information enables proactive problem resolution to prevent SharePoint downtime and restore service quickly in the event of a failure.

"With nearly 100 million users, SharePoint is rapidly emerging as the de facto collaboration platform and document storage location for mission-critical projects. To ensure that SharePoint is always available and running at peak performance companies are asking Azaleos for assistance," said Keith McCall, Chief Technology Officer of Azaleos. "With ViewPoint we provide 24x7 remote monitoring, maintenance, and upkeep of SharePoint by a team of experts in our network operations center."

"As SharePoint continues its rapid growth, services are becoming an increasingly important focal point for SharePoint and this is underscored by our recent launch of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Online offering," said Thomas Rizzo, Microsoft's Director of Product Management for SharePoint. "Azaleos has now created an innovative new hybrid services approach for SharePoint which further underscores and augments Microsoft's services commitment to SharePoint. The Azaleos service breaks new ground in assisting IT by remotely managing and monitoring on-premise SharePoint performance and uptime."

Azaleos OneStop Services for Exchange include:

* ManageXchange, a remote command and control service that allows Azaleos technicians to monitor, manage, patch, troubleshoot and fix issues in a customer's Exchange environment on a 24x7 basis.

* ViewXchange, provides real-time graphical views and formatted reports that cover Exchange health monitoring, e-mail traffic analysis for both internal and external e-mail, as well as message hygiene including SPAM and virus activity, archiving, and mobility statistics.

* ArchiveXchange, automatically archives and stores e-mail from the Exchange server to secondary storage to improve performance and reduce costs. ArchiveXchange enables users to access older mail seamlessly using Microsoft Office Outlook, Web browsers, or mobile devices.

* ProtectXchange: secures e-mail boxes managed by Azaleos from spam, viruses, and other forms of malware.

* RestoreXchange, provides complete dual-site business continuity capabilities, handling both dial tone and mail storage restoration.