January 13, 2000

Christopher Whalen, Director of Network Services, Advanced Internet Solutions, Inc.

Advanced Internet Solutions, Inc. (AIS) hosts Web sites for customers around the world. As a longstanding member of the Microsoft Web Presence Providers (WPP) program, AIS provides Microsoft customers with reliable Internet services.

Christopher Whalen, Director of Network Services for AIS, administers the server farm and also provides support to customers around the world. Christopher has considerable experience with Microsoft FrontPage® Server Extensions and now with Microsoft Office 2000 Server Extensions.

In fact, Christopher was an active participant in the launch of Microsoft Office 2000 and Office Server Extensions (OSE), and helped answer questions about deploying OSE.

Company profile: Advanced Internet Services, Inc.

Advanced Internet Solutions, Inc. (AIS) has provided Web site hosting for nearly five years. They began Web hosting exclusively with the introduction of Microsoft Internet Information Services version 1.0.

When Microsoft acquired Vermeer Technologies and the FrontPage Web site creation and management tool, AIS immediately integrated the FrontPage beta into their server farm and began working with the FrontPage test team.

AIS was one of the first members of the Microsoft Web Presence Providers (WPP) for FrontPage program to offer commercial hosting that supported FrontPage Server Extensions. Many of the first customers referred through the WPP program have been hosting their sites with AIS ever since.

Business at AIS has grown from simple Web site hosting to a wide range of business services, including database, e-commerce, and now — with Office Server Extensions — business collaboration services.

Participating in the OSE beta program

Capitalizing on their experience during the FrontPage Server Extensions beta, AIS was one of two Web-hosting providers who participated in the OSE beta program. AIS installed Office 2000 Server Extensions before the release of Office 2000, so they were ready to handle the expected demand from new and existing Office users.

During the OSE beta program, AIS worked with program management and development teams at Microsoft to install and test Office Server Extensions on AIS Web servers. As AIS continues to support OSE, they rely on the white papers available on the Microsoft.com Web site and on the information in the Office 2000 Resource Kit.

Christopher commented that he was able to figure out many of the issues on his own during the beta — and that the released product "pretty much installs itself."

Hosting OSE for customers

AIS relies on the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) to provide database support for Office Server Extensions. In the future, as their OSE-hosting demands increase, AIS plans to integrate their OSE servers with their Microsoft SQL Servers (version 7.0) to take advantage of a more robust database for collaboration data.

Many AIS customers use OSE to communicate with team members on their local area networks (LANs). These customers also take advantage of the OSE servers hosted by AIS to distribute documents to clients over the Web. With both an internal OSE site and external hosted support, customers can communicate with all members of their teams, even if they are not part of the same organization.

For example, one AIS client, an attorney, uses OSE to make his legal documents available to his clients online. Through a Web site hosted by AIS, clients can log on and use discussions and subscriptions to keep up with changes to the documents.

AIS has sent announcements regarding its OSE-hosting capabilities to customers both in e-mail and in monthly billing statements. AIS also advertises their support for OSE on their Web site and in their print advertising. Support for OSE on a Web site hosted by AIS costs customers only an additional $10 monthly.

AIS finds that the process of installing and hosting Office 2000 Server Extensions requires very little additional effort. The company is looking forward to helping even more customers take advantage of OSE collaboration features.

For more information about Advanced Internet Systems, Inc. and their support for Office 2000 Server Extensions, see the Advanced Internet Solutions, Inc. Web site.