January 13, 2000

Jason Peoples, Vice President Business Development, Interland, inc.

Interland, Inc. is one of the largest privately held Web-hosting companies in the world. With 80,000 domains and 46,000 customers, Interland provides Web hosting, consulting, and e-commerce solutions to businesses all over the world. And business is growing at a steady pace.

During the Microsoft Office 2000 beta program, Interland was one of two Web-hosting companies that participated in the launch of Microsoft Office Server Extensions (OSE). In fact, Interland was able to offer live OSE hosting on the same day that Office 2000 became available to the public.

Jason Peoples, Vice President of Business Development at Interland, is responsible for strategic planning and for creating and maintaining partnerships with industry-leading companies. Jason speaks enthusiastically about Interland’s deployment of OSE. He is equally enthusiastic about the business opportunities that OSE represents for Interland in hosting for small- and medium-sized organizations. According to Jason, the customer response to OSE has been "absolutely overwhelming."

Company profile: Interland, Inc.

When Microsoft FrontPage® 98 came out, Interland, Inc. was 1 of 12 companies in the Microsoft Web Presence Providers (WPP) for FrontPage program. Interland began hosting Web sites, but soon received requests from customers to host FrontPage 98-based Web sites by using FrontPage Server Extensions. The company has never looked back.

Interland now has many FrontPage-hosted accounts, and they have used their expertise in FrontPage Server Extensions to host Office 2000 Server Extensions (OSE), which is based on FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions.

With the addition of OSE to their hosting packages, Interland can deliver collaboration services to their central customer base: small- to medium-size businesses that rely on Web hosting. Interland plans to continue partnering with Microsoft in this initiative.

Customers respond enthusiastically to OSE

Office Server Extensions gives Interland a great new opportunity to offer enhanced communication and collaboration services to customers. When they were evaluating OSE, Interland sent surveys to their existing customer base. Customers responded enthusiastically; they wanted to start using OSE in a shared environment right away.

Interland’s biggest challenge when deploying the Office 2000 beta was keeping up with customer demand for OSE. They began testing OSE with a selected group of customers, by setting up accounts and hosted sites for their customers to try out.

Customers started using the beta version right away —— and they could hardly wait for the final version to be complete. During beta testing, whenever Interland had to temporarily stop the servers for servicing and updates, their customers were on the phones, asking how long it would be before they could get back to using the features.

After the beta, Interland upgraded to the final version of OSE and started offering OSE in their hosting plans. In just six months, the demand for hosting under Microsoft Windows NT® has grown from 50 to 70 percent of Interland’s business, an increase they attribute directly to the availability of OSE.

By the first of next year, Interland will start offering new OSE-based applications in their hosting plans, including the following:

• OSE-based calendaring plan
• OSE-based Web group plan
• OSE-based collaboration plan

"Right now the biggest demand is for document collaboration, file sharing, and real-time online discussions," Jason explains. "These are all powerful tools that people are excited about."

OSE is even listed as a standard feature in Interland’s direct mail campaigns and print advertisements (which appear in magazines such as Internet World). When Interland’s sales team approach new customers, they highlight OSE features so that all customers can take advantage of them.

Integration and automation are key

Interland relies on automated systems to set up new accounts. When customers want the features enabled by OSE, they sign up with Interland for a Windows NT-based account, and they are matched up automatically with an available server.

During the Office 2000 beta, Interland created a dedicated programming team to integrate OSE into their automated systems. The team found it easy to make the few necessary changes to their automated Web site provision code — thanks to their previous experience with FrontPage Server Extensions, the great support they got from the developers and management team at Microsoft, and the information in the Microsoft Office 2000 Resource Kit and the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Now Interland’s automated systems are working like clockwork, connecting customers with sites that are automatically configured with the OSE features they want.