As an early adopter into the BPOS partner program Harbor Computer Services received 250 free accounts to use and commenced testing the service and offering it to some of our existing clients. We also let two of our MVP friends use account for their own beta testing purposes. We used those accounts to not only help our team learn BPOS but we also helped others.

Our target market for this product has been very small companies with under 10 users. We think that hosted Exchange loses appeal to small businesses that are larger than that. We have sold a few and are looking forward to selling some more. However, in order to continue to qualify as a partner with some free accounts to use, Microsoft requires that we sell to companies with 25 seats or more. What’s a small business specialist to do?

This is in response to your e-mail from 10/12/2010. We understand that you have contacted us on how to maintain your Business Productivity Online Suite Subscription and we are happy to assist you. As you may be aware, in order to maintain this Subscription as free of charge, your organization needed to sell two deals of Business Productivity Online Suite that each consist of 25 licenses (seats) or greater the prior year. Unfortunately your organization did not meet the requirement, therefore as an option you can have this particular Subscription to be as a Paid Subscription with Partner Special Pricing of $5.00 per month per user. Before the expiration, please contact us at your earliest convenience and we will decrease licenses quantity accordingly and have our billing specialist apply the Partner pricing to your account.
Should you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to be of assistance.
Thank you for contacting Microsoft Online Services.

That is the response that we got to our inquire. Not ideal. I would like to see Microsoft support SBSC’s better in this and I would also like to see them invest in companies that are just starting out with BPOS. I guess, what I can say is that it’s better than nothing. I hope that Microsoft Online Services will choose to better support the small business specialist in the future.

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