Rackspace puts Microsoft Sharepoint in the cloud

Rackspace Hosting has launched Hosted Microsoft SharePoint, the popular collaboration and file sharing platform, uniquely backed by Rackspace's 24x7x365 Fanatical Support.

With the addition of hosted Microsoft SharePoint, Rackspace's suite of cloud applications now includes business-class collaboration, e-mail and storage solutions.

“With SharePoint, Rackspace is offering businesses the most powerful file sharing and collaboration software on the market today,” said Pat Matthews, general manager of Rackspace Email & Apps.“With our cloud delivery model, businesses can take advantage of all the power Microsoft SharePoint has to offer without the hassle of having to manage the software in-house. Microsoft SharePoint backed by Fanatical Support is the recipe our customers have been asking for.”

The Rackspace offering includes an intuitive control panel that allows administrators to quickly initiate SharePoint, add/remove users, and create SharePoint sites with only a few steps. The control panel also gives administrators the ability to manage Rackspace Email & Apps' full suite of applications, including hosted Microsoft Exchange, Rackspace Email, Email Archiving, and Rackspace Cloud Drive and Server Backup, in one dashboard.

With SharePoint from Rackspace, employees can become better equipped to collaborate on projects and share ideas across the organisation, with a centralised place to store, organise, and access documents. Specific features and benefits include:

* Collaboration and social computing - Allows teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis and blogs.

* Document management - Organise files and share with team members in one central location. Files are easy to locate when needed.
* Team organisation - Easily customise for each team with workflows that fit the projects. Automatic alerts keep team members up to date.
* Microsoft Office integration - Smoothly integrate with the software of choice. SharePoint works with Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
* Enterprise search - Quickly and easily find people, expertise and content within the organisation.

In addition to the new hosted SharePoint offering, Rackspace continues to offer Dedicated SharePoint through its managed services division for customers who require higher levels of customisation or control. Dedicated SharePoint is a single tenant solution, supported by a team of certified Rackspace SharePoint engineers who design, deploy, customise and fully manage the solution.