As a software development company, our offices get used for a lot of different things. For example, we host meet ups, regularly meet with vendors, host get togethers for the associations we're part of, etc. However, as our business caters to customers and partners worldwide, we don't get a lot of foot traffic from those customers and partners. Recently, we met with Diogo Lopes, the CEO of Webplus, a cloud service provider based in Brazil. He had some good questions for us, and we thought that our answers would be valuable to all our customers.

Diogo was in town meeting with a few of Webplus' partners and wanted to stop by to ask some questions, get an understanding of the roadmaps for our products and give some feedback on our company, our products and our future. We absolutely love these types of conversations as they're extremely beneficial for us as well as our partners. Below is a brief recap of what we discussed…

MAPI Roadmap

Diogo is very interested in MAPI, as are most of our customers and partners. We reiterated that we're progressing nicely and have overcome all of the major hurdles we encountered with Microsoft's documentation, their unit testing and some other big issues. (Thanks in no small part to our friends and partners on the Microsoft Protocols Team.) What's left are some smaller issues, then carrying the optimizations we've implemented to MAPI to the other protocols, specifically EAS, EWS and WebDAV. We're still on track for the BETA release towards the end of June.

MAPI Licensing and Pricing

From both a licensing and pricing standpoint, our plan is to follow what's in place for EWS for MAPI. That is, it will be a server-wide license, NOT an individual mailbox license. That means that any mailbox on a server with a MAPI license will have the ability to connect to Outlook natively: no connector or additional software will be needed.

Partnerships and Licensing

Webplus is primarily a Leasing partner, and Diogo was very interested in our plans around the availability of MAPI from a lease perspective, and he also gave us some feedback and ideas on how to bolster the visibility of our leasing options.

Our Leasing Partnership really is the best viable option for partners, and it's especially attractive for customers looking to start a partnership with us. This is because of its flexibility -- leases can be started and stopped virtually at will -- but also because, with a lease, there's no need for Maintenance and Support. Lease licenses are guaranteed upgrades to new Builds once they're released to the public. As such, Diogo's feedback was greatly appreciated and gave us some things to think about, moving forward.

SmarterTools' Visibility

Finally, Diogo gave us a very valuable piece of advice: Travel! He mentioned that he goes to several conferences a year, and he recommended we do the same. Interestingly, we already have plans to do just that.

We've participated in several conferences, both as exhibitors and as attendees. World Hosting Days in Germany as well as in the U.S., Parallels Partner conferences, Plesk conferences, various HostingCons around the country, GDC, etc. have all been part of our travel schedule in the past several years. As we move into late 2019, and on in to 2020, we'll be expanding our reach a bit and focusing on partner conferences as well as those outside of the hosting business. We're looking at attending conferences that focus on business, technology and even marketing and communications. Once we have things planned out, we'll be sure to announce it to all our customers and partners. You may find one or two conferences you want to attend as well!

Regardless of whether you want to meet us at a conference, or come meet us at our office, we'll be more than happy to sit down and talk. We're always open to discussing our business, our roadmap and any other topic of conversation our partners or users want to bring up. If you're ever in Phoenix, be sure to let us know! And if we bump into each other at a conference in the future, please be sure to say "Hi". We'd love to sit down for a few minutes and have a chat.