Hoping to make its small and medium-size customers at least feel a little bigger Microsoft has debuted its Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.0, what company officials are calling their next generation of hosted services. The new services, which leverage the company's Solution for Hosted Exchange 2003, has added new support for hosted versions of Office Live Communications Server 2005 as well as Windows SharePoint Services. This is designed to be a more cost effective approach for SMBs through access to more robust e-mail, shared calendaring, document collaboration and instant messaging. The added benefit to service providers, company officials claim, is they can offer their smaller customers with more proactive monitoring of their businesses along with provisioning automation and more centralized management. This makes it possible for providers to consolidate existing e-mail systems onto a single platform reducing the cost of deployment. "We hear from a lot of small and medium-sized organizations about their need for enterprise-class messaging and collaboration services, but they do not want the worry of keeping their systems safe against things like SPAM, viruses and other security attacks. At the same time they want to purchase such services from providers that offer personalized support and higher levels of availability. That, too, is very important to them," said Pascal Martin, general manager for Hosting Solutions at Microsoft.