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The Advantages of Hosted Exchange
Email, collaboration and scheduling tools have become critical factors to the success of any business. Unfortunately, small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) often lack a large IT budget or in-house team to implement and maintain the sophisticated messaging software they need. Yet SMBs need this critical toolset in order to succeed in the marketplace. Microsoft Exchange is used by the majority of large corporations for their email, calendars, contacts and files. Exchange powers the full collaboration functions of Microsoft Outlook 2007, such as group calendars, contacts and file-sharing.
Our Hosted Exchange 2010 Solution
We provide the latest version, Exchange 2010, as a hosted service. You can subscribe to this on-demand service for a low monthly fee – instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars upfront for expensive servers and software licenses, hiring specialist IT staff to install and maintain the system and being responsible for a 24×7 infrastructure. We let you focus on your core business.
Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 means that we provide all hardware and software, then run and maintain it for you in one of our Tier-4 data centers. You pay a low monthly fee, and can access your email using Outlook® or Entourage® on your desktop, Outlook Web Access (OWA) in any web browser, or wirelessly from a device like the BlackBerry® or iPhone.
What’s included in hosted Exchange 2010
| Hosted Exchange from Third Octet | In-house Exchange and IT staff | |
| Software licenses |
Yes |
No |
| Enterprise-grade hardware |
Yes |
No |
| 24×7 support |
Yes |
Unlikely |
| 100% Data Protection Guarantee as part of our overall 99.999% SLA |
Yes |
No |
| Tier-4 data center with redundant power, cooling and network connections |
Yes |
No |
| Regular backups |
Yes |
Possibly |
| Anti-virus, anti-spam |
Yes |
Possibly |
| Wireless options |
Yes |
Separate licenses and servers needed |
What this means for your E-mail
People running Exchange as their email server typically use Outlook as email. Among many advanced features, this lets them:
- Securely access email remotely via the web or a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone
- View colleagues’ up-to-date calendars and schedule meetings
- Assign and manage company tasks on central ‘to do’ lists
- Manage contact information of employees and customers and access it anytime
Exchange is a quantum leap from basic POP3 or IMAP4 email, which is most suited for home and personal use, and makes your team much more productive through constant access to email, shared calendars and contacts
To help you understand the productivity-boosting options that hosted Exchange 2010 offers, here is a comparison of Outlook/Exchange 2010 versus basic email options:
|
|
Exchange Server 2010 |
POP 3 / |
| Group scheduling |
Yes |
No |
| Send out meeting requests, then track and update them |
Yes |
No |
| Shared calendars and side-by-side calendar views |
Yes |
No |
| Access to personal and shared address books from remote locations |
Yes |
No |
| Single sign-on for email and network access |
Yes |
No |
| Connections over the Internet are secure |
Yes |
Some solutions |
| Server-side spam filtering |
Yes |
Some solutions |
| Ability to categorize email and flag it for follow up |
Yes |
Partial |
| Ability to add voting buttons to a messages |
Yes |
No |
| Automatic out-of-office reply |
Yes |
No |
| Ability to recall sent messages |
Yes |
No |
| Support for multiple-computer access |
Yes |
Partial |
| Access to email via Web browsers and mobile browsers, Outlook Mobile in Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphones |
Yes |
Non-Microsoft products are typically required |
| Outlook Cached Exchange Mode for working with intermittent Web connection (eg dial-up) |
Yes |
Some solutions offer caching |
| Offline email, calendar, contacts, and public folder support |
Yes |
Partial |
| Access to public folders for sharing documents and information |
Yes |
Individual email folder access in IMAP |
| Basic email support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 |
Yes |
Yes |
| Easy management of Outlook and Exchange Server profiles across multiple machines to lower support costs |
Yes |
No |