Microsoft Exchange eMail - Are you ready for a swap?

Microsoft Exchange is the perfect email system as long as you don’t have to buy and maintain the server and update the software. Many companies in the UK have seen the error of their ways and abandoned owning Exchange servers and software as well as all the associated rigmarole in favour of simply renting mailboxes as needed.

Some company owners have expressed concern and doubt about outsourcing email hosting to an external provider raising issues over privacy, reliability and accessibility. The simple fact is that with modern hosted systems the failure rate is so low as to be completely negligible, and the system security and network uptime is considerably higher than could ever be achieved in an average office environment. One hosted Exchange email provider in the UK has over 6000 companies under contract many of which have hundreds of mailboxes. There is absolutely no denying that the trend is towards mail outsourcing.

Having said that, Exchange is probably the most comprehensive email system you can buy. Your own domain address, full Outlook Exchange features including shared calendars, contact lists and public folders all delivered in a rich email package that makes internal and external communication clean, simple and highly professional. The key fact for the potential business email outsourcer is that these identical features are to be found within a hosted email solution.   

For example a Microsoft Exchange package from one UK provider, Rackspace, allows you to keep all the benefits of Exchange but lose the worry of the server and the software, and from only £9 per mailbox per month. This comes with a money back guarantee in case of uptime failure (though Rackspace does manage to achieve 100% network uptime, so an issue here is unlikely!). Your mail system will be provided with both anti spam and anti virus protection and you can log in from anywhere in the world via the web or an enabled mobile device.

The key benefit for users is that you have absolutely no software or hardware to worry about. No licences, no patches, no upgrades, no faultfinding, or any downtime or system failures to concern you. And the contract can be for as long as you like or as short as you like. You also get the benefit of a technical support service that is second to none. Rackspace Fanatical Support® is world famous and is an absolute guarantee of reliability and is available 24/7/365.  

What you do get is the immense power of Microsoft Exchange enabling you to send, receive and share your way with contacts and customers throughout the world and with full wireless support for mobile systems including GoodLink, Blackberry, iPhone, Pocket PC and Treo/MotQ .

Each mailbox comes complete with a free copy of Microsoft Outlook 07 or Entourage 08 along with full set up information. Every mailbox has multiple backups of all mailbox data for disaster recovery (every 30 minutes) to ensure that in the unlikely case of total disaster everything is totally safe; in fact the hosted mail system allows you to recover 30 days of deleted data immediately. Certainly not something that would happen in-house, even if you could persuade your IT manager to work overnight on the server! (that’s if you even have a 24 hour IT department!)

So what’s the catch? Very little really; your mailbox size is limited to 2GB per user – but that’s a lot of emails! And you can add in extra storage in 1 MB increments if desperately needed. There is a 1GB public folder included with every system. You can’t send attachments larger than 50Mb – though who does with so many large file transfer systems available for FREE? 

The solution is perfect for large and small companies .Your admin system is a web based control panel where you can add or delete users and make changes to the mail system and you know exactly what it will cost from day one. There will be no unpleasant surprises or upgrades to eat into the budget.

So why not think about swapping your Microsoft Exchange server for hosted Microsoft Exchange. You will never look back.