Microsoft Exchange 2010

Despite the significant expense, there are compelling reasons for some businesses to migrate to Exchange 2010, and we shall discuss five of them here.

While the recession may have bottomed out, and the talk of “green shoots” increasing, confidence is still low and money still tight. You couldn’t imagine a worse time for a company to launch a new platform, even if it is Microsoft and even if that platform is the long-awaited Exchange 2010.

Businesses are facing unprecedented pressure to cut costs and save money. Why then are some considering spending time, money and effort on improving a system that already works quite well? Here are five reasons why.

Voicemail

Exchange 2010 has a feature called Voicemail Preview which allows users to view a transcription of the voicemail within Outlook. Voicemail has always been something of a clunky technology. Noise or interference at either end of the conversation can render it useless. Unless a voicemail system is rigorously maintained, it has a tendency to lose, overwrite or not even record messages. It is also too easy to accidentally delete them. The ability to have a transcript of the message allow users to use it much more freely, cut and paste it, forward it on to other parties and have a permanent record of the transaction.

Information Security

We all worry about data loss, either by accident or on purpose. Exchange 2010 comes with an enhanced Information Rights Management feature that can automatically identify predefined keywords in all emails. This allows a much stricter approach to users being able to share internal information and can reduce data leakage significantly. There are plenty of third party applications that can do this, but having it built in to the system is a bonus.

Data Sharing

One the other side of the coin from information security is the ability to share information with partners and other approved organizations. Information such as calendars, tasks, distribution lists and other data with external partners as if they were part of the same organization. This adds a valuable feature for project oriented companies that use a lot of external talent, but needs to co-ordinate them all.

Reliability

The new Database Availability Group feature (DAG) allows database replication across an entire infrastructure both remote and local. This allows for multiple failovers without loss of service. While this adds complications to the migration and maintenance, it is ideal for high availability environments who depend on email.

Storage

Email has always been a storage heavy entity. With Exchange 2010 the storage requirements are much lower, up to 70% in fact. SAN expenditure is significant for many large organizations, and the introduction of this new system should save on storage costs. Direct-attached storage (DAS) technology can also be used in place of SAN to lower costs even more.

So while the thought of migrating to Exchange 2010 is still a daunting prospect there is still a case for doing it. These five benefits make may the difference for an organization and make the whole process worthwhile.

With the launch of Exchange 2010 supposedly only days or weeks away, it’s perhaps time to ask the question, who is going to use it?

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that now the work is done on Exchange 2010 and it has the sign off, that it will be released soon. Especially as the Microsoft Exchange Connections coming up in November 9-12th in Las Vegas. A betting man wouldn’t put money on it not happening…

From the feedback seen so far Exchange 2010 is an excellent improvement on the previous versions. It offers much in the way of security, compliance and reliability. But it does come with the inevitable Microsoft complications. Bearing in mind the complexity and expense of migrating to Exchange 2010, it begs the question, who is going to do it?

The economy has yet to recover and confidence has yet to be instilled. Money is still tight and purse strings locked firmly shut. So who is going to spend a considerable amount of time and money on an infrastructure they probably already have?

Organizations who already have a version of Exchange are going to need new operating systems, in Server 2008, probably new hardware to run it. Considerable new IT infrastructure to support the new Exchange features and a team to install, configure, then manage it.

Likely adopters are going to be those companies who have a bit of money in the IT budget and who are on versions of Exchange 2003 and below. They are most likely to be prepared for renewal or the software, hardware and training needs that Exchange 2010 demands.

Not only are there significant hardware and software demands for a roll out of this platform, there are bound to be problems with integrating it with third party software and solutions. Those organizations with firewalls and anti-virus are going to be extra careful about integrating the new system. Also those custom applications that interface with exchange may need to be rewritten in order to work.

We in IT tend to give Microsoft some grief about how difficult their programs are to integrate into existing infrastructures. It can be a bit unfair though as I’m sure they don’t set out to cause trouble. They want to make things better, but by doing so they break a few rules and existing protocols.

Time will tell whether the move to Exchange 2010 will be a rising tide or a trickling stream. I would guess it would be somewhere in the middle, but only once the economy and overall prospects have picked up and those purse strings loosened a bit. After all, if the current version is working okay, why upgrade right now?

Every internet service provider has free email hosting because it comes with your monthly subscription. Approximately three years ago, Google began free email hosting for businesses assuming online and other businesses would fade. This may not have been their intention, but it is what other businesses were worried about. Since established email hosting businesses saw this coming, they revolutionized their way of service. They offered more features, built their relationships with their customers, and many aligned themselves with each other. Revolutionizing the way they provided email hosting actually helped them when Google announced that their email hosting was free.

The main way that Google and other free email hosting sites are paid is by having advertising on businesses web pages. This is what keeps email free with these sites.
So the question is – is it worth paying for an email hosting service? Absolutely it is. Email hosting services offer businesses much more than the previous mentioned company. They offer spam blockers, php services, amongst other amazing features that are just too many to list. Good luck trying to get any customer service support from free email hosting services. Many businesses think that having ads on sites is a nuisance and unnecessary. When one pays for email hosting, more storage space is widely available just with a few dollars per month. As mentioned above, security is also better. There are things called spam bots that look for a number of things to destroy your website. One of theses things is email. I have an website with email hosting and I was ignoring my spam blocker because I didn’t think I would get as much spam as I did. When I ignored the spam, I received more than eighty ignorant spam emails per day. It became a hassle just deleting them, so finally I searched my email hosting and web hosting company trying to figure out a better way to block the spam.

Eventually, I found an anti-spam blocker in my control panel, downloaded it, and now I have been one hundred percent free of spam. I am able to control it. This almost backfired on me because there is a place that you set how many emails are allowed. I set it to one per email, then a friend emailed me twice, which went to my spam folder. Needless to say, this was easily resolved.

In truth, if you own a business and you don’t have a paid email hosting service, you will soon regret it. I could understand not paying for email hosting if it cost in excess of $40 per month. Almost all email hosting can be purchased for under ten dollars per month, so it is inexcusable if your a business and you don’t have email hosting. There are websites in abundance that offer email hosting, but you can get it right here, right now at our site. Make it worth your while as you see your business becoming more profitable with email hosting.

Legalities aside, email archiving should be used by businesses large and small, no matter what their line of business. It was once thought to be the preserve of public companies until the changes in legislation made sure every company in the country had to comply.

Email archiving is also useful for internal purposes such as employee monitoring. While not very popular with staff, emails can be stored, retrieved and used for disciplinary or investigative purposes as well as compliance with internal guidelines. This kind of monitoring can not only warn the company about breaches in security, potential risks and insider dealing.

With an effective email archiving solution, alerts can be set up for keywords or key phrases in an email that can flag up potential risks as they happen. If this traffic is monitored regularly then action can be taken at the earliest signs, and potentially prevent it getting out of hand. The keywords can be anything pertinent to the business from resume, career, swear words, to client file, secrets, medication and anything company specific.

While this activity may not seem ethically sound, it is another tool in the ongoing mission to protect companies from damage from without, and within. Employees are often unaware of the problems they cause by sharing information they shouldn’t or gossiping about subjects that are better off left alone. If an effective email monitoring and archive system is in place then these kinds of incidents can be stopped in their tracks by early intervention or discipline.

Most smaller to medium companies don’t have a legal department so the burden falls to IT. In an in-house email archiving setup they will be the ones who control and maintain the system anyway so it’s logical for them to monitor. However, in an outsourced situation that burden can be passed to the vendor to take care of.

There is inevitably an expense to setting up an archiving solution, but in this country it is one that businesses cannot avoid. Since those high profile corporate fraud cases, it has been legally mandated that every company large or small who communicates via email has to have some kind of storage and archive facility for them.

If an E-discovery request is presented to a company without a coherent archive strategy, they may have trouble finding the data requested, or even worse, may not be able to find it at all. This not only causes problems for the litigation for which the data is bound, but also for the company itself. The government and judiciary don’t look kindly on those who don’t comply with these new laws as it hampers them when they are trying to investigate companies.

The whole idea of the new legislation was to improve public confidence in American business by ensuring there was always a paper trail for everything they did. Anything that gets in the way of that is viewed dimly indeed.