Microsoft Exchange 2010

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.

A recent study by technology company, CMSWire, found that many companies in the United States get email archives and backups mixed up.  As unbelievable as it sounds, the confusion is still rife, even years after the legislation came into force, and organizations are being caught out all the time.

For those who still don’t know the difference, a backup is when a copy is taken of a given media and stored elsewhere.  This is to provide disaster recovery should any disaster befall the building, the company or its infrastructure.  Every business should have a comprehensive backup process that is followed to the letter, but it is different to archiving.

An archive is designed to copy, store and manage data for the longer term.  It is designed to be a permanently separate, accessible silo where the data can be safely kept.  Ideally it would be sited somewhere other than the premises, in a purpose built facility where it is protected from all forms of harm such as flood and fire.

In the case of an email archive, for compliance, the email data is siphoned off the corporate email platform and formatted into a particular state.  It is then indexed, compressed and then stored safely somewhere else.  That storage should be secure, safe and resilient, so the client can access their data should the need arise.

A backup can run in conjunction with an archive, but are completely separate entities.  They should not be confused.  The only driver for a backup procedure is disaster recovery and damage limitation.  Archiving is necessary to satisfy a range of legal obligations that are enforced aggressively, as well as the retention of important information.

It isn’t only for E-discovery that archiving is a good idea.  Business depends a lot of email using it as the main means of communication both internal and external.  Often corporate communications, policy changes and even external contracts are communicated this way, and they are important for any business to retain for a period of time.

On paper it is an easy mistake to make.  Both processes make copies of stuff for retrieval later but only one will protect an organization from litigation if an E-discovery request comes their way.

While emails can be retrieved from a backup, it is a time-consuming and laborious task.  With no real indexing facility, finding emails may take a significant amount of time, especially in larger, communication heavy organizations.

An email archive makes it easier to follow email trails and the branches that can occur when mail is copied and forwarded to multiple recipients.  A thorough implementation should also comply with the relevant legislation and prevent any action being taken against the company for non-compliance.

Let’s set the record straight once and for all.  A backup policy is good methodology, but entirely optional.  Email archiving is not.  It is mandatory and specified in more than a few laws.  Ever since those very high profile corporate scandal cases, every business has had to comply with a set of stringent compliance laws that demands an effective trail be left with any documentation of any kind.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosted Exchange provider Intermedia (www.intermedia.net) announced on Monday it has launched the first hosted Exchange 2010 service, following the recent release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 software.

The offering expands on its June announcement, when Intermedia became the first hosting provider to offer the beta version of Microsoft’s popular hosted service to customers and partners.

With the full release of Exchange Server 2010, Intermedia customers will now have access to a range of features such as support for BlackBerry wireless solutions and free migration from previous versions of Exchange.

Intermedia partners can also resell hosted Exchange 2010 under their own brand and will be able to offer Intermedia’s private label platform later this year.

“Intermedia was the first to market with hosted Exchange 2007 and now hosted Exchange 2010,” says Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia. “This is about more than innovation for innovation’s sake. We are serving our customers and our partners with sophisticated Fortune 500-grade systems – but in a way that is deeply practical for small- and medium-sized businesses.”

Intermedia, which currently hosts more than 225,000 premium Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, will offer hosted Exchange 2010 service with a 99.999 percent uptime service level agreement. This ensures that the customer will experience less than six minutes of downtime per year.

In addition to Exchange 2010’s new features such as personal archives and multi-mailbox search, Intermedia’s hosted Exchange 2010 service also adds its own extra features.

The hosted Exchange 2010 offering is backed Intermedia’s premium infrastructure, spanning four data centers, to protect email and speed routing, as well as includes free full-service migration, control of the Exchange environment, and support with an average hold time of less than 40 seconds via its 24-hour phone and email support.

Microsoft launches Online Services to provide on-demand e-mail and collaboration solutions for customers in India Microsoft Online Services Subscription is available upwards of $2 per user per month.

The Microsoft Online Services product family offers Exchange Online (for e-mail) and Office SharePoint Online (portals and collaboration) available separately or as a suite together with Office Live Meeting (for conferencing), Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services and Microsoft Office Communications Online (for instant messaging and presence). The services will be available in India from November 7, 2009 onwards.

HCL, Infosys, Wipro among leading partners to provide value added Services Over 1800 Indian businesses on board in the 100 day trial period . As a part of its continued emphasis to enable easy access to its cost effective business productivity software, Microsoft has announced commercial availability of Microsoft Online Services in India.

Customers can access the suite directly from www.microsoft.com/india/onlineservices

Users have to pay a use-based monthly subscription fee, and thus manage their IT needs efficiently and more cost effectively .

Windows 7 delivers on a simple premise: Microsoft Online Services Ready Reckoner

Microsoft Online Services delivers:

E-mail, collaborate, conference, IM facility online on a pay as you go basis
Website from where you can access:
http://www.microsoft.com/india/onlineservices

Costs: (excluding applicable taxes)

The standard suite costs $10 /user/month
Individual offerings are available at:

• $5 per user/month for Exchange Online Sstd
• $5.25 user/month for SharePoint Online
• $2.00 user/month for Office Communications Online Std
• $4.50 user/month for Office Live Meeting
• $2 per user/month for Exchange Online Deskless Worker
• $2 per user/month for SharePoint Online Deskless Worker

Microsoft Online Services:6 easy cost saving steps

• Step 1 – Go to www.microsoft.com/india/onlineservices
• Step 2 – Choose country and log in with Live id
• Step 3 – Add chosen services to shopping cart
• Step 4 – Choose the partner of choice
• Step 5 – Start using the service (after you receive service setup notification)
• Step 6 – A usage based monthly bill will be make it easier for customers to do the things they want on a PC through a streamlined user interface and several new features that make everyday tasks faster. This launch marks a significant milestone for Microsoft and is a result of extensive feedback from millions of customers and partners around the world.

Company email has become a vital source of evidence in legal proceedings over recent years. As it became more important to the way businesses operated and communicated, both internally and externally, the more useful email became in litigation.

Email compliance soon became an important part of an IT department’s life, and plans were hurriedly drawn up so organizations could meet their obligations. While archiving email has been a part of the IT schedule for many companies, it was often on an unofficial or ad-hoc basis. Then along came a raft of legislation compelling businesses to create and maintain an effective, and compliant archive and retrieval system.

Fortunately, even during its infancy, there were two methods of email compliance. The first was to control everything in-house, on the organizations own servers. Then build in a secure storage function, efficient retrieval and processes to answer E-discovery requests.

The second was to outsource the operation to third party providers and let them take the strain. They would take the email information off Exchange servers or other email platforms, format it, compress it and then store it securely. They would then service any E-discovery requests made by the client or their legal team.

Both have pros and cons.

Keeping it in-house involved a hefty investment in time and money. Extra hardware, networking, staff and processes would be needed in order to build a coherent, and compliant process that would satisfy the needs of the legislation. The benefit was that the organization retained full control of the data, the systems and the process.

Having the email compliance hosted offloaded just about all of the initial outlay, the need for the hardware, extra staff and the infrastructure to support a compliant system. That would be in the hands of the vendor. The size of the solution could also be scaled according to seats. If the client company grew, bought other entities or got purchased itself, the outsourced service could be scaled to meet the new needs.

The downside was that it is a recurring expense that the business has to pay, but doesn’t own. The organization also has to rely on the professionalism of the vendor in order to ensure the data is safe and that they are completely covered in the event of litigation or E-discovery requests.

There is no right answer to the question of what method is right for which business. That comes down to the individuals involved. Both solutions lend themselves to different scenarios, and different situations. The decision whether to go in-house or outsource depends entirely on where the organization is now, and where they plan to be in a few years time.

By Liau Yun Qing, ZDNet Asia

SINGAPORE–In a bid to expand its international marketing efforts around Google Apps, the search giant last week launched a global initiative it calls “Gone Google”. But, one local company cites user inertia and learning curve as reasons for not jumping on the bandwagon just yet.

Deepak Ramanathan, the company’s Asia-Pacific head of enterprise marketing, said in an e-mail interview that Google is focusing on digital screens for the campaign to keep the advertisements “fresh and up-to-date”, and has placed advertisements in 17 digital billboards across the Singapore Changi Airport’s three terminals.

Ramanathan said Google sees “huge opportunity” in enterprises and has “thousands of” Google Apps business users in Singapore and Southeast Asia, ranging from small and midsize businesses (SMBs), to large enterprises and educational institutions.

At the Gartner Symposium in Orlando last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had said: “[Enterprise is] the next big billion-dollar opportunity after our display [ad] business.”

The company hopes marketing Google Apps will further promote enterprise moves to cloud computing.

But, at least one organization is doubtful Google Apps’ feature set can match their current office productivity software staples.

User inertia, learning curve
Local company Digital Scanning Corporation (DSC) is among those that will not be switching to Google Apps just yet.

In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, DSC CTO Wong Ee Sing said the organization currently has no plans to push for a company-wide migration to Google Apps, though the IT department had tried out the suite and found it adequate for day-to-day use.

Wong cited “user inertia and learning curve” as some of the company’s concerns.

“None of our users are interested in re-learning a new application, especially when the one they are currently using works just fine,” he explained. “If we want to move to Google Apps, we would have to uninstall [our current office suite] from every PC to force users to learn Google Apps, [which is] not great for productivity.”

He added that DSC employees in general seem to be more concerned with presentation rather than content of a document. “Google Apps do not provide such rich formatting capabilities. This mindset would have to change or be changed for Google Apps to take off,” Wong said.

The company also has “nagging worries over security and confidentiality“, he noted.

In response to these concerns, Ramanathan told ZDNet Asia in a follow-up e-mail that the “true power of Google Apps is the ability to collaborate online and share documents in real-time, from any PC or Web-enabled mobile phone”.

“While client-based productivity software has many more rich formatting capabilities than cloud-based productivity software today, the gap is closing,” he said. “Meanwhile, cloud-based productivity software can provide additional functionality that client-based software does not currently have, such as translation of documents into 42 languages.”

Users who like Microsoft Outlook, he added, can try an application called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows Outlook users to connect to Google Apps for business e-mail, contacts and calendar. These people can also use Gmail’s Web interface to access information when they are not on their work computer, he said.

PointStar, a Google Apps reseller, added in an e-mail interview: “Google has dedicated teams of engineers to constantly monitor and maintain data security as well as data center protection procedures that conform to the SAS 70 standard.”

Wong believes, too, that the cloud computing model will eventually prevail. Although DSC is not focusing on the platform yet, he does not discount the possibility of migrating to the Web. “As more applications move to the cloud, our entire desktop experience will reside in the cloud and tightly,” he said.

Company that “Gone Google”
And while DSC is biding its time with Google Apps, another local company recently made the switch.

In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, NGR Engineering’s CTO Gilles Depardieu said the company made the decision to migrate after its previous server–running Microsoft Exchange–crashed following an attack by hackers from Russia and China.

The company’s CEO was also looking to reduce associated IT costs from having to consult Exchange platform specialists whom NGR did not have internally, and who were “expensive and busy” to engage when needed, Depardieu said, adding that this also created “lots of invoices” that had to be exchanged between the finance and IT departments.

The company evaluated other options, such as running managed/hosted Exchange servers with local service providers, but found the price “too high”, he said.

NGR conducted a pilot test before deciding to move to Google Apps, Depardieu said, noting that companies looking to make the switch should prepare for user resistance to change. He added that changes to local configuration on each PC can also be upsetting for some users.

“The CEO has to be on the CTO’s side from the start [and] the CTO would have a lot to do to convince other executives,” he said. “Users will complain about how slow the migration from their old local data [on the user PC] to cloud data is, [which] might take days, as uploading is always slower than downloading.”

Gerry Chng, partner at Ernst & Young, said organizations looking to adopt cloud computing should first consider some key issues before making the commitment. In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, Chng outlined these areas:

• As public cloud computing utilizes the Internet, if they are using public clouds, organizations should consider whether their existing infrastructure can handle the demands to access applications and data over the Internet.
• Companies need to review their business continuity plans for provisions in the event of unavailability of applications or data in the cloud.
• They need to relook internal policies and regulatory requirements on data protection before deciding how much data, and in which form data should be hosted in the cloud.
• Organizations need to realize even though users demand mobility, high-speed Internet access is not always readily available. For example, an executive on a plane will not be able to access his cloud-based e-mail if he cannot connect to the Internet.
• Lack of open standards for existing cloud applications may pose a hindrance or risk for organizations in migrating existing applications or developing new applications for the cloud.

Chng also noted that availability and confidentiality posed risks to information security when companies move to the cloud.

“As the applications or data are provisioned from the cloud, organizations become highly dependent on the availability of the cloud service provider and Internet connection,” he said. “While an organization can plan for bandwidth, one cannot always prepare for unexpected events such as an earthquake disrupting optical fiber submarine links to the Internet.”

Chng added that organizations typically prefer to handle confidential data internally to prevent sensitive information from being leaked out.

“The challenge of confidentiality is amplified when data is handled, stored and processed through a third party,” he said.