It was clear from the product positioning that Microsoft is feeling the heat (GigaOm Pro, sub. req’d) from enterprise adoption of tools from Google, such as Gmail, many of which are free or available in low-cost versions for business use. Cisco — a long-time Microsoft partner — is also taking aim at Microsoft Exchange with a new enterprise email service, WebEx Email. Steve Elop, president of Microsoft’s business solutions division, made numerous mentions of cost savings that enterprises can purportedly reap with Exchange 2010, and there was much focus on the email archiving and legal compliance features to be found in both it and Outlook 2010. Among cost-saving citations, Elop noted that companies can now run Exchange Server on lower-cost storage platforms than SANs.

Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been very vocal recently about that company’s “next billion-dollar opportunities” when it comes to delivering web-hosted applications and other tools that can serve as alternatives to Microsoft’s solutions — and its licensing fees. In fact, many of Schmidt’s recent comments are decidedly anti-Microsoft.

No doubt with Google’s focus on online-hosted applications in mind, many new features in Exchange and Outlook are designed to allow email inboxes and archives to migrate easily between on-premise deployments and online-hosted ones. For example, a demonstration at the Berlin event included taking an existing on-premise email inbox and transferring it to a web-hosted implementation. Exchange Server is available now for trial use, here (Microsoft Silverlight req’d.).

Microsoft officials also announced that the company is acquiring SourceGear’s Teamprise technology. Teamprise allows Java and Eclipse developers to create applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We’ll be on the lookout for more announcements slated to arrive at TechEd this week and will update you as they come in. Stay tuned.

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.

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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.