Hosted Exchange: Home Truths

I’ve read reports saying that most small businesses operate with substandard e-mail systems that are absent lots of technology’s snazziest features and that don’t accommodate for their employees’ need for shared content. Considering the level of sophistication the latest systems possess, and the glut of providers willing to host them on behalf of others, this surprises me.

Admittedly, Managed Services is tricky business. There’s a multitude of players and each is convinced that theirs is the ultimate solution, from Hosted Microsoft Exchange & Sharepoint, Microsoft CRM, Wireless synchronization with Blackberries and iPhones to Remote Online Backups!

But users overlook the offering of Hosted Microsoft Exchange services at their peril. Indeed, all of the buzz around Microsoft Exchange hosting should encourage, not deter, managers considering an overhaul of their communication systems.

Staying competitive means scratching your way to the top of everything technological, including the very latest in those messaging tools that can provide rich and efficient access to e-mail, calendars and contacts. It also means parceling your productive time wisely, which translates nicely into: if you don’t have to manage something yourself, but can pay someone reliable and clever in your stead, so much the better.

The elegance of Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Server is a computer server that stores a slew of information around your company’s communications activities. E-mail, attachments, contact information, shared calendars and tasklists are all accessible on this, the world’s most widely used business messaging platform. Users can get at it all, via Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access, from any web-accessible computer or mobile device.  The benefits of this platform are many. Simply put, Microsoft Exchange helps business owners keep in touch with their clients, and to do so from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection.

Playing Host

And thanks to the hosting option, Small to medium size businesses get to avail themselves of a product whose crazy implementation and maintenance costs had previously kept it out of reach.

With Microsoft Exchange hosting, someone else operates your e-mail server so you don’t have to. Here, servers are housed in a central, secure centre whose facilities are maintained off site and geographical spread for redundancy. Businesses who engage web hosts are effectively renting services with a pay-as-you-go model that allows them to scale up or down as required. It’s a wonderful thing! Organizations that take advantage of this service get access to their e-mail service and account information without the niggly bits associated with maintaining their own servers and infrastructure and/or downtime outages.

Here at 360, our hosted Microsoft Exchange solutions ensure that all of your mission-critical communications technology and data are available 99.8% of the time. In fact we are so confident of these solutions that we offer an availability guarantee. And our wireless integration option can ensure that all your e-mail, calendar and contact data are fully synchronized in real time, so you can dip into it whenever, from wherever on any mobile device.

It’s a brilliant solution for companies teetering on the brink of commitment on this front