What Is It

What Is It

The Advantages of Hosted Exchange

Email, collaboration and scheduling tools have become critical factors to the success of any business. Unfortunately, small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) often lack a large IT budget or in-house team to implement and maintain the sophisticated messaging software they need. Yet SMBs need this critical toolset in order to succeed in the marketplace. Microsoft Exchange is used by the majority of large corporations for their email, calendars, contacts and files. Exchange powers the full collaboration functions of Microsoft Outlook 2007, such as group calendars, contacts and file-sharing.

Our Hosted Exchange 2010 Solution

We provide the latest version, Exchange 2010, as a hosted service. You can subscribe to this on-demand service for a low monthly fee – instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars upfront for expensive servers and software licenses, hiring specialist IT staff to install and maintain the system and being responsible for a 24×7 infrastructure. We let you focus on your core business.

Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 means that we provide all hardware and software, then run and maintain it for you in one of our Tier-4 data centers. You pay a low monthly fee, and can access your email using Outlook® or Entourage® on your desktop, Outlook Web Access (OWA) in any web browser, or wirelessly from a device like the BlackBerry® or iPhone.

Hosted Exchange from Tech Connections In-house Exchange and IT staff
Software licenses Yes No
Enterprise-grade hardware Yes No
24×7 support Yes Unlikely
100% Data Protection Guarantee as part of our overall 99.999% SLA Yes No
Tier-4 data center with redundant power, cooling and network connections Yes No
Regular backups Yes Possibly
Anti-virus, anti-spam Yes Possibly
Wireless options Yes Separate licenses and servers needed

What This Means For Your Email

People running Exchange as their email server typically use Outlook as email. Among many advanced features, this lets them:

·   Securely access email remotely via the web or a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone

·   View colleagues’ up-to-date calendars and schedule meetings

·   Assign and manage company tasks on central ‘to do’ lists

·   Manage contact information of employees and customers and access it anytime

Exchange is a quantum leap from basic POP3 or IMAP4 email, which is most suited for home and personal use, and makes your team much more productive through constant access to email, shared calendars and contacts

To help you understand the productivity-boosting options that hosted Exchange 2010 offers, here is a comparison of Outlook/Exchange 2010 versus basic email options:

Exchange Server 2010 POP 3 /
IMAP4
Group scheduling Yes No
Send out meeting requests, then track and update them Yes No
Shared calendars and side-by-side calendar views Yes No
Access to personal and shared address books from remote locations Yes No
Single sign-on for email and network access Yes No
Connections over the Internet are secure Yes Some solutions
Server-side spam filtering Yes Some solutions
Ability to categorize email and flag it  for follow up Yes Partial
Ability to add voting buttons to a messages Yes No
Automatic out-of-office reply Yes No
Ability to recall sent messages Yes No
Support for multiple-computer access Yes Partial
Access to email via Web browsers and mobile browsers, Outlook Mobile in Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphones Yes Non-Microsoft products are typically required
Outlook Cached Exchange Mode for working with intermittent Web connection (eg dial-up) Yes Some solutions offer caching
Offline email, calendar, contacts, and public folder support Yes Partial
Access to public folders for sharing documents and information Yes Individual email folder access in IMAP
Basic email support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Yes No
Easy management of Outlook and Exchange Server profiles across multiple machines to lower support costs Yes No

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