For most businesses operating in a web enabled marketplace, e-mail has replaced the phone system as the communications nerve center. If you don’t think so, imagine which one you could do without for a day. As one of a business’ most valuable and important resources, it presents some challenges when it comes to how and where to manage it. Commercial e-mail like Gmail or AOL isn’t an option for anyone that wants to be taken seriously, and unless you already have significant bandwidth, hardware, and 24-7 staffing, running it in house isn’t really an option.
The decision to outsource e-mail may be an easy one, but the implementation is much less cut and dry. Shared hosting versus dedicated, basic POP mail service versus full featured Exchange hosting, there are solutions to fit organizations and budgets of any size. Regardless of the solution you’re considering for your business, there’s a common question you should be asking- what kind of data center will my mail be hosted in?
In a very tangible sense, the data center is a tremendous portion of the overall value of a mail service, and yet, it is frequently the least considered one, lost is a sea of price points and feature sets. Often it’s the quality of the data center that makes the difference between poor and excellent e-mail service.
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The iPhone may be the center of attention at the smart phone party right now, but when it’s time to get down to business, the leader remains the BlackBerry. Even the top executive in the country famously has his own souped up model. The BlackBerry has become ubiquitous in companies all over America, and it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that business would halt if people’s Blackberries stopped working (the proof being a notorious outage of a couple years ago). 
The much ballyhooed iPhone 3.0 update is here, and with it come a number of significant improvements in the way the iPhone integrates with Microsoft Exchange server. As a counter to the button down business oriented Blackberry, the iPhone has been seen as the ‘fun’ device, but when combined with Exchange server, the iPhone is a powerful business smart phone in its own right.
When the history of early 21st century business is written, Google will certainly be counted among the success stories, and big component of their success has been the wide adoption of Gmail. Although not the first to offer a free e-mail service, Google’s mail service has been very popular thanks to a minimalist approach- slim on features, but easily accessed on a variety of web enabled devices. As a recent letter sent to Google CEO Eric Schmidt points out, one of the features they’ve scrimped on is security.
