Jul
24
2009

Why your Business Email needs a Top Notch Data Center

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.
more

Jul
16
2009

Hosted Exchange and BlackBerry- Enterprise Communications for SMBs

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).

With the entrenchment of the BlackBerry in the business world, it’s surprising how few SMBs have fully integrated it with their larger business communications solution. To put it another way, if your employees use Blackberries and you aren’t using hosted BlackBerry services along with Microsoft Exchange Server with Active Sync, you’re missing out on some big advantages.

The BlackBerry rose to dominate the business world primarily based on one killer app: it was and still is an easy to use e-mail appliance that fits in your pocket. It’s funny and not a little surprising then that millions of business people use this handy little e-mail machine to access an e-mail system that it’s totally separate and disconnected from their corporate mail. They go through a complicated daily process of forwarding mail from desktop to hand held and back again, with multiple copies of documents in multiple places and creating a management headache that magnifies geometrically with any serious volume of mail to deal with. The solution to this is by using Exchange and Active Sync in conjunction with hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).
more

Jun
29
2009

iPhone 3.0 and Exchange Server- Better Than Ever

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.

The iPhone has always been able to connect to Exchange servers via IMAP, and native support for ActiveSync and Exchange has been built in since release2.0. This gives administrators an alternative to the potential security risks associated with IMAP. Using ActiveSync to connect to Exchange server has additional benefits as well. IMAP is only designed to handle e-mail, but with ActiveSync users have full synchronization with their calendars and contacts in addition to e-mail.

iPhone 3.0 takes this synchronization feature a step further, allowing syncing with multiple calendars, both locally and from the Exchange server. Meeting invitations can now be created and sent from the phone, giving field reps and sales people added flexibility for appointment setting and client meetings. Like calendars, contact info can also be synced between local contact lists and contacts on the server. iPhone 3.0 supports both CalDev and ICS calendar protocols.
more

Jun
24
2009

How Email Synchronization Can Save Time and Money

There are few things as aggravating as having to do the same job twice, and yet when it comes to managing our business lives, many people have to do this constantly. Here’s a common example- a salesperson books an appointment with a client. She adds the appointment to her desktop calendar. Then she also adds the appointment to her cell phone or PDA. Then she adds the appointment to the team calendar, which is printed and posted in the office so co-workers can keep track of each other. Finally, she adds it to the lead tracking sheet, call log, and activity log, and is looking forward to actually selling something instead of documenting it before the fact.

Then the client has to move the appointment out by an hour.

Our poor overworked salesperson has to re-do all those listings, and hopefully doesn’t forget one in the process. Many meetings have been missed because the rescheduling notification flow broke down before reaching all the participants. How much better would it be to make a single calendar entry and have everything else update automatically? Fortunately those capabilities exist today, through hosted Microsoft Exchange.

Using ActiveSync and Direct Push technology, your hosted Exchange Server can synchronize calendar information across a variety of devices- smart phones, handhelds and palmtops, as well as laptop and desktop PCs. Updates are relayed to everyone, whether they are at their desks or out in the field, and the days of missing the meeting because of crossed signals are over.
more

Jun
18
2009

Is Gmail good for your business?

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.

By default, Google Mail and Google Documents transmit information in clear text. This means that data is unencrypted, and easily read by anyone who is able to intercept it. The reason this is disabled by default is understandable- tough encryption comes with a processing cost. The overhead for Google to encrypt all the mail that moves through their system would be massive. The problem for Google is that, due to their positioning, they are held to a higher standard. It would likely come as a big surprise to the millions of businesspeople who rely on Gmail that it comes with a massive security risk.
more

• view all