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.

Think of your e-mail server as a safe deposit box in a bank. Bank A is in a warehouse with sheet metal walls and roof, tucked away on a small road. Bank B is a large concrete facility, well lit and located at the intersection of several large highways. It doesn’t take an accounting degree to determine that Bank B presents a better option.

That example isn’t as extreme as it might appear. There’s a world of difference between a server located in the collocation room of the phone company and one in a custom built data center. N+1 redundancy, environmental control, dedicated UPS power, and around the clock technical staff are just a few advantages you get from a top quality data center. They are things that are transparent when everything works the way it should, but that mean the difference between a technician fighting for off hours access to an out of the way phone company central office or having a technician already on site and working on restoring your service.

There are also many intangible benefits to being located in a top notch data center, like multiple connections to backbone network providers. That highly meshed, high performance connectivity means the best possible experience for users, regardless of where their traffic originates. A quality data center will also boast such features as fully redundant, generator backed power, physical and automated security measures, and available ancillary services like data backup and recovery, managed firewalls, and load balancers.

The sum total of these things is performance and availability. Your e-mail server, or more accurately the information that lives on and moves through it, is as valuable to your business as actual revenue. Just as you wouldn’t entrust financial resources to a bank with a rundown building, it’s important to put that same consideration in choosing a ‘bank’ for your business e-mail service. There’s no substitute for an enterprise grade provider with world class facilities.

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).

The reasons for SMBs to go with a hosted Exchange service are as numerous as they are compelling. High availability and performance, centralized communications, and backup and security considerations are just a few of the benefits of a hosted Exchange service. As compared to owning and operating an Exchange server in house, managed and hosted Exchange minimizes the cost of entry, and mitigates the cost of operation with 24/7 support and robust network infrastructure. Even without considering the price of BlackBerry server licenses and support, it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage in house.

Top quality Exchange hosts let you add hosted BES capabilities to your existing Exchange deployment, adding significant value to daily operations. Broadly speaking- employees with more and better access to critical e-mail, contacts, and calendar information can do a better job. Meetings and calendar info can be changed and updated on the fly, important e-mails can be accessed from anywhere, and all key data is synchronized seamlessly between devices.

If your employees use their BlackBerry devices to access external e-mail for business use, you not only run the risk of legal exposure and corporate sabotage, but you are missing out on powerful efficiencies than can make a difference in a tough, cut throat business environment. Native Active Sync support makes it effortless to integrate BlackBerry Enterprise Server with your corporate e-mail. To coin an old candy commercial, hosted Exchange and hosed BlackBerry services are two great tastes that taste great together.

Add BlackBerry Enterprise server support to your hosted Exchange plan today and get 2 months of service, absolutely free! No setup fees or hidden charges, just great BlackBerry service for 2 months at no charge. Don’t miss out! Order today and take advantage of this limited time offer!

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.

Spotlight Search has been improved for iPhone 3.0, allowing users to search mail, calendars, and contacts directly on the Exchange server, boosting efficiency, saving time, and giving users on the go access to the info they need. This is a powerfully helpful feature, as anyone who has searched for a particular e-mail in overcrowded mail folders can attest.

The iPhone has other features that make it a solid performer for business use. It supports secure, encrypted access to wireless networks and VPNs. The iPhone also includes administrator friendly Configuration Profiles, making it easy to set up devices quickly and efficiently for many user types.

Although the Blackberry has the reputation as the ‘business smart phone’, its tight integration with Exchange Server make the iPhone an excellent option. This is a trend that will only continue with the new iPhone 3.0 release. In addition to new features for Exchange and ActiveSync, the new iPhone OS has an expanded Bluetooth profile. This will allow the iPhone to interoperate with a variety of other business devices and hardware.

It’s a rare piece of hardware that grows in value as it ages. Apple has bucked the depreciation trend by pumping new life into first, second, and now third generation iPhones. Each new release has further demonstrated the flexibility of the platform, and a constant stream of innovative applications has leapfrogged the iPhone into serious contention with Blackberry as a business ready smart phone. If the superior built in support for Exchange Server doesn’t have you convinced, just imagine the morale boost you’d get from giving employees an iPhone option.

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.

Synchronization with Exchange goes much further than scheduling and calendars. E-mail and contact lists are also available from a variety of platforms, with real-time accessibility and application uses. Critical company information is available to everyone that needs it, anywhere they happen to be. The upcoming Exchange 2010 will also allow you to combine e-mail and voice mailboxes into a single communications portal that brings together your entire organization in ways that will dramatically impact how business is done.

Centralizing your e-mail in a Hosted Exchange environment has other benefits as well. Exchange is fully compatible with iPhone and BlackBerry devices, giving employees the flexibility to use the hardware they are comfortable with. E-mail retention and archival is easy and automatic. As with other hosted services, cost of entry is minimal, and there’s no need for additional investments in training or hardware. You get the advantage of the redundancy and connectivity of a world class data center at a fraction of the cost.

If you don’t have a platform independent, real time synchronization solution for your business, whether you have just a handful of employees or hundreds, Hosted Exchange can save you time and money. Exchange lets you supercharge scheduling efficiency throughout your organization. Reap the benefit of putting the full power of your corporate communications in the hands of your employees, wherever they are. Highly flexible and cost effective for any budget, Exchange doesn’t just keep your data in sync, it keeps your entire company in sync.

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.

The 37 researchers and scholars who signed the letter to Google also assert other dangers. Google Mail, Documents, and Calendar all use the same authentication cookie. This means that if one service is breached for a user, all three are accessible to the hacker. The authors further allege that Google doesn’t do enough to promote the secure HTTP option in their applications, and should better inform their users about the importance of encryption and the risks of clear text transmission.

Industrial espionage and sabotage aren’t just the stuff of novels. They’re a reality and a legitimate concern for smart SMBs. “Free” services come with a cost that’s often hidden, and just as often higher than anyone could have anticipated. The good news is there are other solutions that deliver the ease of use and accessibility that Google Mail, Calendar, and Documents provide.

A hosted Microsoft Exchange service can give your organization the power and ubiquity of Google email, calendar, and document applications with an important difference- Exchange is an enterprise class solution backed by tough service level agreements and with must-have business oriented features like automated archival and built in iPhone and Blackberry support.

People who have been around the IT business for long enough remember the days of free web hosting accounts from Internet service providers. Referred to as ‘tilde accounts’ for the character used to preface the user name in the URL (www.provider.com/~username), they were something of a negative status symbol for businesses looking for a bargain basement web page.

In a lot of ways, Gmail is the tilde equivalent of e-mail for your business. It works pretty well, it’s free, and it’s a big red flag to anyone evaluating your company. Smart businesses take control of all critical customer facing processes, and there are few that are more critical than e-mail. If security issues, lack of service level guarantees, and an absence of control are concerns for your business, hosted Exchange could be the answer.