Jun
16
2009

E-mail Retention and Archival- Why It’s Critical For Your Business

by William Toll

If your business is like most, e-mail has become the heart of your company communications. Sales teams depend on it to communicate with clients, management depends on it to communicate with employees, it’s vital for a successful modern business. What many people fail to consider is that e-mail is also a dangerous chink in your corporate armor, and in a decidedly unglamorous way. It’s a simple but critical question- where does your company e-mail go when your employees are done processing it?

It’s important to understand that company e-mail is the property of your company. There have been many good arguments made about privacy in the workplace and the rights of individuals but make no mistake- when it comes to the law your business is responsible and accountable for that information.

E-mail retention is difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which is most e-mail is the equivalent of a gum wrapper once it’s been read, nothing but an afterthought. The sheer volume of e-mail presents another challenge, as is the fact that by and large e-mail defies easy categorization. Above all else is a truism that most of us have experienced- the e-mail you can’t find is the one you need.
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Jun
11
2009

NaviSite attends Mass Innovation Nights!

by William Toll

NaviSite was honored to participate in the third gathering of a great new event in the Boston, Massachusetts area.. MassInnovationNights.com allows companies large and small to showcase their new products to an audience of social media enthusiasts, mass media and potential customers.

NaviSite SMB hosting was featuring its recently launched Business Email service powered by Microsoft Exchange. With NaviSite’s Exchange hosting service, businesses of any size have access to corporate class email services like: shared calendars, BlackBerry synchronization, Free software including Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008 for PC and MAC.
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Jun
9
2009

Five Ways Hosted SharePoint Improves Project Execution

by Sumeet Sabharwal

Once upon a time, collaboration was really difficult, time consuming, and expensive. For one thing, people often had to travel great distances just to talk through the details of a project. In an optimal situation this might mean a drive across town and the loss of only a day. More typically it meant the hassle of a cross country flight, and the better part of a week or more in lost productivity, not to mention the expense of a round trip ticket and hotel stay. And that’s just the beginning.

Here’s how it would go- the project manager from the home office on the East Coast flies out to the engineering team on the West Coast. Monday is a lost day getting ready for the trip, getting meeting documents together and making whatever other arrangements needed to cover a week out of the office. Tuesday is a travel day, so if our hapless project manager is lucky, they’ll get to the West Coast office just about in time for everyone to head out. Wednesday is a meeting day, but only half of the people needed are actually in the meetings, because no one had the correct schedule. Adding to the confusion, the 50-plus pages of printed meeting documents are wrong, the numbers are all from an earlier analysis. The Thursday meetings go slightly better, but by this time things are badly off track, and anyway there’s an afternoon flight back home to worry about. By Friday our poor project manager is back in the office, exhausted and with only half of the goals for the trip accomplished, and at tremendous time and expense. Seems crazy, right?
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Jun
4
2009

The Hidden Costs of Spam

by Sumeet Sabharwal

You don’t have to be an IT expert to know that spam is a huge problem, for businesses and individuals alike. A study by the state of California estimated that spam cost US companies and organizations over $13 billion in lost productivity and overhead. Unlike the junk mail that litters your physical mailbox, the cost of spam is shouldered by the recipients, not the senders. It’s been estimated that half or more of all e-mail sent is unwanted spam. That means for a service provider, more than half of all their e-mail traffic has no benefit to their customers, and is in fact a nuisance. At every step closer to the end user, this trend continues.

Setting aside the productivity costs for a minute, consider the expense in storage and bandwidth when some 50% of all e-mail traffic is unsolicited spam. Cutting corners isn’t an option, because of the risk of losing or otherwise delaying legitimate mail. Spammers operate by leeching resources, and stolen credit cards, hacked servers, and spoofed network addresses are all tools in the spammers arsenal. Policing these types of activities is a full time job for network service providers, and something that the average business simply doesn’t have the resources to effectively accomplish.

As with anti-virus measures, anti-spam solutions are an ongoing process. Constant vigilance is required to keep up with the latest blacklists, filters, and known spammers. This is a drain on IT man hours that would otherwise be spent in revenue generating efforts. Unfortunately, even the best in-house anti-spam practices too often are barely able to stem an increasing tide.
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May
27
2009

Protecting your data with Managed Services

by William Toll

It’s not just a little ironic that the often quoted Murphy’s Law was coined long before data storage changed from boxes in a warehouse to zeroes and ones on a magnetic disc. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong is a truism in the IT arena. As anyone who has experienced the loss of critical files on a hard drive, memory stick, or even a phone number scrawled on a napkin can tell you- there’s nothing like that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know the information is well and truly gone.

As maddening as it can be to lose personal data, when it comes to your business it’s a mistake that could be catastrophic. As a result, data backup solutions are a multi-million dollar industry, and to be sure, there are many options to consider. From automated robotic tape rotation machines to software driven RAID disc arrays, there are solutions to fit any scenario. Unfortunately they also share a common weakness: unless your core business actually is data backup, managing your backup solution in house assumes responsibility for a complex process without the human resources it takes to do it correctly. That’s a complicated way of saying if you handle your own backups, chances are you’re going to run into Murphy’s Law, and it won’t be pretty.
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May
18
2009

Rain in the Cloud, and Finding the Silver Lining

by Sumeet Sabharwal

The recent Google outage made a lot of people sit up and take notice. By some accounts, an outage that lasted a little over an hour impacted total internet traffic for the day by 5%. Gmail and other Google Applications were unavailable, and underneath the collective sigh of frustration was a decreased confidence in the ubiquity of ‘the cloud’. To their credit, Google reacted admirably to the problem, was up front with users, and had a resolution in place quickly. Despite that, a lot of people got a taste of the danger of having all the eggs in one basket.

It seems like an oxymoron, but free comes with a price. In the case of Gmail and related applications, that price is paid in limited functionality and reliability. The value of that price is a sliding scale. Taking an extra couple of minutes to track down an e-mail is a minor cost, having a primary business communications tool down is a major one. For casual users this isn’t a big deal, but in a business environment it’s a huge one.
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Apr
24
2009

Exchange 2010 Reveals Great Future for Business Class Email

by Sumeet Sabharwal

At NaviSite, we find the college basketball tournament kind of exciting, and yeah, we’ll probably tune in for the finale of Dancing With The Stars. But here at NaviSite HQ, when it comes to real excitement it’s hard to beat the recent announcement of Microsoft Exchange 2010.

The thing is, when it comes to NaviSite and Exchange, we go way back. We’ve been a leading provider of Exchange hosting for a decade, going back to 1999 with our offering of managed hosted Exchange 2k. We’ve spent the last ten years helping businesses of all sizes take advantage of the power and convenience of a Hosted Exchange mail solution, and with the advent of Exchange 2010, that high level of service and support will transform the way businesses communicate.
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Apr
22
2009

Making Small Business Anytime, Anywhere Communications a Reality

by Sumeet Sabharwal

After years of devices that didn’t quite live up to expectations, the smartphone revolution is upon us. With the mass consumer penetration of BlackBerries, iPhones, and other next-gen handhelds, smartphones are changing the way we interact with information, and businesses who don’t adapt to this new environment will find themselves falling quickly behind their competition.

Over the last 15 years e-mail and cell phones went from novelties to critical business tools. Those of us who are a little longer in the tooth remember struggling with brick sized cell phones and command line Pine based e-mail accounts provided by the local library, and that so much has changed so quickly belies the relatively short time frame.
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Dec
17
2008

2008: Looking Back at Small Business Hosting Purchases

by William Toll

Small and medium-sized businesses found 2008 to be the year when many previously “leading edge” and “out of reach” technologies became accessible and, more importantly, critical to their bottom line.  In 2008, SMB technology teams, ISVs, and IT consultants were transforming their technology deployments to hosting services utilizing formerly out-of-reach technologies.

For the first time, SMBs were benefiting from solutions and technologies such as Software as a Service, Quad-Core CPUs, Virtualization, and the new Microsoft server technologies.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the preferred method for SMBs to consume software to meet their application and business process needs.  SMBs now clearly see that it no longer makes sense to buy software and hardware from traditional retailers and distributors.  The VARs and MSPs that service SMBs have moved from break-fix agreements to recurring arrangements with their SMB customers.  In 2008, SaaS became not only a viable option but in many ways the preferred solution.  Large capital outlays on new hardware and the associated big expenses on installation and upgrade licenses are now seen as the not financially advisable and inefficient.  Hosted dedicated servers and virtual dedicated servers enable SMBs and their VARs to quickly deploy new solutions and upgrades and save time and capital.
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