Software (plus) Services (equals) Hosted Exchange Mail and OCS Services

By Tom Cross

Technology Columnist

 

Referred by Microsoft (News - Alert) as “software+services” or as others call it SAAS (Software as a Service) and more commonly referred to as hosted or Web-based applications, there are more than 100 companies who offer hosted Microsoft Exchange e-mail services. In addition, a growing number of these ISP’s offer Microsoft OCS (Office Communications Server) telephony as an additional featureset. Microsoft Hosted Exchange Filtering provides both inbound and outbound anti-spam, anti-virus, policy, disaster recovery along with administrative console, junk mail quarantine and other features. In addition, Hosted Exchange integrates Microsoft Forefront security software with SharePoint. SharePoint is what was called computer-conferencing, groupware and other names. It’s a great concept developed in the 1970s by a number of different organizations including such notables as Douglas Engelbart, the Father of the Mouse.

 

The animated tutorial can be found at: http://blog.tmcnet.com/cross-talk/

 

E-mail archiving is critical for legal discovery and proper corporate governance. Hosted Exchange Archive provides text indexing of e-mail and attachments, IM (Instant Messages) and other documents. In addition, government compliance tools for supervising, escalating, and tracking messages are available. With Hosted Exchange, users can access quarantined mail and Administrators can perform message administration. Either party can access mail archive via the Web for real time mail functionality. In addition, archive repository benefits from upstream spam and virus protection features. Here as you can see Hosted Exchange reduces and may eliminate a substantial number of onsite equipment requirements while greatly enhance an organization’s ability to support multi-site or new locations. Traditional Exchange Server 2007 “on-premise” implementations remain viable for single location organizations where DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) functions are required for HTTP, ecommerce and other applications including OCS. In addition, situations where internal locations are behind the DMZ would be appropriate for an on-premise approach.

 

 

If you want to know more, this information is part of OCS-101 and SIP Essentials 2.0c courses available onsite and online. The online version is $299 for SIP 2.0c and $499 for OCS-101 Office Communications Server per person (volume and site license discounts available). For more information go to http://www.techtionary.com or please call Tom Cross (News - Alert) at 303-594-1694 or [email protected]. Discounts are also available to members of the SIP Forum and MS Partners for $99 per student during May.

 

Courses are free to channel partners – see terms and conditions at http://www.techtionary.com/techu/

 

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