Hosted Exchange
While email, scheduling and collaboration tools are key factors in the success of any business, many small and mid-sized companies often lack to IT budget or inhouse team to implement and maintain the sophisticated messaging software they need. Core IT now offers the same Microsoft Exchange 2010 used by the majority of large corporations for their emails, calendars, contacts, files and full collaboration functions available as a hosted service.
You subscribe to this on-demand service for a low monthly fee - instead of paying thousands of dollars for upfront for expensive servers and software licenses, hiring specialist IT-staff to install and maintain the system and being responsible for a 24/7 infratsructure. With a hosted service, all the hardware and software is provided for you, then run and maintained in a secure data center. You pay a low monthly fee and can access email using Outlook or Entourage on your desktop, Outlook Web Access (OWA) in any web browser, or wirelessly from a mobile device like a BlackBerry or iPhone.
What this means for your business email
People running Exchange as their mail server typically use Outlook as the email which offers many advanced features:
- securely access email remotely via the Web or a Mobile device
- view colleagues' up-to-date calendars and schedule meetings
- assign and manage company tasks on central "to-do" lists
- manage contact information about employees, suppliers or contacts for anytime access
While POP3 and IMAP4 are well suited for home or personal use, Exchange provides constant access to email, shared calendars and contacts to improve team productivity.
