This is the final part of my previous postings and I would like to conclude this series by mentioning some nitty-gritty facts before choosing your preferred hosting company. If you have missed reading my previous posts on this series, do visit them at the below URLs:

1. Are You A Growing Small Business? Exchange Hosting will bring peace of mind! (Part I)
2. Exchange Hosting: Factors which can bring peace of mind to your growing small business (Part II)

Introduction

After all the initial studies, now you are considering the hosting company to outsource your e-mail infrastructure. Wait! Aska  few more questions… Dave Grantz recently published a nice article where he advises customers to ask some essential questions. Why would some of the hosting companies rush with an attractive deal while compromising reliability and customer support? Customers should realize that not all the hosting companies offer redundant infrastructure, stable backups and efficient support. While offering down to earth lower price per mailbox, they might be eyeing on various extra fees for services. Who knows, there might be some hidden clause where customer will be stuck with the hosting providers for a certain period once signed up.

Know the difference: Managed Hosting & Non-managed Hosting

Managed Hosting – In a managed environment, the following tasks should be performed by the hoster:

1. Server maintenance, related facilitation in the datacenter & physical security of the whole infrastructure.
2. Data backups, patch management, support related issues & escalation which occurs from time to time.
3. Related software license management and further procurement of hardware/software, if any.

In a Non-Managed Hosting environment, you can rent a server in its datacenter rack space. The way servers are being managed and maintained is not the hoster’s headache. If something happens to these servers, you literally have to worry about how to bring this back online not the hosters. In other words, you crush your business continuity by outsourcing the server.

Is Data protection guaranteed?

Here belief comes first. Secondly, how credible your Hosting Company is. If you are not getting a firm answer on this, the hosting company may not have established enough security standards. Go to the next level of checking; do they have a very good protection from spam and virus? Though most of the hosting companies provide anti spam and anti virus protection, some of them are not and some of them offer a very basic one. Many offer the standard one which cannot cope with the daily innovative spammers, however the advanced solution of anti spam and antivirus can offer the customer some desired level of guaranteed protection. (Of course, with additional fees)

Look at their Spam filtering policies no matter standard or advanced. Most of the filtering is done at the server level, there are situations where you need user control to further refinement/validation purpose. The reason for doing this end user level is because of accidental filtering of legitimate mails at the server level. I remember, in my previous company we used to have web access (accessible even from the internet) where we log in to the Inbox in an Anti Spam appliance to retrieve messages those being filtered accidentally.

Data Recovery from the Exchange Mailbox.

This is most demanding in some companies where end users casually deletes and expect the support people to recover whenever they demand. Its productivity killing and sensitive task. Again, depends of company’s retention policy. So this is even worse when you outsource your email to a hosting company if you do not have a proper data recovery policy. I know good hosting companies do provide clear retention policies and backup tape rotation method. On top of it, with an archival system users don’t need to manage their PST for past years and they can access it using the web from anywhere. Statistics from various research firms shows that employees waste their time in managing PST, worst case when the valuable PSTs crash and are irrecoverable (because these ignorant users store beyond 2GB). What if a mailbox of an old employee needs to be recovered for legal purposes? In a nutshell, it is very essential to understand and ensure how fast this can be recovered.

All these come at an additional cost! Usually mailbox retention policies starts from 14-30 days. But retention of backup tapes is not longer, therefore you must have an idea if any long term archival is done and also, how much it costs.

How is the pricing done?

Most of the hosting companies charge per mailbox that is being hosted (e.g. $7 per month). This doesn’t mean that you are going to get all the features you need. So get down to granular details.
For example, Mailbox size - Managing mailbox quota is always challenging for the support team, especially users keep demanding an increase as they reach the quota (some users who do not want to learn the simple techniques of controlling the mailbox).

Eventually if you decide to increase the mailbox size for the users, be prepared for additional costs. Likewise, there are additional charges for more functionality (e.g. Mobility, Archival etc.)

Before I conclude, there are many other areas you can check to analyze the performance a hosting company that you are considering. Check their server availability/downtime status in the previous years. Do a detailed reading of various clauses in its Service Level Agreement, What if you want to migrate to a new Exchange version etc…

Lisa Masiello
123Together.com
781-273-6245 x652
lmasiello@123together.com

Which one makes sense to outsource first out of all the infrastructure components in your organization? I vote for email systems (guess it’s based on MS Exchange too). The first benefit which comes into the picture is reduced cost; let the hosting providers carry the headache of the most difficult responsibilities such as operation, keeping the infrastructure up-to-date with latest technologies, customer support, complying various regulations from government, etc.

Away from complexity

Managing e-mail servers needs expertise; if it’s Microsoft Exchange Server, the magnitude of complexity is drastic and needs real technical expertise to manage it. Microsoft Exchange is the dominate email server in the market; hence most SMBs prefer this platform due to its usability factors. Good news is that many Exchange hosting providers can consolidate and take care of your organization’s entire email infrastructure, hosting, email management, support, etc. So get rid of this unwanted complexity from your business as hosters can take care of single point of failures, reliability and high-availability.

Even in a simple Exchange 2007 deployment, it requires multiple components working together to secure the email system. Figure 1 below might seem complicated, but it represents the basic infrastructure of an email system using Exchange Server 2007.

Figure 1 (click for larger image)

Outsource! Outsource! Outsource…

Let me list down some of the unavoidable upfront cost when you set up email systems in-house:

• Hardware procurement in the beginning
• Licensing for Windows 2003 and Exchange Servers
• Antivirus/Anti Spam software
• Client Access License (CALs) for Microsoft Outlook
• Spare parts to minimize the lengthy downtime when critical hardware failure
• Additional cost as standby for exchange administrators to be on-call 24×7

The reason for me to yell to outsource is simply because of the above mentioned factors. You can literally avoid all these hassles by outsourcing to a hosting company; enjoy the benefits of reduced cost to maintain an email server with reliable and high available system. You can get this entire guarantee in writing through a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Technorati : Exchange_Server_2007_Hosting, Hosting_providers, exchange_server_2007, ms_exchange_2007
Del.icio.us : Exchange_Server_2007_Hosting, Hosting_providers, exchange_server_2007, ms_exchange_2007

Introduction

Growing SMBs should definitely concentrate on their core competencies. Though email is a critical application which helps to drive business, it is not related to the product and services that you are offering to your customers.

In other words, reduce the cost of running the business/resources in order to bring revenue. I have seen that many SMBs are making mistakes by engaging their resources to maintain the organization’s IT infrastructure, namely, CRM, e-mail, Pabx, etc at the expense of its talented human resources who are supposed to be working on its core competencies. We all must agree that these are the cornerstone of running a business in today’s world, and look for alternative methods for managing IT.

What’s next?

For many companies, this is a key transformation phase in terms of IT infrastructure because they realize expenses in managing IT inside the company with its own people. Therefore, an outsourcing company will be a better choice - better service than in-house at lower cost, minimum complexities and you will be able to allow your staff to increase  productivity.

Out of all the IT components, the email server should be the first choice of any company which can be outsourced - by doing so, complete operations will be done by this outsourcing company (Exchange Hosting Providers). Now these hosters will have to take control of certain tasks such as regulatory compliance, systems integration, Upgrade, patches, migration, implement cutting edge features to support a growing business, help-desk, support etc… What peace of mind! Isn’t it?

I met a friend in Singapore yesterday who is running a SM with 3 employees; he is a typical trader who travels a lot. I noticed that he has huge headache in managing his mailbox as well as his employees, is worried about losing data, managing it because they think IT is so complex and has great concerns on time management as his staff needs to concentrate on the trading business rather than mailbox management/backup, etc. He was happy when I suggested Exchange Hosting packages which are as low as $6 per mailbox and decided to go for it.

I want to continue this topic in my next post where I elaborate on the different factors that justify the Exchange Hosting benefits.

Technorati : Exchange_Hosting_benefits, Exchange_hosting_2007, SMB_Hosting, SMB_IT
Del.icio.us : Exchange_2007_Hosting, Microsoft, advice, email_hosting, exchange_hosting, guide, hosting, tips

I have been writing exclusively on Exchange Hosting for a while here, I thought its time to mention some basics on Exchange Server itself. Hosting providers in the market are still selling Exchange 2003 based hosting, but most of them have now started offering Exchange 2007 based hosting services.

Lately If you have observed the news on the Internet, Microsoft and Google competition is heating up like anything. Especially, both companies are dominant in the email marketplace, where Microsoft dominates in the Enterprise and Google on the public side. When it comes to Email Hosting, Microsoft still has the market edge where Google already showed tough competition with Google Apps.

Back to the topic, if you are considering Exchange Hosting it is good to know about the current transition from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. This information may not be relevant for an end user, but its a must know for the IT manager or consultant at the infrastructure side. Email with other collaboration tools is going through convergence and has also become a “top mission critical application” for many organizations.

Whats the real difference and benefits you get when your hosting providers replace Exchange 2003 with Exchange 2007?

The below table shows some highlights of the major changes in terms of roles, storage and processing power.

It is obvious that most of the Exchange 2003 customers are staying on the same platform for some more time, while new customers take advantage of Exchange 2007 Hosting. The main reason for this transition delay is due to the fact that effort required to change from 32-bit to 64-bit hardware is higher.

“Standard and Enterprise Edition” in Exchange 2007 has big difference in pricing. So in a 5 role deployment scenario, you can pretty much restrict all the roles , except “Mailbox Server Role”, into Standard Edition. In Exchange 2003, “Standard Edition” was less useful for large organization because it only supports up to 16Gb storage capacity.

Another benefit worth pointing out is the lesser IOPS. With the benefits of 64-bit addressing, it generates only 75% fewer IOPS compared to Exchange 2003 on 32-bit. According to Radicati Group Study, “There will be more than 1.4 billion mailboxes in the year 2007 and that number will grow to 2.2 billion mailboxes in 2009, an average annual rate of 16%.” In another study they mentioned mailbox growth as below,

The above study justifies a move into an Exchange 2007 Hosting environment. Lets move on and see how Exchange 2007 has been improved in business continuity and backup.

In another study as per Meta Group Survey in 2003 “80% of organizations surveyed felt that access to e-mail was more important than the telephone…74% believed being without e-mail would present a greater hardship than losing telephone service.”

Exchange 2007 is full of “Business Continuity” features. Here is a glance,

1. Local Continuous Replication - Using a single server, after logs are committed it ships from the active storage group on one disk system over to a passive copy on a secondary disk system. These logs in secondary system becomes passive copy and can be further backed up using VSS aware backup application.
2. Cluster Continuous Replication - This is using two servers, and based on active/passive MSCS cluster technology. Node #1 is attached to the primary disk system, and after logs committed it ships to the disk (passive copy) attached to the Node#2
3. Standby Continuous Replication - SCR is based on two independent servers in two locations. Very much like CCR, if the first server fails, scripts can be run to switch over to the second server. Each server has its own disk system.
4. Single Copy Clusters (SCC) - This is the same OLD style clustering in Exchange 2003.

Significance of Archiving

Various compliance study estimated that majority of the organization’s intellectual property (IP) located in their email storage. Email is often requested in lawsuits and regulatory investigations. Hence the new regulations now mandate that emails are archived, protected against tampering and unauthorized access, and kept for a certain period, or until specific conditions are met. Here is a nice white paper on “Why organizations need to archive email”

Value additions may even become “Mission Critical”

Continuous research from Microsoft enabled the organization to reach its users beyond email (Outlook client). Some great examples are “Outlook Web Access” (provides browser-based access), “Outlook Mobile or Active-sync” (enabled PDA to connect back to organization Messaging Server) and “Outlook Voice Access” which allows you to listen to your emails from any phone. With unified messaging component and Office communications server, more people begin to telecommuting and eventually, these “value added services” are also become “Mission Critical” component.

Technorati : CCR, LCR, OCS, OVA, OWA, SCC, SCR, exchange_2007_hosting
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BURLINGTON, MA – November 27, 2007 – groupSPARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a leading private label Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of hosted services including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, announced today that it has been chosen by Microsoft Corp. to participate in its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for the next significant release of Microsoft’s customer relationship management solution Microsoft Dynamics CRM, code-named “Titan”. As a result, select groupSPARK reseller partners can receive early access to the application as a hosted solution.

With inclusion into Microsoft’s TAP program, groupSPARK will be the first providers of hosted software services to offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. groupSPARK will collaborate closely with the Microsoft development team, gain greater insight into the technology and provide valuable feedback helping to shape the release version of the product.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an intuitive customer relationship management application which helps companies grow their business, improve customer service and increase profitability. groupSPARK is adding Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to its hosted services offering which currently includes Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

The new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a software platform that is fully multi-tenant and highly scalable, and supports multiple languages and currencies. It delivers a highly productive, role-tailored user experience across a wide range of user interfaces, including Microsoft^® Office Outlook^®, Windows^® Internet Explorer^® and a broad range of mobile devices. The ability for customers to quickly utilize Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a hosted environment is also beneficial to groupSPARK private label resellers. They will be able to offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as a hosted service to their customers without requiring hardware dedicated to individual companies, thus, reducing cost, allowing flexibility and scalability in growth for their customers as well as significantly shortening their own sales cycle. In addition, this new service will expand resellers’ portfolios of private label hosted services and allow them to generate increased recurring revenue.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will also help customers dramatically increase productivity by allowing them to utilize or customize the provided Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 workflow templates. By better managing their customer relationships users will gain greater insight into their customers’ behaviors, improve customer service and increase revenue. Preconfigured templates for the manufacturing industry and the public sector are currently offered and additional templates will be made available in the coming months. Resellers will also have the ability to modify these templates to fit their customer’s needs thereby increasing the opportunity to generate additional revenue and greater customer retention.

“As the first to market hosted software services provider to offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, we are delighted to be able to make Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 available to a select group of industry partners as a hosted private label solution. This is a significant addition to their current offering of private label hosted services and gives them the opportunity to gain additional revenue,” stated Ravi Agarwal, chief executive officer of groupSPARK. “This new release also gives small and mid-size companies the ability to significantly grow their own businesses and enhance their customer relationships.”

To obtain additional information on groupSPARK’s partner program and to be considered for inclusion in groupSPARK’s early access program for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 please visit http://www.groupspark.com/Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM.htm.

About groupSPARK

Located in Burlington, Massachusetts, groupSPARK is a leading provider of hosted SaaS services including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services v3.0, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 making them available to be resold by partners. This completely private labeled service allows partners to expand upon their own product offerings and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

Its partners utilize groupSPARK’s turnkey private label platform to provide hosted services to their users in minutes. Partners are able to address scalability and uptime concerns by leveraging groupSPARK’s 100% uptime SLA, private label 24×7 U.S.-based support and proactive hardware and software monitoring capabilities.

This topic is more of interest to a hosting provider. However, I thought it would be a good idea to list some key points on service provisioning which helps you understand its relevance.

Big data centers for Exchange hosting environments are always complex, where system administrators are often responsible for managing a large number of servers. The outcome is, routine admin tasks become challenging across the large number of servers; for example, adding new users, updating directory entries, and provisioning application services across a large volume of servers are all manual administration tasks that do not scale easily.

Apart from that, customers demand strong service level agreements (SLAs) with increased uptime and availability, and the ability to monitor and administer their own services.

Service Provisioning - What does it require?

Service Provisioning the data center is important since you can automate routine administrative tasks; allow customers to manage their own resources, and reduce overall operation costs. So Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) combined with “Hosted Exchange Extension” (third party solutions) will support the concept of resellers. In other words, it can support the Hosting Company selling services to a reseller who resells services to a customer; who in turn have users - a sort of private label system.

Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) automates routine administrative service management tasks such as:

1. Adding new users.

2. Updating directory entries.

3. Provisioning applications and services.

Picture Source: Microsoft

Third party Hosted Exchange Extension solutions complement the MPS basic tasks with additional features and functionality such as:

• Delegated Administration - allows your customers to manage their own resources including databases, e-mail, payment and contact information. By enabling customers to self-provision their accounts, service providers can lower the number of service requests arriving at their call centers.
• Designing Service Plans - You can design service plans with an advanced wizard which eventually will be offered to your customers. It allows you to select features, currency, billing cycles, price, upgrade/downgrade items, and add-ons.
• Complete Billing - An advanced billing system is essential to take care of all your billing requirements.
• Service Selling - You may create several online stores quickly and easily. Each store offers currency selection and is fully dependent on service plans you configure.
• Automated Provisioning - As soon as the service is purchased and passed through billing, a subscription is created and automatically provisioned with the appropriate provider (e.g., MS Exchange).

In summary, substantial time is saved from automated provisioning. These freed resources can work on other value-added services. Human participation is reduced in these highly automated tasks which are repetitive and difficult, as a result precision is improved and human error is drastically mitigated.

Del.icio.us : Exchange_Hosting, MPS, Provisioning

Mobile messaging presents a variety of difficult challenges for corporate IT management:

• Mobile messaging use in the workplace is growing rapidly.
• Organizations support many different mobile platforms including BlackBerry®, Good™ Mobile Messaging, Windows Mobile® and more.
• A growing number of users employ mobile devices while at work, not just while on the road or otherwise away from the office.
• Mobile users are using a growing number of applications in addition to email.
• Mobile users tend to be higher profile and more demanding than the average email user.

These issues make mobile messaging management difficult, largely because organizations must add mobile capabilities to the already difficult tasks associated with managing conventional messaging systems, not to mention other applications.

This white paper discusses key trends in the mobile messaging space and the variety of challenges that organizations must satisfy for their growing base of mobile messaging users. This paper also identifies the significant benefits connected with working with USA.NET for a full messaging solution that includes both email hosting and mobile messaging hosting. With this combination, the IT staff and overall budget can now be focused on core components of the business.

Get the white paper now.

Start the New Year with a plan to reduce the IT costs and resources associated with managing your organization’s email system. Join our webinar Dec. 4, 2007 at 1 pm EST to learn how USA.NET can help you solve seven costly and time consuming problems that will impact your organization soon, if not already.

SPEAKERS:

Steve O’Brien, Sr. Director of Service Development, USA.NET
John Devenyns, Sr. Solutions Consultant, USA.NET

Date: Dec. 4, 2007
Time: 1:00 PM ET
12:00 PM CT
11:00 AM MT
10:00 AM PT

Register for this event

Start the New Year with a plan to reduce the IT costs and resources associated with managing your organization’s email system. Join our webinar Dec. 4, 2007 at 1 pm EST to learn how USA.NET can help you solve seven costly and time consuming problems that will impact your organization soon, if not already. Don’t miss this chance to find out how upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2007, mobile messaging advancements, increased security concerns and a growing number of regulatory compliance laws will affect your in-house email system and IT staff. We’ll discuss how email hosting will help you focus on projects that are strategic to your business and allow you to free up your budget, staff and infrastructure from the challenges of managing a complex in-house email system.

You’ll learn:

• What to consider when choosing between an in-house system and a hosting provider.
• The current trends in mobility, collaboration, unified messaging, application integration and email security that will affect your business.
• How a business of any size can gain the reliability and messaging infrastructure of a Fortune 50 enterprise.
• The challenges and IT drain of continually upgrading, managing and patching your messaging system to keep your business connected and in sync 24×7.
• How to select an email provider that will help your business grow.

Register for this event!

If you start looking around at Exchange Hosting offerings, everyone takes prides in their great features, industry experience, etc… In this post, I expect you to understand what you should be expecting as a baseline and at minimum in the bundle.

Lots of free goodies are now “standard” when they sell hosted mailboxes such as Spam/anti-virus protection, license for Activesync/outlook, 30-day money back guarantee, instant activation, flexible contracts, etc. Hosters should also provide full backups, shared calendar/contacts and outlook anywhere. These are somewhat necessary features to start with.

Come to the pricing - hosters will have a few plans according to single user or multi-user scenario and the price is fixed based on mailbox capacity. Usually it starts from 200Mb to few GBs. A slight difference if its a multi user plan, as the charge is based on a combination of the no. of users plus the required total mailbox capacity for these users (for example, if you take a 5 user plan with the storage of 2.5GB, then each user will have a 500 MB mailbox capacity).

How about some other value additions?

Nowadays, having a mobile device is not a value addition. It has become part of our daily usage. That brings me to services like Blackberry and Windows Mobile Devices. Both offers push mail, device security, flexible device administration etc.. Hence its users choose one of them.

Firewall - though the exchange servers are shared and located at the service provider, users will still need to bother unless hosters protect with an appropriate firewall. Make sure they have this implemented industry standard equipment.

Setup fees & customer support - a one time setup fee is common across all providers. Since mail is a mission critical application, don’t forget the fact that customer support is important and 24/7 support by different means (phone, email, live chat, remote admin etc) is essential.

Last but not the least, get a written paper about uptime (most of them offer 99% uptime, the more 9s the better the uptime).