Getting Ahead with a Hosted Email Solution

getting ahead with a hosted email solution

email
Email hosting is one of the most valuable and important resource these days, which operates email servers. There is an increase in the demand for email services because of the large number of people sending as well as receiving emails daily. Getting a hosted email solution is seen to be an important and attractive option to many companies. This is because it is one of the ways of getting new customers.

Email hosting means that the hosting company performs all the email functions for its clients. Such functions include basic functions such as sending and receiving email messages as well as complex functions such as global searching and database processing. Once a company agrees to provide a hosted email solution to its clients, it must also agree to maintain the privacy as well as the security of the client’s email accounts. The servers on which the email accounts of the clients are stored need to be reliable.

According to PCWorld, hosted email solutions provide you with extra features for your email, which are going to give your business a great boost. Such features can include IMAP support, which ensures that you can download offline email client. In addition, you have the chance of getting additional cloud storage for your email messages and get support for you custom email addresses. With email hosting services, you have access to collaboration tools that will integrate with email.

Email hosting offers premium email, which is usually at a cost compared to the free webmail or email that is advertisement supported. These services are offered at low costs. Small and medium sized companies require hosted email solutions to help them get ahead in their business. It is possible for a business to get email hosting solutions that are specific to their needs to make sure that the solutions work effectively.

Small businesses are advised to give their businesses a chance to grow before paying for any hosted email solution. This ensures that they get to pay for the email hosting services once they have several employees and are in need of the different types of features such as collaboration tools and shared calendars, which come with email hosting. This is because transition from one email hosting solution to another can be hard once your business experiences rapid growth. Contact us for more information on email hosting and to get the email hosting solutions that will suit your business best.

What Does the End of the Ballmer Era Mean for Microsoft Exchange?

what does the end of the ballmer era mean for microsoft exchange
steve-ballmer

Love him, hate him, or fear him, there is no denying that Microsoft co-founder and CEO Steve Ballmer is one of the industry’s true larger-than-life personalities. Reactions to the news that Ballmer is to retire within the next year have varied greatly, from “worst CEO ever” to reflections on his “classy exit.” The one certainty of the situation, however, is that Microsoft is due for drastic changes. What impact will the departure have on Microsoft Exchange and enterprise email?

Office 365 is an important part of Microsoft’s future strategies. The platform faces competition from many other providers with enterprise productivity capabilities – one of the most important of which is email. What we will see in Microsoft’s future will undoubtedly be an acceleration of its transition to cloud services and move away from the Window’s bound mindset. The argument has been made that Ballmer’s reign was marked by the unwillingness to accept that the company needed to move beyond Windows.

However, Microsoft must cover a lot of ground if it is get past the “lock in” of its once ubiquitous operating system. Office 365 reflects this fact: despite being cloud-based, its roots in the proprietary license software model show very clearly. Most of its applications need a major retrofit for the cloud-based environment in which access from any device and data interoperability rule.

Rather than waiting for Microsoft to catch up, organizations have more Exchange alternatives than ever for their 21st century email needs. Platforms such as the open-source Zafara were built with web-access and platform independence in mind. Contact us to learn more about systems with all of the capabilities of exchange that also happen to be way ahead of the curve in giving businesses the agility that they need in the modern age.

A hosted email solution with five star reliability and collaboration for less money

a hosted email solution with five star reliability and collaboration for less money
zarafa-schema

If we polled business owners as to what they thought the three most critical factors determining their success was there’s a good chance that the top three would be: reliability, collaboration, and low cost.

Achieving those three critical elements in a hosted email solution for your business should be considered a tremendous win for your company. The truth is that many business owners may not spend the necessary time and resources into really researching the best possible option. Microsoft Exchange is often thought of as the “go to” choice here purely for its name and recognition. Further investigation, however, does show that another option exists that could provide all the wonderful familiarity and usability of Microsoft Outlook with even better reliability and collaboration at just about half the costs. Introduce yourself to Zarafa.

Firstly, Zarafa can offer increased reliability with the full utilization of a Linux server, which saves your email and collaboration data to a MySQL database for added security. Collaboration is another strong suit of Zarafa, whereas it enables full Outlook sharing, including email, calendar, and contacts. It is also compatible with any mobile device.

The true strength in having Zarafa up and running for your business, however, is in its open source platform. Because it is open-source, the costs are significantly lower than those of its competitors. In some cases they are as little as 50% of the costs of some proprietary packages. It is also fully licensed under the Alfero GPLv3 software license.

Overall, it is the peanut-butter and jelly like combination of providing open, compatible, and enterprise level collaboration with Linux server reliability and all at a lower cost that makes Zarafa a real alternative to Microsoft Exchange in the eyes of its customers and partners.

“AE Technology Group” is a Managed IT and Cloud Hosting Solution Provider headquartered in Rockville Centre, NY. We specialize in offering enterprise class services to small and medium sized businesses including: Managed IT Services, Business IT Support, Cloud computing, Disaster Recovery, Email, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Hardware as a Service (HaaS), Hosting Services, and VoIP. Please contact us today for more information. We would love to hear from you!

Why Microsoft Exchange No Longer Has a Lock on Business Email

why microsoft exchange no longer has a lock on business email
exchange-zarafa-email

One interesting thing about Microsoft’s recent communications regarding its public beta of Office 2013 is that the emphasis has been entirely on the client-side and cloud-based aspects. To learn anything more about the new Microsoft Exchange server requires more digging.

This is a sign of how Microsoft is shifting focus, and though it is keeping and adapting most of its legacy office programs, it is starting to recognize that its models are becoming less viable in the face of Microsoft Exchange alternative providers.

Organizations Are Losing Fear of Hosted and Cloud-Based Solutions

Email has been one of the prime vectors of malicious attack, and in fact the combination of “Microsoft Outlook + VBScript” used to be almost synonymous with basic hacking. Companies have been forced to stay guarded when it comes to email content as it contains the core of all internal communications and is also a powerful resource for attackers. This has been enough to justify the overhead associated with storage, licensing, and upkeep of email systems.

However, things have changed in recent years. Enterprise organizations are willing to trust their email exchange to hosted/cloud-based third parties, finding that security is often more than adequate and that the ability to leverage web access and mobility creates returns in productivity that more than justify the risks of giving up control.

Competitors Have Established Viability

Microsoft Exchange market share has dropped accordingly. Gmail as a business solution may have not been a widely-embraced idea when Google first launched its services, but nowadays email as part of Google Apps for Business has become the go to solution for countless successful organizations.

In addition, open source exchange alternatives such as Zarafa have allowed businesses to build an entirely Exchange-compatible email stack on top of a Linux-based solution. This allows them to leverage the advantages of local control yet also sidestep massive ongoing licensing costs and easily implement mobile and web-based access.

If you are evaluating your long term email strategies and considering migration, contact a trusted Exchange alternative provider.

What alternative email solution is better than Microsoft Exchange?

Microsoft Exchange and its associated Outlook client have been the face of enterprise communications for many years and are pretty much synonymous with the idea of work email. That does not mean, however, that there are not open source alternatives. There is a slate of clients/email servers that replicate the functions of Microsoft’s email solutions and not only have transparent code but plug into Linux server backends. One of the most well-known is Zarafa.

Zarafa released its email client/server technology as open source in 2008. Its distinguishing feature is that it is offered as a full-fledged, transparent replacement for Exchange, giving all its benefits as well as some additional features not available on the proprietary system:

Similarities

Zarafa has maintained an almost identical look and feel compared to Outlook, which is good news for any organization that decides to switch over as users can easily adjust. It not only is familiar in layout but carries similar features such as the address book, calendar, and public folders to which Outlook users have become accustomed. It also provides connectivity with Outlook by means of a plugin. Microsoft uses the proprietary Messaging API (MAPI) for communication between Exchange and Outlook. Zafara has implemented its own version (Mapi4Linux) for compatibility. Like Exchange it can also perform authentication through LDAP and Active Directory.

Differences

Linux is the platform of choice for Zafara, as you would expect, and it plugs into a MySQL database for added security. In addition to the difference in OS, the email client for Zafara is an AJAX-based web-app as opposed to being a stand-alone application like Outlook, giving it high accessibility as well as ease of use from mobile devices. As with all open-source solutions, it is cheaper than Exchange to license but not entirely free, as it comes in Standard, Professional, and Enterprise editions at different price points.