Microsoft Exchange is a powerful tool. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it offers all kinds of advantages over pop mail. It functions as a web based Mailbox that synchronizes with Outlook or Entourage on the mac.

· No backup of email data is necessary. By nature of the product, your email is saved both offsite and on your pc. The file synchronizes every time you are back online.

· All mail folders and information on all computers and phones/devices are perfectly synchronized.

· Calendar and Outlook information sharing with multiple view/edit rights available. This means an office manager can update multiple calendars which in turn, sync to the user’s IPhone or Blackberry

· Common Public Folders for shared calendars, contacts, tasks and notes.

· SpamLab Spam Filtering included with each Hosted Exchange account.

· Free Aliases

· Ease of management for both the end-users, and the onsite client-administrator

A hosted exchange account is generally between $14 and $20 per month depending if you’ve got additional fee services such as BES for the blackberry. Before a couple of years ago, you HAD to purchase an exchange server, Hardware and Software licenses. Some people still prefer to have their mail server onsite, and paying for 20 or more accounts monthly can get costly. But a server has maintenance and hidden costs as well. Not only is a server expensive to purchase and maintain, but you’ll need a second one if you want a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). How many people are you providing mailboxes for?

Hosted Servers are available as well, talk about that later. For now you simply need to ask yourself the following two questions. Is your Exchange Server Aging and have you priced out Exchange Server 2007 licensing, Server Hardware and Warranties?

Do you have 30 or less people with mailboxes in your office?

If the answer is yes to either of those, you should investigate AMT Hosted Exchange over Server replacement.

Happy Holidays all.

CA for All Mountain Technologies, Llc.

Solutions that Work for YOU!

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