Most small and mid-sized businesses are using email as a primary communication method with customers, and vendors. But these company's are missing out on important features like; Remote access to email, shared contacts and calendar.

By upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, you can significantly raise your team's efficiency and productivity. Basically, Exchange is a computer server that stores your company's email, calendars, address books and files centrally, so they are available 24x7 and can be shared among your team, if you wish. It is the messaging system of choice for most Fortune 500 corporations.

Email, collaboration and scheduling tools have become critical factors to the success of any business. Unfortunately, small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) often lack a large IT budget or in-house team to implement and maintain the sophisticated messaging software they need. Yet SMBs need this critical toolset in order to succeed in the marketplace.

WE HAVE A BETTER SOLUTION

Microsoft Exchange Server is used by the majority of large corporations for their email, calendars, contacts and files. The Exchange server powers the full collaboration functions of Microsoft Outlook, such as group calendars, contacts and file-sharing. We provide the latest version of this as a hosted service.

SMBs can subscribe to this on-demand service for a low monthly fee - instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars upfront for expensive servers and software licenses, hiring specialist IT staff to install and maintain the system and being responsible for a 24x7 infrastructure. We let you focus on your core business.

Hosted Microsoft Exchange means that we provide all hardware and software, then run and maintain it for you in a tier-1 datacenter. You pay a low monthly fee, and can access your email using Outlook(r) or Entourage(r) on your desktop, Outlook Web Access (OWA) in any Web browser, or wirelessly from a device like the BlackBerry or Treo.

• More than a quarter of SMBs believe that sales would be impacted after only 1 hour without email.
• A third of major in-house email outages leave staff without email for more than 24 hours.
• 35 per cent of email outages come as a result of server failure.

Email is now an essential business tool, so downtime is a serious problem. This is why companies are increasingly turning to 'hosted' Microsoft Exchange. Here are four compelling reasons:

ENTERPRISE-CLASS TECHNOLOGY AND UPTIME

Very few companies have in-house the qualified staff or enterprise-grade Exchange infrastructure to prevent downtime. In fact, around 70 per cent of businesses suffer downtime of some kind each year, which conservatively costs an average of $42,000 per hour, according to Gartner Research.

With redundant power supplies, cooling and Internet connectivity, plus clustered servers and a SAN for storage, datacenters providing hosted Exchange solutions guarantee an outstanding 99.9 per cent email uptime.

Hosted Exchange technicians are also focused on keeping specific servers running 24x7, rather than working on a range IT hardware and software. As a result, they can guarantee the reliability your company deserves.

EASY AND COST-EFFECTIVE MOBILE EMAIL

Running separate email and wireless email servers can be an expensive nightmare, as they are often in different locations and require skilled teams to keep them online. Our hosted Exchange datacenter also runs BlackBerry and GoodLink servers, so getting hosted Exchange email on a BlackBerry or Treo is simple. Just 'switch on' the service and it works. There's no tricky configuration, no expensive hardware or software to buy (like BlackBerry Enterprise Server), and no maintenance needed.

CONTINUOUS PROTECTION

15,000 new viruses and security threats were discovered last year alone. Even so, with overstretched staff and resources, in-house IT teams with even the best intentions often fall behind on back-ups or updating anti-spam and anti-virus software.

With hosted Exchange, this is never a problem. Back-ups are performed on a regular and scheduled basis, with the latest anti-spam and anti-virus updates constantly applied across all servers. Given today's huge array of IT security threats, you can outsource Exchange just to have confidence that you are shielded from the crippling loss of your entire email system.

Hosted Microsoft Exchange from us will give you affordable business email, with instant BlackBerry and Treo access, total protection against security threats, and guaranteed 99.9% uptime.