8 Reasons to Move to Hosted Exchange 2007

May 6th, 2009 by Andrew H.

If yours is like most organizations, a dependable e-mail service is of critical importance. Below are eight reasons to trust your e-mail to Exchange 2007 and to entrust your Exchange hosting needs to a managed hosting expert.

1. Availability

A small to medium-sized organization probably doesn’t have datacenters with redundant internet connections, power, and a dedicated 24/7 IT staff. Purchasing a hosted solution may be just what you need to ensure that your staff can access their e-mail when they need it.

2. Fault Tolerance

Exchange 2007 offers a plethora of features that make high availability a reality for many organizations. Continuous Cluster Replication (CCR) technology replaces the need to purchase an expensive shared storage device. With CCR data is replicated from the active node to the passive node in the cluster, ensuring there are two copies of the data instead of a single shared copy.

3. Scalability

As your organization grows, you may find yourself painted into a box with one or more of your IT systems. Due to its modularity, Exchange 2007 offers numerous solutions for scaling beyond the single server many organizations start with, including separating roles into multiple servers.

4. Built-in Antivirus

The Exchange 2007 Enterprise CAL allows the use of Forefront Security for Exchange. Forefront uses up to 5 different Antivirus engines for each message to ensure that viruses and worms can’t make it into your network.

5. Infrastructure Security

A new feature in Exchange 2007 is the Edge Transport Server, which allows you to place Exchange on a perimeter network that accepts inbound mail without accessing your domain. The rest of your network remains secure even if your externally facing mail server is compromised. The Edge Transport Server is also responsible for Antivirus and spam filtering, ensuring that unwanted mail never even makes it into the network.

6. Creating a Virtual Office

Outlook Web Access (OWA) is undeniably one of the most full-featured webmail clients on the market today. Exchange 2007 adds features that bring OWA closer to Outlook, the desktop mail client. Some of these features include a greatly enhanced search feature, the ability to open other mailboxes, and the ability to render many files (such as Excel and Word documents) for web viewing if the appropriate application is not installed on that computer. These features make it possible for your employees to work remotely.

7. Remote Access to Network Shares

This is a feature of OWA important enough to deserve its own mention. One of the more impressive new features in OWA is the ability to securely access remote network shares. This allows users to access their documents, shares, and files linked in e-mails directly through OWA without the need for a VPN.

This allows for a simple way for users to gain access to the files they need, when they need them.

8. Datacenter-level Resiliency

Using Standby Cluster Replication (SCR), it is possible to use Exchange in a disaster recovery plan that features geographically distributed servers. Logs are shipped from the Exchange mailbox servers to the SCR mailbox server, and the hub transport servers relay any messages that were not replicated before the active mailbox server went offline.