Exchange My Mail Blog

Further Distinctions Include Earning TWO Microsoft Competencies

PRESS RELEASE

Albertson, NY, (May 27, 2008) - Exchange My Mail Inc. today announced it has attained Gold Certified Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program with competencies in Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, recognizing Exchange My Mail’s expertise in the technology marketplace. As a Gold Certified Partner, Exchange My Mail has demonstrated expertise with Microsoft technologies and proven ability to meet customers’ needs.

Exchange My Mail, Inc ®, provides hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Windows SharePoint services 3.0 to thousands of customers. Achieving Microsoft Gold certification further demonstrates our commitment to achieving highly available systems that our customers deserve and expect.
“Exchange My Mail is extremely excited to be among an elite group of Microsoft Gold Certified Partners; this achievement demonstrates our commitment to continue working closely with Microsoft..” says David Grantz, CIO at Exchange My Mail, Inc.
 

Competencies
As one of the requirements for attaining Gold Certified Partner status, Exchange My Mail had to declare a Microsoft Competency. Microsoft Competencies are designed to help differentiate a partner’s capabilities within specific Microsoft technologies. Each competency has a unique set of requirements and benefits, formulated to accurately represent the specific skills and services that partners bring to the technology industry.

• Advanced Infrastructure Solutions: The Advanced Infrastructure Solutions Competency is designed for partners with proven expertise in designing and/or implementing complex infrastructure solutions such as Hosted Microsoft Exchange. Because customers are increasingly seeking higher availability and uptime, more often they have been looking to work with partners that have the dedication, devotion and expertise to pass this kind of certification. Specializations within the competency are Active Directory and Identity Management, Exchange Migration and Deployment, Hosting Solutions, System Management and Storage Solutions.

• Networking Infrastructure Solutions: Microsoft Gold Certified Partners enrolled in the Networking Infrastructure Solutions Competency have proved their expertise in implementing technology solutions based on either the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Server operating system, with a particular focus on Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 and Windows Small Business Server 2003. These implementations may include crafting solutions that connect Windows-based servers, PC locations and the Internet; installing a server farm; or building a small-business Windows Server stand-alone solution that includes file and print capabilities.

The Microsoft Partner Program was launched in October 2003 and represents Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to the success of partners worldwide. The program offers a single, integrated partnering framework that recognizes partner expertise, rewards the total impact that partners have in the technology marketplace, and delivers more value to help partners’ businesses be successful.

For more information about Exchange My Mail products, visit: http://www.exchangemymail.com

About Exchange My Mail
Exchange My Mail offers hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, and Windows SharePoint services. Exchange My Mail Inc. is based out of Albertson, NY and operates in a secure Tier3 Data Center and Network Operation Center (NOC). This facility is fully N+1 redundant. Their Data Center achieved SAS 70 Type II compliance, assuring customers of their ability to fulfill HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for their IT infrastructure.

For more information, call +1.888.608.6245, email sales@exchangemymail.com , or visit www.ExchangeMyMail.com.

I recently found this great article by Darren Dahl on the Inc.com website about how companies and individuals can save money by outsourcing their IT needs.

He mentioned amongst other things outsourcing Hosted Microsoft Exchange and a bunch of other ways to save money by outsourcing your IT.

Read the Article Here

It used to be that you had to work a 9-5 type job and remain in the office for all hours, except, maybe, your lunch hour. Now, however, with wireless available all over the place and with PDA’s and cell phones that can do everything except make you lunch, many more office workers are choosing to get out of the office and to enjoy a bit of time in the sunshine and away from the stress in the office world. Studies find that it is beneficial for employees to be able to step away from the office situation for a bit, but how can they stay connected to the office should they need to have contact?

Hosted Exchange 2007 is a perfect way to keep your wandering employees in check with the rest of the company. When you choose a Hosted Exchange 2007 company that comes with wireless synchronization, you can help your employees to stay in touch with your company on a real-time basis. They can easily connect to their e-mail, get contact information, and even see calendars for your company, without having to miss a beat. Hosted exchange can keep everyone in check, easily.

We all know that Microsoft Exchange 2007 is an amazing program with unlimited benefits to companies, but we also know that it is expensive. Not anymore. With Hosted exchange server anyone can afford to use the program without having to worry about installing a server or paying for its upkeep! One of the latest things in Hosted exchange server is reselling.

Resellers have the great opportunity to not only use Microsoft Exchange 2007, but to help other people use it as well. We currently have two different programs available for those who are interested in reselling Microsoft Exchange, and each program will allow you the opportunity to make money and to be successful with it. When you resell Microsoft Exchange 2007, you are allowing businesses, probably those small ones in your area, to have access to a hosted exchange server, which will not only make their lives easier, but will allow them to compete in the big business world. If you’re not interested in reselling, but would like to use the program for yourself, you can certainly do that! You simply need to contact us and we’ll set up your computer with our hosted exchange server.

What do you do if you are working really late and suddenly your email isn’t working? If you’re like most people, you fidget with it for a bit, get really fed up, and attempt to throw your computer down the stairs. Having Microsoft Exchange 2007 can really help to get your business organized, but not if it’s not working and you have no one available to fix it!

One of the bet things about Hosted exchange 2007 is that users have access to highly trained technical experts who can help them no matter what time it is. If you are working at midnight and suddenly your internet goes down when you have Hosted exchange 2007, you can simply pick up the phone, call technical support and have someone help you through the problem. Having someone from technical support available who is not only willing, but able to help you through any internet problem at two a.m. is a definite plus to Hosted exchange 2007, and is one that you simply can’t beat. Unless, of course, you have enough money to hire your own tech and to pay him double (or triple) overtime whenever you have email issues.

Get more out of the day by synchronizing your Blackberry, email, calendars, contacts and Smart phone. There are countless wireless devices, and if you’re not careful, they can eat up a large portion of your time. Not only that, they can zap you of vital energy that you need to get the job done correctly. Luckily, having a hosted exchange 2007 server can help you set up a cost effective way to consolidate all of those so you can have an easy to access portal. All you need is an Internet connection. Hosted exchange 2007 is the perfect solution for both large and small businesses. In fact it is a good solution for personal use as well. Keep track of which emails were sent, what tasks and schedules were done and what is still on your list of “to do” things. A copy of all of the messages that you send is automatically sent to your sent folder. This makes it easy for you to keep up with what you’ve sent and what you still need to send. These can be viewed from your computer at work, home  or from your laptop on the go.  You’ll be able to log on and get all of your important information from anywhere in the world, granted you have an Internet connection.

Exchange My Mail has been working on improving it’s network, Cisco firewalls, and switches as well as adding all new Dell servers and a new EMC SAN for the release of Exchange 2007.

This new and improved network will continue to build on the strengths and quality of the Exchange My Mail brand name. Known for it’s outstanding customer service, and server uptime the release of our Hosted Exchange 2007 service will allow customers to benefit from the advanced features in the latest release of Microsoft Exchange.

Uptime and customer service are the primary goals for Exchange My Mail. Although we were not the first to lanuch Exchange 2007, we believe that we did the right thing by waiting for our competition to find the bugs and problems. “Let them be the guinea pigs” says David Grantz ( Chief Technology Officer ). “Our customers demand and deserve the high quality service they have come to expect from us. We were just not willing to let our customers be a “test bed” while the unexpected problems came to the surface. Now that we have seen the data, and the first few hot fixes have been released we are ready to enable this service for our customers.”

We are now excited to launch Microsoft Exchange 2007, and look forward to the increased benefits it has to offer. The new 64bit architecture will certainly help increase performance and capacity. The added benefits of Outlook 2007, and the use of server resources is also great news ( included free with Exchange My Mail service ).

We are hoping for a Launch date of Nov 15th, 2007 -

There are some real advantages to Exchange 2007. A few of the more popular Exchange 2007 benefits are in OWA and Outlook.

Outlook Web Access is almost an identical clone of the Outlook desktop interface. This makes using OWA much easier since the layout is so similar. Another new benefit of Exchange 2007 in OWA is WebReady Document viewing. Office documents in formats such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF can be accessed as e-mail attachments or through public folders to be displayed as HTML, even if Office is not installed on the PC. You will also be able to access things like “Out of Office” controls through OWA.

Outlook Auto Discover: Outlook 2007 combined with Exchange 2007 has the ability to configure Outlook profiles linked with Hosted Exchange automatically. Clients simply enter their user names and passwords and Outlook finds the local Exchange settings and creates the profile. Once the profiles are up and running.

Improved searching: Outlook will be able to find specific messages in large message stores much faster due to rewritten serch algorithms. This will save time when looking for a particular e-mail message within your entire mailbox.

ActiveSync has been dramatically improved within Microsoft Exchange 2007. Users will benefit from improved direct push to ensure messages are received on server connect. Also relating to ActiveSync with Exchange 2007, the ability to download long attachments without reloading the entire message. This is known as in-line message fetch. ActiveSync can now also wipe your device directly from OWA if it is stolen.

SharePoint 2007 integration. With integrated SharePoint 2007 hosting, your staff gets an instant intranet for documents, blogs, wikis and more, with access from any Web browser or directly from Outlook 2007.

Better performance. Superior clustering brings higher reliability and uptime. Entirely 64-bit hardware means more powerful processing and faster email delivery.

Mailbox Storage and Limits Many users are asking, why there are limits to the size of the mailbox and messages? There are a number of reasons for having these limitations, which include client performance and responsiveness, backup and recovery, uptime, maintenance, storage, bandwidth, and SLA agreements. It is important to us that we are able to anticipate the needs of our users to improve their overall experience in communicating with their associates and organizing their daily tasks.

Having large mailbox size limits can compromise security and our ability to meet our customer guarantees. Here are some of the vulnerabilities an Exchange Admin is faced with when allowing its users to have large mailboxes:

• Denial of Service Attacks - Without a message and mailbox size limit, a hacker (whether internal or external) can easily implement a denial of service attack by sending messages with large attachments, ultimately using all available resources on the Exchange servers, thereby causing system failure. Implementing message size limits (both internal and external) can reduce the likelihood of this risk.
• Capacity Planning - The lack of quota management effectively limits any type of future capacity planning (e.g. cannot predict future database growth). In particular, if you have an SLA that dictates a backup/restore window you may not be able to meet that goal, due to not being able to control the database size metric.
• Network Utilization - Since the users will have unlimited mailbox sizes, network utilization will increase between client and server if users utilize OSTs or cached mode Outlook clients.
• Single Instance Storage - Single Instance Storage ratios may continue to decrease if reactionary measures are used to combat the lack of quotas (e.g. continually moving mailboxes around the enterprise to head off low disk space, SLA attainment, etc).
• Cost Impact - Due to the growth that will likely ensue without a proper quota management implementation, organizations will find that the cost per mailbox will continue to increase over time. In addition, more than likely, additional costs will accrue due to poor management of the solution, in terms of not having proper SLA/OLAs, moving mailboxes to head off capacity disasters, and overloading servers from a performance and capacity standpoint (due to the aforementioned mailbox moves).
• Performance Impact - A lack of quota management will mean that eventually the storage subsystem will not be able to sustain the I/O throughput required. As you increase the mailbox sizes, the number of items will increase and for most users this will mean an increase in the number of items in the key folders (Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, etc); as the number of items increase, the I/O throughput per mailbox will increase (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=905803). In addition, since the amount of data increases, users may deploy desktop search programs, and when running in online mode, these search programs utilize Exchange server resources (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=905184).
  - Ross Smith www.msexchangeteam.com

The End User Experience
It will also affect your local storage. We recommend our users use their Exchange profiles in “Cached Exchange Mode.” When enabled, an offline copy of the mailbox is kept on the local machine called an OST file. This allows users to work offline. This file will always be somewhat larger then your actual mailbox size.

Here is what Microsoft has to say about large OST files:One factor that can contribute to reduced performance is a large OST file. If the user’s OST file grows too large (for example, larger than 1 GB), Outlook with Cached Exchange Mode performance degrades. To improve response time in Outlook, users should either reduce the size of their mailbox (for example, by archiving older files) or disable Cached Exchange Mode. To help prevent large OST files, you can set a limit on the mailbox size in Exchange Server. You might also choose to disable synchronizing shared non-mail folders or disable synchronizing users’ Public Folder Favorites if you previously enabled the option in your deployment of Cached Exchange Mode.

-Microsoft TechNet

Mailbox size isn’t the only inhibiting factor to consider. The number of items a mailbox has in any given folder can also inhibit the performance of an exchange system, mainly for the end user. Operations will take longer such as, opening, saving, etc. Outlook plug-ins working with these folders in the background can effect the overall responsiveness of the client. Use of limits can greatly improve and maintain performance. Allowing for our Administrators to better plan for scalability, and improve maintenance schedules. End user’s clients will be more responsive and save storage space on their local computers. Plus the overall cost of storage is kept to a minimum.

Alternatives: SharePoint:
We offer SharePoint services for collaboration and document storage. Instead of sending out mass emails to all your coworkers, make an announcement on the SharePoint homepage for everyone to see when they login. Store your documents at your SharePoint site instead of saving them as attachments. This makes your documents accessible from Windows Explorer, which allows you to save your documents straight to the site from any Microsoft Office application.

Archiving:
If you archive your mail, the emails are pulled offline and stored on your local computer in a PST file. You can pick a certain date and everything received passed that date will be stored to the PST file. You can even setup an Auto-Archive schedule. They are still accessible in Outlook and can be opened in any other Outlook profile you might have. Also backup your PST to Disk to ensure your data is kept safe.

For more information on Archiving please visit,
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/results.aspx?qu=Archive&av=ZOL110

Hosted Exchange 2003

Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2003 for Mission Critical Environments.

Most organizations are highly protective of their email system, as they should be. All research points to continuing dominance of email as the primary mode of business communications, making these systems mission-critical for most organizations. In other words, when email fails, business suffers – sometimes dramatically.

It’s no wonder that companies feel proprietary about their messaging systems, and are often loathe to outsource them:
the wrong choice of technology or provider can disrupt an organization for months, and is instantly visible to ALL members of an organization, from administrative assistants to CEOs and board members.

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