Posted by Tony Rorai

In the current economic climate, IT Directors have to balance costs with the continuing march of technology more than ever. Prudent organizations know that standing still is the worst thing they can do, so the discussion becomes how to offload critical but non-strategic functions to free up resources and focus on core business priorities. The first of these functions that should be migrated to a hosting provider like NaviSite is Enterprise Email and Collaboration. Read more…

Posted by Jason Hollenberg

NaviSite engineers have noticed a recent trend in the IT industry to move toward tape-less backup solutions for cost and efficiency reasons. This tends to occur mostly within small organizations where tape backup equipment and managing costs have a higher impact than in larger corporations. IT administrators are forced to balance between backup solutions they can afford and what their backup needs actually are. Many administrators choose to ensure business critical data (email and files) is stored on redundant hardware such as RAID1 (mirrored) or RAID5 (striped with parity) or even automated copy jobs to another physical server and consider that data safe.

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Posted by Jason Hollenberg

For those who may not be familiar, Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging is an add-on option of the Exchange 2007 email server suite that bridges an IP-based PBX phone system with corporate email. This allows businesses to add exciting new features such as natively-supported voicemails into email; faxes into email; and Outlook Voice Access, i.e., verbal access to emails, calendar, and contacts via a telephone.

Microsoft’s recent foray into the telephony field signals a paradigm shift in how phones and email are viewed and supported. Unified messaging breaks the traditional barriers existing between various messaging systems – changing the way businesses communicate and collaborate. All types of messages are stored in a single system – eliminating the need to manage multiple messaging systems, and hence reducing the cost and complexities associated with a messaging environment. Read more…

Posted by Jason Hollenberg

At times MS Exchange engineers run into network issues with servers that have the DNS Server security update 953230 (MS08-037) applied where services like IAS, IPSEC, and ActiveSync AUTD (Always Up To Date) won’t start after a reboot. This is especially painful if the server is running IPSEC services (PPTP VPN) because the server runs in Block mode and blocks all inbound and outbound network connectivity to itself. Read more…

Posted by Jason Hollenberg

04-15-2009

No longer do MS Exchange users need to worry about what might happen should a worst-case natural disaster scenario occur. 

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 now includes Standby Continuous Replication (or SCR) – an exciting new feature that natively supports site resiliency for Exchange email data. A first in the Microsoft history, this feature  ensures that email data is replicated offsite to a standby server, which can be activated with a simple command to get users up and running with minimal downtime, even if the central data center where email data is normally stored goes offline.
Hypothetically, with a primary data center on the East coast of the United States and secondary data center located on the west coast, data can be replicated between the sites using SCR to ensure email stays accessible even if the primary site is lost. Furthermore, data replication can also be configured to delay transaction log processing for a preset amount of time (24 hours by default) – so that if the source email database at the primary data center experiences corruption, the backup copy won’t introduce the corrupted data into the backup database. Read more…

Posted by Patrick Songer

In the wake of Convergence 2009, there was one theme which resonated among the attendees – “I like Dynamics-CRM – but I don’t want to manage it – or its integration with Exchange”.

This is very understandable. No matter how easy Microsoft says it is to integrate the two products, no one wants to unnecessarily increase the complexity within their messaging environment – or add more integration points to their daily management tasks.  The good news for Dynamics CRM-Exchange fans is that both of these products are a natural fit for hosting services.  Read more…

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Online Signup for Customers for Quick, Flexible Messaging Solution

By Dixie Meyer, Product Manager-Messaging

NaviSite has been a messaging expert for over a decade – providing customers with the full flexibility and functionality of hosted messaging solutions in a secure, highly-available, and reliable environment, coupled with complete management and 24×7 monitoring. We take a step forward to help our customers enjoy the benefits of Hosted Microsoft Exchange in less time and money, and in line with their needs – with our online sign up functionality.

On June 23, 2008, NaviSite went live with online sign up for Hosted Exchange. The online delivery allows new customers to sign up for 1 – 200 mailboxes, and receive a fully functional messaging solution within 24 hours. Our customers will have the ability to purchase, provision, and manage their environment that is hosted by NaviSite. This online solution also includes additional services such as SharePoint, mobile messaging, and archiving services. Customers can sign up easily for this service at http://www.navisite.com/email-collaboration/hosted-exchange.php by paying with a credit card.

The online service allows customers to scale up or down the mailboxes to fit their specific requirements and budget. Earlier, by going through a traditional sales model, the customers had to sign up for a minimum of 10 mailboxes along with a 12 month contract. Now with the online solution, they can sign up for a single mailbox and can then scale up on a monthly basis based on their needs. This saves them from signing a 12- or a 24-month contract, and consequently, from unnecessary costs and inconveniences.

“With our online Hosted Exchange delivery, we offer a customized messaging solution to our customers that grows with their business needs”, said Gina Murphy, Vice President, Product Management. “Our competitive feature-set, per-mailbox pricing, and easy additions of new features ensures that organizations get maximum return on their messaging investment.”

If you have any questions or need more information on our online Hosted Exchange solution or our other messaging solutions, feel free to contact the author of this article at dmeyer@navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is designed to deliver increased protection for your business and give anywhere access for your employees, while being operationally efficient to deploy, manage and maintain. Should you upgrade? Here are ten reasons for you to consider. For more information, peruse the detailed features listing and compare features across versions to help you discover all that Exchange Server 2007 has to offer.

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