What Does Hosted Exchange Mean to Small Businesses?

Once again, I heard a colleague complaining about having issues accessing his e-mail while he was doing extra work from home. He couldn’t call his IT person as it was late in the night and most of the input he required was in his Outlook software – on his faulty computer. Have you ever encountered such issue?

As a business decision maker in a small business, you want your employees to have the necessary IT tools to allow them to perform well. My advice to this unlucky colleague was to ask for his company to move to Hosted Exchange 2010 – with a Hosted solution, he would have been able to finish his project that night simply by using another computer.

Challenges a business owner may face when using an in-house Exchange solution

From the small business owner’s point of view, installing and managing his own exchange server can be expensive: he has to hire an IT person (or assign the IT-related task to someone else, thereby lowering the quality of service that will be provided) and then he has to budget for acquiring software licenses as well as buying high-end servers. As if that wasn’t enough, after approximately three years he’ll have to upgrade everything and reinvest again. Moreover, as technology is evolving, users (the sales team for example) would require access to their collaboration tools from other devices such as their smartphones or other computers. While that would help attaining best sales results, the small business owner would have to hire a specialized service provider for implementing that feature, this means additional cost to bear.

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What does Hosted Exchange mean to you?

What if, as a small business owner, you could find a solution where all the techie things would be done for you, while keeping your budget requirements low and foreseeable? As a bonus, you can even get your employees to access your collaboration tools from anywhere and everywhere and from any device – forget about that failing computer that prevented you from finishing a late-night catch-up project. Wouldn’t it make your business efficiency higher? You can have a Hosted Exchange 2010 solution that deploys all the features that you need without the technical headache. Do you remember that project that my colleague couldn’t finish late at night? With a Hosted Exchange solution, my colleague could have used another computer, resumed his work and if it was an issue with his mailbox, he could have called an excellent support team to get the problem fixed asap. He’d be back on track in a matter of time. Finally, your employees can have secure access to the Exchange’s collaboration tools even when they are traveling, or visiting clients – they can even do it from any device: their laptop, a smartphone or a tablet- all with no additional cost.