• 1. London, UK
  • 2. New York, NY
  • 3. Sydney, Australia
  • 4. Melbourne, Australia
  • 5. Moscow, Russia
  • 6. Singapore
  • 7. Paris, France
  • 8. Chicago, IL
  • 9. Hong Kong
  • 10. Houston, TX

Thursday, April 12, 2007

 

Exchange Hosted Services is not hosted Exchange

Posted by Bharat Suneja at 8:25 AM
Like many folks out there, I believed - wrongly so, that Exchange Hosted Services is hosted Exchange, and competes with Microsoft/Exchange's model of selling Exchange Server software licenses.

Thanks to Paul Englis, PM, UC Services, for the clarification - EHS offerings include Exchange Hosted Filtering - an anti-spam/anti-virus filtering service, Exchange Hosted Archive - an outsourced mail archiving service for message retention, Exchange Hosted Continuity - which allows users to access their last 30 days' email over the web and send/receive new mail - to reduce impact of a mail server outage on users, and Exchange Hosted Encryption - which offers policy-based message encryption. These services complement your (in-house/on-premise) Exchange deployments, not replace them.

Microsoft does pitch hosted Exchange (as in hosted mailboxes) through its partners, and given the general tone of the hosted Exchange/Exchange Hosted Services message, one cannot be blamed for thinking Microsoft is hosting Exchange. For instance, take a look at the pricing/licensing page for Exchange Hosted Services.

On the above page, before you get to the pricing for Exchange Hosted Services - a Microsoft offering, the company pitches Exchange Hosted E-mail - provided by its hosting partners.

Regardless of who does the actual hosting - Microsoft itself, or its partners - it is about giving customers a choice - on-premise/in-house, or hosted.

A third alternative, and one not offered by Microsoft, is managed services - the infrastructure can be on-premise/in-house, but managed by a managed services provider (MSP), which promises the best of both worlds - if you're convinced enough.

For many organizations, hosted Exchange makes sense - whether it does for you or not depends on your evaluation criteria, cost being a major one. (It's a hot-button issue for many Exchange folks, and a topic for another post... - Bharat)

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