Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007 Overview
This video demonstrates the features available with Exchange Server 2007. For more info, please visit: www.i-technosoft.com
outlook 2007 hosting with web access - Bookshelf
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Sharepoint 2007, the definitive guide Outlook Web Access is really a function of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007 together, since there are both server and client components. ... |
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About this book For any organization that wants to use Windows SharePoint Services to share and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents, this book shows administrators of all levels how to get up and running with this powerful and popular set of collaboration tools. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology in Office 2007 is an integrated set of services designed to connect people, information, processes, and systems both within and beyond the organizational firewall. "SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide" provides a detailed discussion of all Sharepoint features, applications and extensions. You learn how to build Sharepoint sites and site collections, along with ways to administrate, secure, and extend Sharepoint. This book teaches you how to: Get up to speed on SharePoint, including ways to create lists, libraries, discussions and surveys Integrate email, use web parts, track changes with RSS, and use database reporting services Customize your personal site, create sites and areas, and organize... |
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Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Exchange 2007 builds on the enhancements that Exchange 2003 introduced. Outlook Web Access just gets better with every version of Exchange. ... |
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About this book Microsoft Exchange Server provides a reliable messaging system that protects against spam and viruses and allows for access to e-mail, voicemail, and calendars from a variety devices and any location. Fully updated for the latest release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), this book offers a look at the significant improvements and exciting features of SP1 and explains how they will increase productivity. Youll walk through planning and design, installation, administration and management, maintenance, and more and also take a look at SP1s interoperability with Windows Server 2008, unified messaging, and enhancements in mobile e-mail security and management. |
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How to Cheat at Configuring Exchange Server 2007, Including Outlook Web, Mobile, and Voice Access In addition to hosting mailbox and public folder databases, ... )TJ The Outlook Mobile Access (OMA component is no longer a part of the Exchange Server ... |
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About this book The Perfect Reference for the Multitasked System Administratorslt;/b> The new version of Exchange is an ambitious overhaul that tries to balance the growing needs for performance, cost effectiveness, and security. for the average system administrator, it will present a difficult migration path from earlier versions and a vexing number of new features. How to Cheat will help you get Exchange Server 2007 up and running as quickly and safely as possible. Understand Exchange 2007 Prerequisites Review hardware and software requirements, Active Directory requirements, and more. Manage Recipient Filtering Create a custom MMC that contains the Exchange 2007 Recipients work center, which can be used, for example, by the helpdesk staff in your organization. Manage Outlook Anywhere Outlook Anywhere makes it possible for your end users to remotely access their mailboxes from the Internet using their full Outlook clients. Manage Outlook Web Access 2007 See how Outlook Web Access 2007 was completely... |
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Designing Storage for Exchange 2007 SP1 Regarding storage, these reasons make Exchange 2007 different from other ... only access mode for Microsoft Exchange, and users of Outlook Web Access will ... |
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Learn The Top Reasons Behind Poor Performance Availability With Microsoft Exchange
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As a professional, your clients know they can depend on you, and that you are there for them. But what happens when your technology is not there for you? Imagine you are on the phone with your client, telling him with great pride that at long last the document he has been waiting for is complete. While you chat, you attach the document to an email, send it off…and wait.
And wait. The email is no longer in your outbox and not in his inbox. You double-check the email address, and as the conversation becomes more and more awkward, you assure the client that the document really does exist and there really was an email sent. He is frustrated and you are at a complete loss. You decide you cannot wait any longer and switch to your personal Hotmail account to resend the document, which may or may not work immediately either. The result is wasted time, and if you switched email systems, you no longer have a cohesive record of the exchange.
Your system administrator will list a number of reasons why this incident happened, reasons that are beyond his control:
Junk mail folders
Anti-virus systems
User errors
Bottlenecks in the Internet that day
The real reasons may actually run much deeper, which means that this lost email will not be an isolated incident.
Lost Emails Mean Lost Opportunities
Consumers, accustomed to fast responses through websites, are quickly losing their tolerance for slow email responses. Evidence of this can be seen through a recent study by the WAV Group, who claims in the real estate industry, the first agent to respond to a customer email inquiry has a 73% chance of securing the business. The third to respond has virtually no chance.[1] Similarly, a study conducted by Vodafone released in December of 2008 estimates that lost opportunities due to failures to reply promptly to email messages cost businesses approximately $27,000 a year.[2]
What about email that goes missing entirely? This summer Apple Corp admitted to “losing” 10% of their MobileMe subscribers email between July 16th and July 18th.[3] A wave of blog posts have popped up as a result of this problem, with subscribers making claims of everything from lost job opportunities to lost business. We tend to view email as a low cost service, yet clearly when it fails, the costs can be startling. Apple would only remark that the problem was due to a “serious issue.” So what exactly does happen to these wayward email messages, delayed or lost?
The truth is there are dozens of potential reasons for email delivery delays and errors. With complex business-grade email systems, like Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes, there are many ways to build and configure a system. Some conform to the highest standards, while others barely meet the minimum requirements. With very little effort, you can determine whether your system had been adequately configured to suit your needs.
High Availability
As the name implies, High Availability is a system or network that is operational, or available, with a high degree of certainty and frequency. Ceryx, a Hosted Exchange provider, has made high-availability one of their primary focuses. With data centers in New York and Toronto, they have developed various technologies to replicate all messaging data in real-time and can fail over to the secondary facility in the event of catastrophe, allowing them to provide a real 100% SLA. While most providers tend to choose between high availability and high performance, all of Ceryx’s Microsoft Exchange deployments have been built to meet the highest standard of availability uptime without sacrificing performance.
One benchmark for testing an application provider’s performance is to log in to the webmail application and switch from the email view to the calendar view. Pick a folder with lots of messages in it and try sorting by “sender” and then clicking through the various pages. If there is a noticeable delay between these actions then your application provider’s performance may not be adequate.
A system’s availability is determined by numerous factors, each of which is examined below.
Architecture
Delays are often a result of high server RPC latency. RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, is how the Outlook client or the Outlook Web Access client (OWA) communicates with the Exchanger servers. RPC latency refers to the delay between initiating a request and its completion. RPC latency, as seen from the client, is a combination of networking latency and server latency. For good performance, the Microsoft guideline is 50ms average latency on the mailbox servers.[4] If mailbox server RPC latency averages much higher than this, the desktop user can experience “pop-ups” and warnings about problems with the connection from Outlook to the Exchange server. In the background, inbound and outbound email is not being processed as the system tries to catch up with other requests. Excessive “pop-ups” can become more than just an irritant; they can slow down a PC to the point of being unusable while Outlook tries to establish a connection to the server.
Ceryx aims to maintain an RPC rate 20ms or less. To do this, they have avoided the tendency of many providers who built their systems with less expensive virtualized environments and network attached storage. Instead Ceryx has invested in server clusters and high-end SANs (Storage Area Networks) at each of their data centers. SANs provide disk access performance, as well as redundancy through RAID configurations and fibre channel connectivity to the mailbox servers.
Many providers, in an effort to reduce costs, combine the Client Access Server and the Hub Transport Server (servers used to facilitate email delivery) on a single physical machine. This dual role can introduce latency at times of peak usage and throttle the ability to handle large outbound mail queues. Ceryx has engineered the Hub Transport role to ensure message queues can be quickly cleared even during periods of heavy load. By combining multiple, dedicated physical Hub Transport servers with the built-in round-robin load balancing capabilities of Exchange 2007, messages are quickly distributed to their destination on the internet. For legitimate email, hardware load balancing is used to ensure optimal performance of the critical Hub Transport role, which processes every single message that passes through the system.
Monitoring
Most hardware load balancing configurations can achieve both high performance and high availability; however, to sustain high performance and high availability – with a dynamic system like a Hosted Exchange deployment, where usage and load can vary dramatically – you must have an advanced monitoring system and the processes in place to scale the system in response to constantly changing variables.
Some providers install generic monitoring packages that tend to monitor every single metric available, whether the metrics provide meaningful insight to system performance or not. With Ceryx, every aspect of the environment from key metrics around SAN queue length through to standard metrics like CPU utilization and memory usage are closely monitored, trended, and understood. This information is used to develop highly accurate forecasting and scheduled system scaling. Any provider who has not invested in such monitoring tools and resources will just react to spikes in usage and load. Ceryx plans for them.
Breathing Room
Another major reason for email delays and poor performance can again be attributed to basic economics. A “store” is the unique databases for storing messaging data. With Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise, there is a limit of 50 stores per server, with a Microsoft recommended limit of 200 GB for each store. Some providers will try to maximize the number of customers they can support by pushing these limi ts. Ceryx does the opposite. Ceryx maintains a maximum of 50 GB per store – one quarter of the maximum – in order to deliver the best raw database performance and protect against data corruption, common with larger stores. With these hard restrictions in place, it’s difficult to imagine how some providers – who offer mailboxes up to 4GB – are able to run a sustainable business and maintain high performance and availability.
IOPS
Economics may also drive another cause of poor performance: IOPS, a measurement of the number of times data can be written and read to disk per second, can vary widely per system. With Microsoft Exchange, IOPS capacity is directly related to performance and a heavy user can use up to 1 IOPS under certain circumstances. Each disk has a maximum number of IOPS it can support, so a careful ratio of users per array of disks is essential to maintain decent performance.
Ceryx is careful to maintain a generous ratio of IOPS per user based on real-world metrics monitored from its large user base, taking into consideration peak activities times and not just daily averages.
Routing Issues
To be fair, email delays and errors may occur outside your environment. In the scenario where your colleague was eagerly sitting and waiting for an email to arrive, it may have got stuck somewhere “in the cloud” – somewhere in between both of your email environments.
On a pre-sales and support level, Ceryx has developed a number of troubleshooting tools to help identify potential routing issues. As with any application “hosted in the cloud,” bandwidth is an important consideration when trying to ensure a positive end-users experience. Microsoft Exchange, which consumes 3 KB of a client’s internet connection per active user, is no different. Ceryx has developed a tool that simulates a series of network connections to determine if the client has adequate bandwidth to support their user base. Through this exercise they have discovered that – with any client moving from an on-premise environment to a hosted environment – any increase in bandwidth required is partially offset by decommissioning and offloading SMTP traffic, external connections spam traffic and attacks.
Spam/Anti-Virus
Of course the most notorious place a message gets “stuck” or delayed is in a provider’s anti-virus and spam filtering system. Ceryx runs seven different anti-virus products in its environment to ensure system health and email hygiene. That level of protection could potentially cripple an ordinary system that wasn’t built for high performance; however, Ceryx has not only sized their solution with the performance hit associated with anti-virus scanning in mind, but also closely monitors its environment to ensure email delivery is never compromised by spam and anti-virus filtering.
Beware of any provider who either ignores this potential performance hit or, worse yet, removes backend anti-virus all together. Removing anti-virus may appear to be a good way to control costs, as high-end solutions can be very expensive, but removing them allows viruses in, and once in, are often hard to then find, never mind remove. Ceryx’s system scans incoming and outgoing messages as well as messages in the store on a scheduled basis. A regular scan of mailbox databases is just as important as gateway anti-virus to reduce the instance of catastrophic failure.
Mobility
The benefits and usability of the Ceryx architecture can be measured not only on the desktop level but for mobile users as well, who share the same highly optimized and redundant environment. Ceryx also maintains fully-replicated BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) in both its environments to maintain maximum mobility uptime as well. Forum Oilfield Services, out of Houston Texas, currently has 600 employees using the Ceryx Hosted Exchange solution, with almost 100 mobile users.
Beware of “Bargains”
Unfortunately the market is crowded with Hosted Exchange providers who are not as concerned about delivering a dependable and resilient solution as they are about keeping their costs low and selling high volumes of mailboxes. Providers that offer 3 or 4 GB mailboxes are ignoring the commonly held understanding that mailboxes of this size do not perform well and are highly susceptible to data corruption. That corruption is not limited to just the user in question, but can impact all users on that store, potentially even the entire server.
These providers can only offer mailboxes of this size at a bargain price if they compromise on some other expense – dedicated servers, SANs, anti-virus solutions or a fully redundant architecture. Of course the much greater expense is the lost productivity and opportunity that results from using a solution that was designed with the primary goal of meeting the lowest possible price point to compete with free solutions in the market, and not delivering Enterprise performance and availability.
Ask all potential vendors for the following:
Customer references
(Quiz the references about any down-time they may have experienced)
The SLA
Have a close look at the financial penalties if high availability is not maintained. Professional hosting providers, confident in their systems ability to maintain high availability, will include clearly worded conditions in their SLA around the exact fees that will be paid to a customer should they not maintain an acceptable level of up-time.
How Do You Measure Up?
A lost or delayed email could be viewed as a nuisance or as a warning. Purchasing decisions need to be fiscally responsible, but often, seemingly bargain solutions can have a devastating and costly effect in the long run.
So how does your system measure up? Using Ceryx as a control, measure the speed, versatility, and resilience of your system.
Ceryx
SLA: 100%
Latency: < 20 ms
GB / Store: 50 GB / Store
IOPS per User: High
Bandwidth Sizing Tools: Yes
Spam / Anti-Virus: Gateway + Mailbox Server, Integrated
Mobile Device Access: Redundant BlackBerry, ActiveSync
Ceryx customers share the belief that their data is their companies most valued asset. As the most used collaboration tool in business, an individual Microsoft Exchange account typically contains a blueprint of an employee’s tenure: their schedule, correspondence (and commitments), contacts, contracts and much more. Ceryx customers trust that this real-time journal is safe, available and always accessible.
Footnotes:
[1] The Wav Group: Gaining an Edge in Real Estate with Smartphones http://wavgroup.com
[2] The Open Press: http://www.theopenpress.com/index.php?a=press&id=42004
[3] Apple Support Forum: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1953
[4] Microsoft Exchange Team Blog: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/09/28/411674.aspx
[5] Microsoft TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738147.aspx
Microsoft Clouds Don’t Rain on Small Businesses – a Comprehensive Assessment of Microsoft Online Services
Microsoft Goes SAASy
Flashback
Used to being the unchallenged leader during the early days of information technology, Microsoft never had it as easy since the advent of the internet. No matter the hot new internet technology, Microsoft was forever caught napping. It was never the innovator and forever a laggard in terms of success. Google trounced it at search and online advertising, Yahoo at instant messaging and consumer mail, Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad were far better at blogging software, it never even appeared on the battle ground of social networking with MySpace and Facebook ruling the roost.
But there were certain markets, especially corporate markets, in which Microsoft continued at have a strangle-hold, which kept its cash registers clinking, and at a frantic pace at that. These were the PC OS market with its Windows series, MS Office for Office suites, and its prize cash cows – MS Exchange and MS Sharepoint for enterprise messaging and collaboration.
Now, the above mentioned software are essential for every enterprise, and 5 to 10 years back, Microsoft did undoubtedly offer the most robust solutions available. In those days, since every body was eyeing the juicy big business enterprise segment, with their thousands of users implementations and IT budgets bursting at the seams, it was for that audience these software were developed. So although Exchange and Sharepoint required dedicated servers, complicated implementations and dedicated IT to man and maintain the system, nobody really minded, because these mega enterprises had the money and staff to spare.
The Present
But there was a segment which minded it, the small to medium size business (SMB), segment which had neither the staff, nor resources, nor the inclination. Since not many alternatives were available, they either had to bear the burden, or do without these technologies altogether. But in recent times, things have started to change. In the past 3 years or so, a new approach has emerged, spurred on by technology improvements and increased bandwidth – the software as a service approach. And its primary market is the small to mid sized business segment.
In a recent SaaS survey conducted by Cutter Consortium, nearly three-quarters (72%) of the people who responded reported that they are using Web-based solutions to fill unmet needs. More than a quarter of the respondents (28%) are hoping that these solutions will cut their costs by 20%-30%.
It is true that there was some initial skepticism initially about the viability of SAAS solutions, in that it involves letting go of some control and allowing the organization’s critical data lie on a third party SAAS vendor’s servers. But the benefits of this approach have been so overwhelming, and due to providers like salesforce.com and HyperOffice providing SAAS solutions effectively over the years, that organizations across the board, from small to mega enterprises, have been converted.
Microsoft Plays Catchup
With the enterprise market saturated, Microsoft has also been eyeing the relatively untapped small to mid sized business market in the past few years. Considering the success of SAAS with this segment, Microsoft has introduced offered a succession of software offered as a service in recent times, under the Microsoft Office Live banner. But the real success story with this segment was “hosted Exchange” and “hosted Sharepoint” solutions offered by independent vendors; many of them certified Microsoft partners. First, a little refresher:
What is Hosted Exchange (and how it differs from Exchange Server)?
Every company needs dedicated company email for its employees, as well as some basic productivity solutions to lubricate everyday working (task management, calendars, address books). To cater to these universal needs, Microsoft developed Exchange Server whose major features consist of electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks. The front end client for Exchange through which employees access all this information is usually Outlook, but Exchange also supports mobile and web based access (called Outlook web access or OWA for short). But implementing Exchange is hardly easy, as it includes setting up a dedicated server, undertaking a complex Exchange implementation, in addition to additional anti spam and anti virus implementations for the security of the server. Also, dedicated staff needs to be hired to monitor the system and keep it running, and to manage a myriad of complexities that may arise, since Exchange is a vast solution.
Under hosted Exchange however, all aspects of implementation and maintenance of the Exchange implementation are outsourced to the servers of a specialized “hosted services” provider. Customers still get the most of the features of Exchange – dedicated email, shared calendars/contacts/tasks, and premium features like mobile and web access to information (typically at an extra cost). But unlike an in house implementation, where everybody accesses Exchange over the local network, in this case it is accessed over the internet. This approach is especially beneficial for small to medium businesses which are saved the huge costs of in house implementation and instead have to pay a reasonable monthly subscription.
What is Hosted Sharepoint (and how it differs from Sharepoint Server)?
Apart from basic email capabilities, companies also need the ability to manage the company’s information, stored in documents, and the ability for employees to work together on this information. This is what SharePoint, Microsoft’s browser-based collaboration and document management platform does. It can be used to host and create a company’s web site that includes shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications like to do lists, discussion boards, wikis and blogs. But Sharepoint’s power is coupled with its complexity. It’s implementation is no less cumbersome and costly than Exchange. Moreover, it is not end user friendly. Subject matter experts cannot share their knowledge directly; they always have to either go through IT intermediaries, or undergo specialized training which consumes time and diverts attention from competencies. Knowledge is not dispersed freely through the organization, but is choked by having to pass through the IT bottleneck.
As with hosted Exchange, under hosted Sharepoint, all aspects of a company’s Sharepoint implementation and management are outsourced to third party vendors. Customers can still access all of Sharepoint’s features over the internet, but for a reasonable monthly fee.
Microsoft Takes the Big Services Plunge
As long as the hosted market was not sizable, Microsoft was content selling Exchange and Sharepoint as software products, and let its partners and independent vendors do the hosting. But considering the bourgeoning of the SAAS market lately, and its future outlook, coupled with tough competition from “alternative” collaboration and messaging offerings like Google Apps, Gmail and HyperOffice, MS finally In Oct. 2007, Microsoft finally took the plunge when it announced hosted Sharepoint and Exchange for enterprises with more than 5,000 seats – titled Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online. In Feb 2008, it went one step further by opening these services to all organizations, irrespective of size.
The Hot News – Microsoft’s “Hosted Service Bundles”
Keeping with its recent rapid movement, on July 8, 2008, Microsoft made another announcement, introducing a novel, if not controversial strategy. In addition to offering its hosted services as single offerings, it announced that early in 2009, it would also offer them as “bundles”, a combination of services at a reduced total cost.
Microsoft has introduced two “bundles”, titled the Deskless Worker suite and Information Worker suite. The deskless worker suite is priced at just $3 per user per month, and will include Exchange Online services as well as read only access to Sharepoint Online services. This is supposedly targeted at workers who typically spend only a very small part of their day in front of the computer. The information worker suite is priced $15 per user per month and includes a full range of offerings including Exchange Online, Share Online and Live Meeting, Microsoft’s web conferencing software.
An Assessment
Great Solution?
At first view, it would seem that Microsoft has come out with a great offering. The entire range of Microsoft’s best of breed enterprise applications, rolled into one, available at a very affordable monthly fee. Exchange online for email, calendars, address books, task management and access over the web and mobile; Sharepoint Online for collaboration and customized portals for teams and partners; and LiveMeeting to conduct audio and video conferencing with multiple participants no matter where they are. All at the customers disposal, in a single offering, at an imminently reachable $15.
A good opportunity to validate the parts – as in they have the right idea messagin, project collaboration, document management, Outlook sharing, couple with online meetings.
Think Again
Whenever something seems so perfect, it always makes sense to bring ones guard up, and look closer. The first phrase to reconsider is – “rolled into one” or “all in one”. Does it mean that all of Microsoft’s great offerings have been integrated into a single, seamless solution, with all aspects communicating with each other? Or does it mean something else.
Well, it means something else. All in one refers more to “all in one pricing”. The services remain exactly as they were; only they will cost less when purchased jointly. Individually, Microsoft sells hosted Exchange Online for $10; SharePoint Online for $7.25; Office Communications Online for $2.50; and Office Live Meeting Online for $4.50. So a joint pricing of $15 means a saving of $ 9.50 per user per month.
Moreover, even the separate components of Microsoft’s new offerings are bare bones solutions, requiring implementation and configuration, before a workable solution is set up. This is effort most small to mid sized businesses are not equipped to make, nor do they want to make. Although the pricing of Microsoft’s bundles may be very tempting, a major reason companies go to “hosted service” providers in the first place is that in addition to hosting they also offer “managed services”. All aspects of configuration, integration and maintenance are their hassle. If all the components – Exchange, Sharepoint, LiveMeeting and Office Communications; are to be integrated into a single seamless solution, that will require massive implementation.
So, although Microsoft’s offering looks enticing from a distance, it is hardly the end to end, ready to use solution businesses are really looking for. Microsoft offers all pieces of the puzzle, but they remain separate pieces that don’t fit together. Even the measly priced Deskless worker suite has attracted a lot of flak. The verdict is that it caters to an imaginary class of worker who needs only read only access to company information. Although real life workers of this class don’t access the company’s information systems as much, they often interact with the system in critical ways. An example is a nurse who may need to keep the hospital’s drug stock updated.
Hosted Service Provider’s Perspective
With Microsoft jumping into the fray, and at very competitive prices at that, traditional providers (Microsoft Solution Providers) of Exchange and Sharepoint hosting are certainly feeling the heat. Setting up Microsoft infrastructure on their servers, and further selling it as a service offered them a steady and ongoing revenue stream. But Microsoft offering such services directly will certainly cut into their pockets as they can hardly hope to compete with Microsoft’s pricing.
Microsoft was well aware that the latest announcement would pinch hosted service partners bad, and not intending to cut them out of the picture completely, it made another announcement intended to keep them interested. Partners can resell Microsoft’s new hosted service offering and pocket a percentage of the ongoing revenue. Partners will receive 12 percent per user, per month, up front for a first-year contract, and 6 percent per user, per month, of the ongoing subscription fee. So in the first year, resellers of hosted services will receive 18 percent margins on the subscription value, and 6 percent for subsequent years. But in spite of this carrot, partners are still smarting, because reselling Microsoft services won’t be nearly as profitable as letting out on premise implementations.Â
Some Microsoft solution providers are worried that this puts them in the feast-or-famine mode of trying to find the next project to generate consulting revenue as opposed to recurring revenue streams associated with keeping Exhange and SharePoint servers running.
There is Hope
Although hosted service providers who provide bare bones hosted Microsoft products will feel the competition from Microsoft’s new offerings, but there barely are any vendors who do just that. A vital part of what these companies do has always been adding value by offering integration, consulting and management services on top of the basic Microsoft products they host for their customers. And this need for integration, management and consulting still remains because Microsoft will merely offer basic hosting of its products, while end customers need ready to use products, without the hassle of implementing and managing the application.
So, these companies can continue to do what they’ve been doing all along and still attract customers – host Exchange and Sharepoint on their servers, and build solutions on top of that and offer them to customers as services. Alternatively they can resell Microsoft’s hosted services by adding value added services on top of that, and attract a premium price. One example could be offering support for email on iPhone and Blackberry that stripped down hosted Exchange does not. Or a company could integrate all the components of Microsoft’s bundle – Sharepoint, Exchange, LiveMeeting and Office Communications, into a single seamless solution with a centralized console.
The Search for Truly “Complete” Solutions
Although with this announcement, Microsoft didn’t quite deliver what it seemed to offer, the need it sought to address is nonetheless very pertinent. The need for a truly end to end, integrated messaging, collaboration and web conferencing solution, with each component fitting seamlessly into the whole and communicating with every other component. Solutions which don’t require any hardware, downloads or maintenance and are ready to use from day one. Solutions which come at an affordable monthly subscription.
So, do end customers have to wait for a couple of years before somebody else takes up this challenge? The answer is a resounding “certainly not!”. Although Microsoft may make it seem like it was the first to serve this compelling need (not that it really did serve the need), it was for the precise reason of pressure from rival products that Microsoft took the “bundled hosting” plunge. Google for one offers many compelling alternatives to Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint with Google Apps, Google Pages, Gmail et all. But even Google’s star products are piece meal, and it hasn’t so far come up with a truly integrated end to end solution. Moreover, it doesn’t have a web conferencing solution at all, which would be vital in a totally complete solution.
But there is a another category of solution providers, who may not be as big as Google and Microsoft, or get that kind of frenzied airtime, but they have for years offered very compelling solutions to small and mid sized businesses. Many of these solutions would put the biggies to shame, and are in intimate touch with the real needs of the small to mid sized business segment. To present my case, I shall discuss the web based application HyperOffice. HyperOffice has been operating in the “Exchange and SharePoint Alternative” domain for years, and they’ve built their solution bottom up, based on experience. It would not be wrong to say, that they’ve been doing for years what Microsoft promised to do just now, and did not do even that.
Now to assess HyperOffice on the basis of the parameters we have defined for a truly end to end solution.
Exchange Features
HyperOffice includes business email, shared contact management, shared calendars and shared task management. It also includes Outlook integration and can be used to power the Outlook accounts of your employees as if Exchange were running in the background, only that its not. Users can access their accounts on their desktops using Outlook or online using any Mac or PC browser and all information is automatically kept in synch. Moreover users can also access and synch their accounts from mobile devices like iPhone, Blackberry etc.
Sharepoint Features
As an alternative to Sharepoint, HyperOffice includes a publisher tool which can be used to set up dedicated intranet and extranet workspaces for employees, departments, partners or clients. The publisher allows for deep customization of the workspaces according to user needs. Users can finely manage the appearance, layout, pages, interlinking of these workspaces. In addition they can choose from a range of collaboration tools to add to each workspace – document management, calendars, address books, to do lists, task management, forums, IM, polls etc.
HyperOffice also includes a rich online document management tool. It allows for easy online storage and organization of all file types and allows people to collaborate on documents using features like versioning, notifications, locking, overwrite protection etc.
Web Conferencing
Keeping with growing travel prices and increasing openness of companies to web conferencing as a mode of communication, HyperOffice has recently introduced HyperMeeting, its web conferencing tool. It is as robust as any web conferencing solution, with the ability to conference with upto 125 participants, file distribution, presentations, application and desktop sharing, whiteboard etc.
Integratedness
The best thing about a solution like HyperOffice is that all parts fit perfectly into the whole. This makes sense, because even in a business, all parts are forever interacting with each other, and so it should be with a collaboration solution. Consider the following scenario – A web conference needs to be set up. Since it is a meeting, invites need to be sent out to all the participants. So an automatic invitation tool will be involved. The invitation tool will need to talk to address books so that the right recipients are selected. Moreover, to ensure that participants don’t have clashing schedules, calendars will need to be compared. Before the meeting is undertaken some documents may need to be distributed to the participants, and collaborated on. So the document management tool would be involved. The conference may relate to an important milestone in a project. So the project management tool would be involved. This is only one situation in which one can envision different parts of the system having to interact with each other; there may be a myriad of other such situations. The synergies that are to be had in such a system are tremendous.
In HyperOffice, different parts of the system come together simply, logically and effectively. It’s no wonder that it’s been nominated for many awards under the “design” category. The solution allows users to set up workspaces for individuals with tools like email, personal document libraries, address books, calendars, to do lists, links, reminders etc. On the second level workspaces can be set up for groups with looks like document management and collaboration, shared calendars, shared address books, group tasks, web conferencing, forums, polls, chat etc. This is a great example of the coming together of messaging, collaboration and web conferencing features.
Moreover, HyperOffice includes a myriad of other features which can only come after years of experience working with clients. These are the ability to integrate the solution with Outlook, mobile access for devices like iPhone and Blackberry, and the ability to manage documents and drag and drop upload documents directly from the desktop.
Another great aspect from an administration point of view is the ability to manage everything from a central console. All aspects of collaboration are contained within HyperOffice and users don’t have to look in different directions and learn a myriad of software for different uses.
Tailored for SMBs
Big names like Microsoft and Google always eye the bigger customers of the range of around 5000 seats because of the juicer profits to be gotten from those clients. So both the products and the services offered around these products take shape with that segment in mind. Smaller companies like HyperOffice, however have been developed specifically for the small to mid sized business segment, and refined through years of experience. The onus is on developing ready to use products with easy “push button” functionality.
HyperOffice just needs a signup and can be set up almost instantly. It is an end-user’s tool, as just about anybody can get on the system and publish information or use the tools. No technical expertise is required to implement or use it. Moreover, they also offer free training and support services to assist companies along the way. If a customer chooses, they can easily scale down the solution, and choose only a subset of the tools offered based on its needs and comfort level, rather than the entire suite.
Conclusion
In conclusion, although Microsoft has opened its hosted solutions to all, they still remain suitable for organizations which are largish if not large. Vendors could also resell Microsoft’s bundles by throwing in integration and management services, but then they will ask for a premium price and the low price tags won’t remain. Frankly, even in their hosted avatar, Microsoft tools are still not suitable for small businesses because they never were developed for this segment, and the effect will always be of trying to squeeze a big foot in a small shoe.
Clearly, the lesson for growing organizations is that although Microsoft and other big names have rather belatedly gotten on the “Small to medium sized business” bandwagon, one has to cut through the hype, and look in all directions for the best solution. And more often than not, the most compelling solutions will come from elsewhere.
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