Intermedia White Paper Sample

While a hosted Exchange solution doesn’t offer the complex (and expensive) third party customization often implemented for large enterprises by consultants or in-house developers, the reality is that most smaller organizations don’t need—or want— more functionality than what comes right out of the Exchange box. And for those companies that do want more than those out-of-the-box applications, some hosted Exchange providers offer easy integration with an entire ecosystem of Microsoft products that includes mobility, encryption, archiving, backup and recovery, document management, and anti-spam/anti-virus, among others.

An example of such integration is the popular Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), which allows employees to communicate in real time using instant messaging, voice, and video chat. Smart “presence capabilities” built into OCS identify the best application for users to reach each other at any given moment. The product also unifies that communication in a secure, easy-to-search archive that is fully integrated with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, significantly boosting employee collaboration-and overall productivity-as a result.

Installing and configuring OCS is a complex process, however, and integrating it with an in-house Exchange Server can be a nightmare for anyone lacking the technical expertise necessary to do it right. A hosted Exchange provider can allow non-technical administrators to add OCS and integrate it with e-mail-with just the click of a mouse.