Like so many of you out there, I upgraded my Apple device to iOS 5 recently, and with that I found that I could get a free email account in the iCloud, an @me.com email address. My immediate response was to go “heck yeah!” and sign up for it. I did, added it to my other devices, and only then did I stop to think for a moment about what I did. That made five, yes, that’s right, FIVE email accounts that my phone would check every so many minutes to interrupt my day with yet another notification that I must check to see what someone sent me. That’s now FIVE email accounts I have to worry about filtering for spam, and securing with unique usernames and passwords, and that I will have to search through when, six months after reading an email and remembering only vaguely what it was about, need to find it again. Continue reading It’s Time to Stop the Madness

Back in May of 2011, the Exchange Team Blog announced that Exchange 2010 SP2 would be coming in the second half of 2011. Now that we are firmly within that second half, SP2 should be just around the corner, and now’s the time for you to start getting ready for the inevitable testing and pre-deployment work that will come with this service pack release. What’s that, you say? Testing? Pre-deployment work? This isn’t just a Windows Update deployed patch? Hardly! Any service pack to any operating system or server is a major event, and the deployment of this service pack will be a major undertaking for every company running Exchange 2010, from the single server installs to the largest of organisations.

Continue reading Get ready for Exchange 2010 SP2

You’d have to have spent the last two years of your professional career living under a rock to have not come across “the cloud”. The cloud – this; the cloud – that; the cloud, the cloud, the cloud… Cloud computing promises to be the next sea change in information technology, as more and more Somethings as a Service (*aaS) hit the market, with every player from Microsoft and Google all the way down to JoeBob’s Hosting trying to get in on the action.

Email services look to be the most common, some of the easiest to move to the cloud, and certainly of the most interest to readers of this blog. My colleagues Jeff Orloff and Paul Mah have both written some great articles around this topic already. Today, I want to talk about cloud based email services from a different point of view; that of the email admin who thinks the cloud will make his or her job go away.

Continue reading Inside Every Cloud Is a Silver Lining

One of the most common applications to move to the cloud is email. Quite frankly, most small and medium sized businesses choose to let a cloud provider host their email because:

• Email services are always up and running
• Email can be accessed from anywhere
• It is scalable – you can increase or decrease as needed
• It is affordable (you only pay for what you use)
• It frees up resources (IT staff) for other projects. Continue reading Cloud Based Email, Best Practices for Before You Move

You must have heard about Office 365 by now, the newly launched cloud service by Microsoft that offers Exchange Online and other Microsoft-hosted services such as SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office Web Apps.  Before being dismayed however, Exchange administrators may want to first check out my arguments as to Why Office 365 is good for Exchange Administrators. In addition, those who have yet to explore Office 365 may want to take some time to read my earlier article on TheEmailAdmin titled A Closer Look at Exchange in Microsoft’s Office 365. Continue reading Using Office 365 Plan P with your Company’s Domain Name

When you don’t understand something that your job requires you to know, the most logical thing to do is research the topic and learn as much as you can about it. For many people who find security as part of their job description, learning as you go is the only option available. Yet despite the fact that there is so much information readily available to us, misconceptions regarding email security still confuse many professionals tasked with maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of email services. Continue reading Misconceptions About Email Security

Microsoft’s newly launched Office 365 offers powerful, intuitive controls for businesses looking to deploy a cloud-hosted collaboration and messaging solution.  I was able to get my own trial account activated in just 10 minutes, faster than any hosted Exchange providers that I’m aware of.  In addition, the presence of a free 30-day trial means that businesses and individuals can experiment with – or even deploy – various components of the service without having to part with a single cent. Continue reading A Closer Look at Exchange in Microsoft’s Office 365

Developments in cloud based computing have shown quite a bit of excitement and promise, especially when it comes to small to medium sized businesses. Those who evangelize the cloud will often cite the many benefits of moving to a cloud based email service. The litany of favorable reasons to examine moving email services off site that are oft quoted fall into line with the reasons used to move to any new technology:

• Ease of scalability
• Ease of software updates
• Email access anywhere
• Better disaster recovery
• Ease of implementation
• And of course, reduced costs

So when a vendor, or even someone in your own organization, throw these at management looking to save money and increase productivity then it seems like the question moves from why should we move to the cloud? to why has it taken us so long to move our email to the cloud?

Is it really that easy?

Continue reading 4 Considerations for Cloud Based Email

With another round of issues facing users of Microsoft’s Exchange Online service the launch of the Business Professional Online Services replacement, Office 365, is starting to face questions by consumers who are starting to think that Microsoft’s cloud based services may not have much of a silver lining.

Exchange Online is a hosted messaging solution, like Google’s Gmail for businesses, and is based on the same technologies that run the ever popular Exchange server. However as this is a hosted solution, the business does not need to dedicate the same resources towards messaging as they would if they were running their own email servers on-site. Since messages are stored in the cloud, Exchange Online users have “From virtually-anywhere” access to e-mail. Also touted by Microsoft’s website is:

• Improved email security
• Enhanced operations efficiency for a company’s IT staff
• 25-gigabyte mailbox storage size for the standard license

Most importantly, users who have become reliant on Microsoft Outlook and its tools can find the move to hosted email seamless unlike the issues that arise when using Outlook with other hosted email services.

Continue reading Is Microsoft Exchange Online Only Half-Baked?

Common wisdom is that there are two sides to every story, and this no doubt holds true in the case of two cloud-related issues recently addressed by David Chernicoff over at the Five Nines: The Next Gen Datacenter blog on ZDNet.com. He relates two stories in his recent column having to do with cloud services.

One was a first-hand experience he had with data loss and a hosted Exchange provider, the other was about a client of his who selected an accounting software vendor which subsequently went out of business, rendering their software unusable.

Continue reading Every Cloud Can Have a Silver Lining