Microsoft rebrands FrontBridge service with Exchange name

Seven months after purchasing e-mail hygiene service provider FrontBridge, Microsoft this week repackaged the capabilities of the service under the name Exchange Hosted Services.

Seven months after purchasing e-mail hygiene service provider FrontBridge, Microsoft this week repackaged the capabilities of the service under the name Exchange Hosted Services.

Microsoft plans to add the services to its growing list of capabilities offered under the software-as-a-service model. The services with work with corporate deployments of Exchange, as well as, Exchange run in a hosted model. It is intended to be a complement to on-premise e-mail hygiene software such as Windows Defender and Antigen for Exchange.

Exchange Hosted Services has four distinct offerings: Filtering, Encryption, Continuity and Archive.

Filtering offers real-time threat prevention, anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities, and content and policy enforcement controls. The Continuity option includes backup and rapid recovery features and a repository that mirrors the past 30-days of e-mail activity. Archive offers customized reporting for compliance and an indexed and searchable archive, while Encryption provides policy-encryption at the gateway.

Microsoft plans to make the services available to volume licensing customers on April 1 and update the service with new features and functionality every three months.

“We plan to have a set of features to release timed with the release of Exchange 12,” says Filo D’Souza, group program manager for Exchange Hosted Services. “This will be the 6.x series of releases that will add such features as calendar and contacts to our Continuity and Archive services and to add more language support.”

Filtering will be priced at $1.75 per user, per month; Archiving at $17.25 per user, per month with an unlimited retention period and 3.6 gigabytes of storage; Continuity at $2.50 per user, per month; and Encryption at $1.90 per user, per month.

Microsoft plans to make these services available through volume licensing contracts and service providers.

Microsoft is offering a free 30-day trial of Exchange Hosted Filtering.