Easy to manage hosted Exchange

AppRiver recently introduced its outsourced Exchange service and gave me a walkthrough of the system last week.

The company’s Shoreline interface allows users to easily set up and manage an Exchange environment with only a minimum of knowledge about Exchange or Active Directory. For example, an organization can migrate its domain to AppRiver without having to manage the change in the MX record. Users can be provisioned very quickly, even allowing inexperienced users to have profiles built for them automatically so that they can easily configure their Outlook client. Users can receive more than the standard 200MB of storage by allowing the system administrator to purchase additional storage in one-gigabyte blocks and then allocate this storage to users however they see fit. Plus, since AppRiver’s primary business is messaging security, very robust anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities are part of the package that starts at $12.95 per user per month. Customers can go through AppRiver directly or any of its resellers to purchase the system.

Managed/hosted e-mail services can provide a number of benefits, particularly for smaller organizations. That’s because smaller organizations typically don’t have dedicated IT departments, and they experience much higher costs for all things messaging on a per user basis compared to their larger counterparts. For example, it takes about as much effort to manage a messaging security system for 10,000 users as it does for 100, so a large organization can afford to devote a full-time person to managing just this capability – for a small company, the cost of doing so would be prohibitive. Because a managed service provider can serve as a good surrogate for a dedicated IT staff, but charge its customers only for the tiny fraction of services that it provides just for them, a small company can use a service provider to reap the benefits of a dedicated IT staff without having to pay for it.

Services like AppRiver’s are definitely worth a look for smaller organizations that need robust messaging capabilities at a very comfortable per-seat price.