* Mailbag: outsourced messaging
I received quite a few of responses to my recent article on messaging outsourcing. Here’s a sampling of what I received, revealing the wide range of opinions on this subject.
* “We have two distinct e-mail user groups: internal employees and contracted agents. We use Lotus for the employees and host it ourselves. We have outsourced the agent e-mail, and they all use Outlook clients to access iPlanet mail [and Webmail]. All of our e-mail [is] routed through the outsourced servers. This basically provides us with a line of defense against spam, as it is filtered at the managed service provider before it ever makes it to our mail servers. This also ensures our agents have access to e-mail even if the home office mail servers should encounter a problem.”
* “If a hosting company were to offer low rates for Domino or Exchange hosting, what would the performance be? These client/server connections require much more bandwidth than SMTP, and what would the associated costs be to accommodate this? Often a pretty blue sky is painted by the salesman selling these outsourced services, and when the deal is signed, the service is nowhere near the level end users currently experience with a dedicated staff.”
* “Because my messaging system is in-house, I control the data. I know it is backed up and I can access it as I see fit. I don’t have to rely on some other company to do what they say they will do. I don’t have to worry that the messaging company might go out of business. If I outsourced our messaging, costs would go up, risk would go up. It is an obvious choice for me to keep it in-house.”
* “I started using… hosted Exchange 2003 services for my company’s messaging about two months ago and couldn’t be happier. My small business enjoys all the premium, productivity-enhancing services of a Fortune 500 corporation at only a few hundred dollars per month, with no need for any in-house technical resources. The service is as reliable as dial-tone.”
* “Outsourcing is a viable solution for many; especially if the companies are using e-mail in its most simplistic way. Once you get beyond people manually answering e-mail, outsourcing gets trickier.”
Many thanks to everyone who provided their comments.
