Law Technology

Exchange Server without the server

By Abraham

Microsoft Exchange Server is the Microsoft software that works behind the scenes to manage your firm’s email flow, and stores all your email in server mailboxes.  This is what makes the goal of near-universal access to your email a practical possibility.  Using Exchange Server, you can access your email, tasks, and calendars through Microsoft Outlook, or in a browser through Exchange’s Outlook Web Access, or on your smart phone using ActiveSync.  Exchange has become nearly ubiquitous in the small-to-medium sized firm, but there’s one problem that has held it back from being widely used among the solo or very small offices: it requires pricey server equipment and robust internet access.  But there is another way.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use Exchange Server and all its features, but leave the task of owning and operating the equipment to someone else?  Well, for a while now, a variety of “someone else”s have been moving to provide that service, and now the biggest someone of all has entered the market: Microsoft itself.

The basic idea behind any of these service offerings is pretty simple.  For a modest monthly fee, a third party will allow you to use their Exchange server to host your email accounts.  All you have to own is your domain name, e.g. the “whatever.com” you want your email addresses to be suffixed by.  All the rest - all the server-related work - is handled by the service provider.  The best part is, all the things you use on a day-to-day basis - your Outlook, your smartphone - they work exactly the same way they would if you had your own in-house email server.  You don’t lose any features or functionality at all.

Currently, even an office of just a couple of people is probably still better off getting their own Small Business Server and running their own Exchange server in-house.  But with the price of newer versions of Small Business Server going up, that equation may change somewhat.  And for the very small firms or the solo practitioner for whom running their own server is impractical, hosted Exchange services provide a convenient and much more feature-rich alternative to using the crummy email services you get free from your ISP.

Full post as published by Ross Ipsa Loquitur on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).