And speaking of these, as I did last Friday, Microsoft has an entry on that side (the positive side) of the ledger as well. They have announced the general release of their Hosted Exchange and Sharepoint online services this week, providing you with exactly the sort of alternatives you should be looking at to running internal bloatware like the new SBS or EBS servers.
Microsoft Online Services has gone from beta to release, offering completely hosted versions of their popular Exchange and Sharepoint products, as well as Office Live Meeting (for web-based conferencing) and Dynamics (Customer Relationship Management software). A host of ancillary services for Exchange are offered as well, from anti-virus and spam scanning to archiving.
Exchange itself is offered starting at $10 per user per month, which is double that of Google Apps Premier Edition (which includes Gmail), but considerably less than you probably pay in total to host Exchange on premises. It's competetive with existing hosted Exchange solutions, which have been offered by third-party service providers for several years now. Sharepoint is offered for $7 per user per month, which may or may not be a good value to you depending on whether or not you have found a successful process model that uses Sharepoint.
You can also get those, and the additional Exchange services, bundled for $15 per user per month, which is right in line with most existing Exchange hosts and provides much of the same functionality.
The reasons you might select Microsoft to provide this service for you are several. One, if you haven't already explored it but think the idea is appealing, presumably having the Redmond software giant hosting its own software might boost your confidence in the matter. Two, even if you don't like the concept so much, the fact that Microsoft itself is cannabalizing its existing Exchange market should tell you something about the direction the software industry will be going with services of this sort. That's right... they're going to be going online for the most part. For all that detractors of the idea hem and haw over the supposedly ephemeral nature of hosting providers, they haven't put much consideration into the concept that traditional software may be just as ephemeral... you may stop seeing Exchange released as a viable stand alone product, some day. Not soon, no doubt, and no doubt you will always be able to purchase it for your premises in some form or another (even as you could probably, for enough of an outlay, set yourself up with a really fine mainframe system today) because there will always be certain circumstances that require it, but on the whole, Software as a Service is an idea whose time has come. You're on board for the next paradigm shift in general computing.
Like the others, this will result in some upheaval, have some growing pains, but will generally reduce your costs and improve your efficiency over time. But the good news is that the kinks are already out of e-mail hosting, and this is a bandwagon you can jump on safely today. Whether you use Microsoft or not, if you need Exchange, stop thinking about a new server and a fresh copy and client licenses for Exchange 2007, and start thinking "hosted solution."
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