Learn more about Hosted Exchange Server Technology

As the person chartered with making email (arguably the most critical, widely-used application in any company) work continuously while meeting user demands and keeping costs contained, you face a real dilemma. How do you offer the tools needed to keep pace and do it with little or no staff, budget or time?

Consider Cobweb Hosted Exchange. You can have a flexible, enterprise-class solution to address your worker productivity and information sharing requirements. Your end users gain all the features and functionality of Exchange, while your technical specifications are met:

Rapid deployment
Timely hosted exchange server upgrades and security patches
Microsoft license management and compliance
Enterprise-class data centre for optimal security and performance
Service level guarantees
Zero up-front capital investment
Low, predictable costs

So, consider Cobweb’s Hosted Microsoft Exchange and enjoy a little operational freedom, without sacrificing the performance and functionality you require:

Data Security

The delivery of the Cobweb Hosted Exchange service is controlled by our ISO27001 Information Security Management policies and procedures. The multi-tenanted security features of the Active Directory within Microsoft Windows Server and Hosted Exchange Server ensure that customer mailboxes are secured with permissions and groups for their organisation only. No other customer has permissions or can see or access any other customer’s data.

The network security at the data centre is fronted by multiple resilient firewalls. Security procedures involve advanced monitoring of network traffic, router loading and application behaviour. Our state-of-the-art data centres are managed on a 24/7 basis by a dedicated security team to ensure maximum reliability, system redundancy and high fault tolerance.

Customer definable strong password policies can be configured within the web-based “Control Panel” Self Care Administration Portal. All MAPI, POP3 and IMAP4 connections use 1024-bit SSL, with SMTP transmitted using TLS for maximum security

Data Backup

Customer data within the Cobweb Hosted Exchange server service is backed up on a daily, weekly and monthly basis for the purpose of service restoration only; ensuring you always have an up to date copy of any business critical data. Data backup includes:

A full backup taken once a week, and incremental backups are taken every other day
VSS Snapshot backups taken of Exchange databases on an at least hourly basis
Backup tapes rotated on a “Grandfather, Father, Son” basis
Our data retention policy is to retain data for 7 years, including secure offsite access
The Deleted Item Cache is configured to retain data for 14 days to allow users to recover deleted items themselves
Deleted mailboxes are retained in the Exchange database for 31 days

Mobile Access via BlackBerry Enterprise

The Managed BlackBerry Enterprise service, based on RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.x provides users of the Cobweb Hosted Exchange service with the following functionality:

Wireless over-the-air device configuration
Wireless IT Policies can be instantly pushed to BlackBerry devices, enabling quick change passwords, the locking of devices or the wiping of device data
Complete, two-way wireless synchronisation of email, calendar, address book, tasks and memo pad
Remote control of email settings allows wireless configuration of out of office replies, email filters, auto-signatures directly from BlackBerry devices
Global Address List (GAL) Lookups
Further information is available in the Managed Enterprise BlackBerry Service Description

Compliance with Email Archival

With email becoming a central part of any compliance strategy; businesses require both a backup environment as well as a high availability production environment to achieve email and data compliance. With Cobweb’s journal archiving, this service option offers the necessary functionality where industry, commercial or regulatory requirements dictate the long term retention of emails by ensuring a copy of all emails sent and received by an organisation are stored in a retrievable archive.

Outlook or no Outlook – installing the local client

With our services you have a choice of whether you use a thin or thick client. These take the form of Microsoft Outlook 2007, installed locally on each computer that you wish to connect to email with or Outlook Web Access (OWA) using a web browser.

Outlook Web Access: OWA for Exchange 2007 provides users with a rich experience, including most features of the full Microsoft Outlook client. For example, you are able to manage your email folders, rules, set out of office messages, manage registered mobile devices and create your own email distribution lists.

As a web application, there are no patches to install or services to maintain so support is straightforward. As a web service it is available from anywhere, and provides users with quick access to their email – whether they use the full Outlook client or not.

Microsoft Outlook 2007: The full Microsoft Outlook client is more feature rich and allows additional collaborative features, for example the ability to link to SharePoint document stores, download POP3 or other IMAP mail accounts and use shared calendars.

One of its best features allows users to run in ‘cached mode’ which creates an offline copy of all email and calendars so that – with the exception of sending and receiving email - you are able to use your mailbox as usual without a connection to the Internet. This is particularly useful when using a laptop or other device with intermittent access to a network as the user experience is almost identical to a fully connected one.