External IT

Messaging is a mission-critical application for your business and delivering a feature-rich messaging service is essential today. The challenges you face include maintaining uptime and reliability, making sure you meet complex regulatory requirements, insuring against the proliferation of viruses and spam, and the need to fully support the range of new smart phone devices.

Just as important is making it possible for your people to orchestrate all of their communications in a way that works, and works well.

Our platform of choice: Microsoft Exchange

Our mail platform of choice is Microsoft Exchange with Outlook. This is the industry standard and it’s built on top of a fully-featured and robust Microsoft Exchange platform.

We can either serve up a dedicated Exchange environment, let you tap into a more economical multi-tenant server farm, or use Microsoft Online and leverage their capabilities.

In this way we provide our clients with enterprise-level availability, reliability and features that fully meet the needs of the most demanding corporate email and messaging requirements.

Microsoft Exchange Servers reside securely within our External IT Data Centers. We operate the most current Microsoft Exchange platform using a back-end/front-end server topology.

Multi-tenant Exchange basic features

Here are the basic parameters of multi-tenant Exchange:

Dedicated vs. multi-tenant

Customers with 100 employees or less generally select our multi-tenant Exchange services. Companies with 100 employees or more are generally happiest supporting their workforce with a dedicated Exchange environment. This is only a rule of thumb. Your company's particular requirements will determine how you should best be served.

If you're an IT Director, start practicing taking a bow.

Groupware/collaborative features

Our Exchange services are configured to take advantage of all groupware features, including public folders, distribution lists, group scheduling, and resource sharing.

You can have multiple domain names, unlimited distribution lists and personal email aliases pointing to individual mailboxes. Exchange settings are easily administered using the OS33 Portal.

Mailboxes as large as you like

Every department has different mailbox needs. For that matter, people within departments often have special requirements. External IT gives you a range of options running from, essentially, small to limitless. If anyone outside your company falls outside those parameters, they would be a first.

We can set up your system so that each user receives a warning message whenever their box is close to full. It can also remind people to remove or archive their data. If your company would like put a global email limitation strategy in place, we can assist with this, too.

We do everything short of waving an airport security wand over everything that goes in
or out.

Spam and virus filtering

All External IT hosted Exchange email solutions feature Spam and Virus Filtering with Google Postini, the industry-leading standard. To make sure that viruses are only spread elsewhere, Postini stops them before they enter your network. Every web request is scanned in real-time instead of relying on static URL lists.

Postini also blocks malware before it reaches the network, and eliminates spyware back-channel communications. Content-based policies for inbound and outbound traffic (including pre-defined lexicons for social security and credit card numbers) can be created. External IT gives you the ability to create user, company and industry-specific black and white lists, in-depth reporting, and flexible policy definitions.

Outgoing mail and attachments are filtered and scanned as well. As scanned messages enter the External IT cloud, we scan them again with our redundant internal antivirus systems.

Smart phone, PDA and handheld synchronization

It’s all here. Your staff can send and receive email, open attachments, access their contacts, calendars, task lists and perform other functions from most any Internet-connected device. We do this with integrated BlackBerry Enterprise Synchronization and Windows ActiveSync Synchronization.

Even your
email has
everything
short of
a personal
security
guard.

OWA

External IT provides users with a Web-based interface to access their hosted mailbox. This interface is provided via Outlook Web Access, which has been designed to deliver comprehensive Outlook functionality.

Advanced email compliance

External IT archiving is an effective way to keep pace with the ever-growing regulatory and legal requirements being placed on electronic communication systems. It helps you to meet full regulatory compliance, and is easily auditable.

Every email passing through the network is copied, then stored in a security-enhanced online message repository. Once in the archive, emails can be accessed through a Web-based interface.