Taming the alpha mail

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If there's one thing every business uses these days, it's e-mail. Whether you're running a 5,000-strong multinational or a one-woman shop, e-mail long ago became the lifeblood of modern business.

Although it's critically important, however, the actual administration of e-mail -- getting it into your company, filtering it, distributing it, providing mobile access to it, archiving it, backing it up, undeleting it -- is an extremely time-consuming, bothersome process. And despite ever-improving applications to assist with many of these tasks, keeping e-mail running smoothly still requires more technical skills than many companies have, or want to dedicate to what is seen as a relatively basic business function.

Getting a third party to handle your e-mail is innately logical. After all, we all pay Australia Post to carry our physical mail; why should e-mail be any different?

Little wonder that managed e-mail services -- which offload the menial work involved in keeping a modern e-mail system running -- have won such strong approval. They have been particularly popular amongst small and medium businesses (SMBs), which would generally rather spend their time and money on business development and other, more strategic activities than on dealing with the minutiae of systems administration.

IDC estimates place the number of SMBs (companies with 499 or fewer employees) at more than 825,000, representing 59 percent of all workers in Australia. This suggests a significant opportunity for managed e-mail service providers, who have flooded the market with options. Although some offer to host Novell Groupwise or Lotus Notes, the lion's share of managed e-mail providers offer access to Microsoft Exchange, renting access to a large-scale instantiation of the application running within a beefy datacentre.

Customers rent e-mail inboxes from that Exchange server at a flat rate per mailbox per month; Bluewave, for example, resells access to WebCentral's managed e-mail services for AU$14.95 per mailbox per month. In return, the service provider takes care of ongoing management as well as ancillary tasks like e-mail filtering, archiving, provision of unified messaging, and more. The managed approach also improves governance by providing a centralised, completely auditable database of a company's e-mail communications.

"Generally, our users are white collar types," says Chris Collinge, director of TPP Internet, which recently jumped into the managed Exchange market. "They're typically businesses that have five to 10 employees, and quite often are geographically dispersed. Having a centralised Exchange server in the office would cause connectivity issues, but having a product like ours really suits our kind of customers."

Managed e-mail has become particularly relevant with the rise of the smartphone: any Exchange-compatible handset can be pointed to a managed e-mail server -- many of which now offer Research In Motion's Blackberry Enterprise Server as an option -- to allow for easy e-mail sending and receiving from the field. Mobile access is usually complemented by Web mail, ensuring that employees can get their communications from wherever in the world they happen to travel.

E-mail isn't the only feature available through managed Exchange services. For example, Exchange's calendaring features allow teams of people to view each others' schedules, make new appointments, and so on. Similar functionality is available for free through online services like Google Apps and ThinkFree, but integration with Exchange's messaging and other features make the managed services approach particularly appealing for many.

Getting a third party to handle your e-mail is innately logical. After all, we all pay Australia Post to carry our physical mail; why should e-mail be any different? Throw in the ability to retrieve your e-mail from wherever you happen to be, and you've got what a growing number of companies now see as a winning combination.