Trusted Office Solutions
Email has become perhaps the most pervasive business communications tool today. To enhance its efficiency and productivity, users are now asking for access to rich messaging capabilities, such as shared calendars, address books and attachments, to be available wherever they are and on any device.
It is important to balance the functionality required by employees want with the costs and risks of providing it. .
We integrate Microsoft® Office 365 as part of its suite of communications services. This latest release of Microsoft™s messaging and productivity server offers advanced functionality to address the needs of even the most demanding and technology-savvy users. It provides anywhere, anytime access to a rich messaging environment on a desktop PC, mobile device or remotely over the Web.
We specialize in helping organizations to deploy, upgrade or migrate to Microsoft Exchange Server using structured, repeatable services in a cost effective and risk-free way. We use a set of best practices and procedures developed through years of experience deploying Microsoft technology for clients.
Features of Microsoft Office 365
Office 365 is an e-mail-based collaborative communications server designed to inter operate with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA Webmail) and various mobile devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile handhelds. Unlike regular POP3 email Exchange Server accounts include integrated collaborative messaging features that extend e-mail to include scheduling, contact management, folder sharing, and task management functionality.
Business-Class Messaging
Coupled with Microsoft Outlook, Office 365 provides valuable messaging features that go beyond simple e-mail that allow business users to take control of their inbox.
Personal archive
each user can now have two mailboxes, a primary mailbox and an archive mailbox. By using an archive mailbox, users can keep their primary mailboxes uncluttered. They’re free to browse their archive mailbox at will, and items can be automatically moved from their primary mailbox to their archive mailbox using retention policies.
- Deliver Broadband Internet Access.
- Leased Line Replacement-eliminate costly telecom costs.
- Contact management, event and calendar management, resource scheduling and administration, task management and shared folders.
- Delegate access to allow others to check designated components like e-mail, tasks lists and calendars.
- Server and client-side rules and spam filtering to manage the flow of incoming messages.
- Multi-colored flagging to mark messages for follow-up, prioritization, searching and categorization.
- Recovery of sent messages
- Ability to delete and replace an unread message
- Out-of-office automatic reply
Public Folders
Public folders are a shared resource, available offline and online, for instantaneous storage of digital content and Communications. Any user with access privileges can retrieve and contribute information from a public folder while working in Outlook.Rather than e-mailing file attachments back and forth, they can be stored in a common location for sharing and discussion.
Shared Calendars
Office 365 includes rich features for personal, group, and resource scheduling that integrates with e-mail, Contacts, and tasks. Users can share their calendar information with others and view multiple calendars simultaneously to Send meeting requests for shared open times. Recipients can decline or propose a different time, or accept and have the Meeting automatically entered in their calendars. Schedules for shared resources like conference rooms and projectors may also be incorporated.
Shared Contacts
Contacts in the company directory (Global Address List or GAL) are centrally maintained for sharing throughout the organization and can be downloaded to Outlook and synchronized for access from Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook Mobile Access(OMA). Distribution lists also can be centrally shared and maintained to facilitate communication to groups such as departments or customer lists.
Shared Task Management
A task list provides the ability to create and assign tasks and can be integrated with e-mail notification and scheduling for basic project management and personal time management. Users can track progress as a task moves from active to complete to overdue, while managing status through various criteria like the person responsible and the category.
Anytime, Anywhere Access
In addition to Outlook, Office 365 enables a large number of clients for mailbox connectivity,including web browsers through OWA (Outlook Web Access) and Windows-mobile devices through OMA (Outlook Mobile Access),Providing flexibility and productivity for information workers regardless of location.
Legal hold
Over the last several years, it has become increasingly more common for an organizations email messages to be subpoenaed as part of the litigation process. The problem is that email is dynamic in nature. Messages are constantly being sent, received, and deleted. Likewise, messages in the archives are often set to expire after a specific length of time. All of these factors have made it difficult to comply with litigation-related message retention requirements.
Office 365 offers a new legal hold feature. This feature allows you to preserve the contents of an Exchange mailbox. Users can still use their mailbox in the usual manner, but copies of all items are retained, even if they delete them or if archived content would otherwise have expired.
Multi mailbox search
A complementary feature to legal hold is the new multi mailbox search feature. This feature makes it a lot easier for organizations to perform E-discovery. As the name implies, multi mailbox search allows a designated person to perform organization-level searches across users mailboxes. The search interface is designed to allow administrators to search for multiple keywords or phrases simultaneously.
Exchange Control Panel
The Exchange Control Panel is a new management tool built into Exchange 2010. While the Exchange Control Panel isnt designed to take the place of the Exchange Management Console or the Exchange Management Shell, it is definitely a welcome addition. The Exchange Control Panel is integrated into OWA. It allows users to perform a few basic self-service tasks, such as changing their contact information. For administrators, the Exchange Control Panel provides a way of performing some of the more common management tasks remotely using a Web interface.
Database availability groups
Office 365 provides several high availability features, such as Cluster Continuous Replication. Office 365 takes things a step further with database availability groups. Database availability groups allow you to designate multiple servers to host copies of individual databases. In the event of a failure, Exchange can automatically recover. Databases are no longer server specific, so you are free to mix and match the database replicas that are hosted on each mailbox server.
Database-level failover
In previous Exchange Server cluster implementations, a failure required an entire cluster node to fail over. This meant that if a server was hosting multiple databases, and the disks associated with a single database were to fail, the entire server would have to fail over which would be disruptive to users whose mailboxes werent even stored on the failed disks. In contrast, Office 365 supports database-level fail over. That way, if a failure affects only a single database, that database can fail over without disrupting the other databases on the server.
Role-based access control
Office 365 uses a new access control model called role-based access control. Now, administrators can perform delegation based on the role that the delegate will be performing. This means that rather than guessing which permissions the delegate will need, the administrator can simply tell Exchange which tasks the delegate will be performing.
