Unified Communications

To profit from the growing demand for rich messaging services more and more businesses today are in the market for hosted messaging solutions. IDC forecasts that in 2005 the number of hosted business e-mail mailboxes worldwide will surpass the number of in-house operated e-mail mailboxes for the first time. Driving much of this demand is the small and medium business (SMB) segment; organizations that operate anywhere from 2 to 250 PCs. Why? Surveys of SMBs indicate that outsourcing messaging services is particularly attractive because it eliminates much of the costs and resource requirements as well as offering a wider variety of rich e-mail solutions. The Microsoft® Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration enables service providers to roll out an enhanced hosted messaging offering that will appeal to SMBs. Using high-performance Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software, this pre-engineered solution provides tools, scripts, sample code, provisioning services, and best practices that service providers can use to efficiently deploy and operate hosted messaging services. Tested and supported by Microsoft, the Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration is a multi-service platform that integrates revenue-producing, managed applications and hosted services with infrastructure components. These infrastructure components play a key role in streamlining the management, administration, and monitoring of your Microsoft Windows®-based hosting environment. Together, both sets of components, as shown in Tables 1 and 2, form a highly scalable and reliable hosting platform optimized for low total cost of ownership (TCO).