Do you have Microsoft Exchange Server? You probably do; almost everyone does. Exchange does a lot for you, but it doesn't do everything.
A large industry has been built on improving Exchange and filling in the gaps in terms of its functionality. One solution to help fill those gaps in is,
.
Xeams solves many of
the problems left unaddressed by Exchange Server. Some of these problems include:
Spam Filtering
The large majority of emails sent on the Internet are spam. At its least serious,
spam is a time-wasting bother to end users and storage and network bandwidth waster for an organization.
But some spam messages are serious threats. They contain links to malicious web sites which could commandeer
a persons computer and put their business assets, including customer data, at risk. Exchange Server does not come with spam filtering. There are many places you can go to get that filtering,
both in the cloud and to run on premise.
The biggest problem with outsourced spam filtering is privacy.
Most emails these days come in the clear, and as a result, companies have to trust the service provider to
handle their sensitive data. Failure to keep matters private can result in problems later on.
Additionally, the return on investment on a spam filtering solution is huge. Consider the following scenario:
If an employee, on average, gets 100 spam messages a day and spends five seconds determining if it's junk
and should be deleted - and the company has 30 employees - that adds up to 250 minutes per day, wasted.
And, if each of those 30 employees makes $25 per hour, that would amount to $104 in lost revenue every day.
Can you imagine the lost revenue at a very large company with highly-paid employees? Human spam filtering
can be very costly and can dramatically reduce employee productivity.
Archiving
You can't keep all your email from the beginning of your service on your email server. Good business practices dictate that you archive such messages to maintain them for legal purposes
and in the event you want to look up some very old messages. Regulated businesses are often required
to retain email records for some period of time.
Good archiving systems are not just a dumping ground for old messages, they index the messages to make them searchable.
If a court orders you to provide all messages between certain people and/or relating to certain subjects, you want
to be able to retrieve them quickly without having to browse.
Recent versions of Exchange Server have a form of archiving available as a premium feature requiring
premium client access licenses. For this and other reasons, third party archiving solutions are very
popular for Microsoft Exchange Server.
Backup Infrastructure
If your Exchange Server were to go down, would you have any way to retrieve your email? Probably not, which
means you run the risk of potential hardware or software problems that could bring your email and your business down. You can solve
this with multiple redundant Exchange Servers, or through a third party solution. Xeams, for example, is a
full mail server; your users can choose to retrieve their email temporarily from Xeams instead of Exchange Server.
Policy Enforcement
Another weak point with Exchange is policy enforcement. There are many policies you can
set with Active Directory Group Policies, particularly for Microsoft Outlook clients, but there are many holes in
this coverage.
Xeams allows administrators to monitor aggregate usage in order so as
to detect abuses of the system and to gather gross statistical data. How many emails are received on a
daily basis? Who gets most of the messages? What percentage of messages are junk? These are all questions
worth asking about an Exchange Server installation, and with Xeams you can ask them.
Xeams from Synametrics performs all these functions and it's free and supports unlimited numbers of
users and domains. Xeams is available for multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux and
other UNIX variants. It is available as a rack appliance. Paid, priority support is available.
Exchange Server is so mature and full of features that it's sometimes easy to forget that there are many things it lacks. If you are using Exchange Server on a daily basis, it is important to get a better understanding of the features that are missing and how the can affect you and your business. By integrating Xeams you are ensuring your that your Exchange Server will be running at 100% maximum efficiency.
