Exchange Hosting Reviews

Unique features allow users to administer their own email service

Warrington Tuesday January 23rd 2007. Simply Mail Solutions has announced the first release of ?SMS Email Control Panel? its unique in - house developed user interface. Users can now login and administer things such as aliases and domains with respect to their email boxes whenever they want to. The Control Panel covers all the three email hosting services that SMS offers whether the type of email is SMS NexGen, MS Exchange, or Zimbra Collaboration Suite and even if the domain is used for a range of services.

Commented Colin Smith Managing Director ?We are committed to offering the best range of hosted email services in the UK. That includes making it easy for users to administer their own account as well as reliability and competitive pricing. For our larger users this particularly offers a very powerful tool to cope with people leaving and joining the company. There is nothing more annoying for than for email you send to a company to go into limbo when people leave and of course if the person is a front line sales or service person this can loose sales or damage relations?

As an example the control panel displays the domains in use by the user and the numbers of mailboxes using that domain. Users can then add, delete or modify aliases allowing for example [email protected] to be sent to the mailbox for [email protected]. When people leave but before new people are appointed this allows email to be immediately passed to someone else to be dealt with.

An even more sophisticated option allows domain aliasing where, as is quite common, a company has multiple domains to be pointed to a specific mailbox. For example if the company has the domains quickpizza.org and quickpizza.info all email to [email protected] can be put into the [email protected] mailbox.

Technical Director of SMS Keith Pritchard commented ?Everybody gains from this kind of approach to customer service. Customers can put things into the system very quickly and whenever it is convenient. We get the information without ambiguity and can process it quicker and more automatically. A major technical problem we had to solve was doing this kind of administration over a number of email systems and we needed to make it interface with our billing system so that customers have a single login whether they want copies of the invoices or to change their email options. Of course we uniquely offer our users the ability to have the same domain independent of service (so that they can have cheaper POP3 mailboxes for people in the office and MS Exchange for people on the road who want mobile phone access and calendars etc) and that had to be built into the Control Panel as well.?

Keith commented further ?We plan to add further options to the Control Panel over the coming months and see this as a key differentiator compared with other email hosting companies (who we see as our direct competitors). Of course most email at the moment simply does not offer the kind of flexibility and features we now include as standard.

About Simply Mail Solutions
SMS is based in Warrington UK and already has thousands of customer email accounts running on its servers. It is a dedicated email hosting company. More information is available at www.simplymailsolutions.com or email [email protected]

T C Harrison to rationalise and expand email systems by outsourcing to email hosting specialist Simply Mail Solutions.

Warrington Thursday January 18th? 2007. Simply Mail Solutions has announced that it has agreed an outsourcing deal with leading motor industry company Sheffield based T C Harrison. A number of different email systems were in operation at different locations with multiple domains and servers and TCH decided to look into outsourcing email both to improve quality of service and to reduce costs. ?

Commented Neil Bailey IT Manager ?Hosted email services have really developed recently but we wanted a service that would allow us to outsource smoothly and would allow us to choose whether to use POP3 or MS Exchange for a users email. MS Exchange is significantly more expensive than POP3 and many of our users are not at the moment, needing to use things such as mobile phone email or collaboration features?

T C Harrison needed a very flexible solution that allowed the type of email service to be decided by the company independent of the company division and domain in use. SMS is unique in allowing mailboxes with the same domain to be either POP3 or MS Exchange based. SMS included this facility in its original email infrastructure. Commented Neil Bailey ?The other mail hosting companies that we looked at could only offer MS Exchange mailboxes and not a mixture of POP3 and MS Exchange for the same domain?. In excess of 200 email boxes are in the process of being outsourced and then once this is all done TC Harrison will be in a position to implement new email services without the constraints caused by having a number of in-house servers.

Neil commented further ?SMS has been easy do to deal with and has been very flexible in meeting our needs. We certainly have a more reliable system that is costing us less and a sound basis to increase our use of email further without difficulty?

The MD of Simply Mail Solutions Colin Smith commented ?We are very pleased to be working with T C Harrison on this project. It shows that an overall approach to managing email systems can bring major benefits to users and has been possible because we designed flexibility into our email hosting service from the beginning. Certainly our unique ability to mix and match the type of email service with a given domain is proving to be a winner.?

About T C Harrison
T C Harrison has now grown into one of the country’s largest privately owned motor groups, with around 750 employees in 16 locations, and an annual turnover in excess of ?200 million serving over 200,000 customers.? The business includes Ford car main dealerships, commercial vehicle operations, JCB dealerships and car leasing operations.
Website:? http://www.tch.co.uk/default.asp

About Simply Mail Solutions
SMS is based in Warrington UK and already has thousands of customer email accounts running on its servers. It is a dedicated email hosting company. More information is available at www.simplymailsolutions.com or email [email protected]

SMS Invests in Advanced Storage Solutions from Network Appliance for its Email Hosting Services

Warrington Monday January? 8th? 2007. Simply Mail Solutions has announced that it has acquired advanced storage equipment from Network Appliance (NetApp) the leader in the network device storage field. The equipment will be located in SMS?s suite at Telecity in Manchester and will be used to provide backups of customer?s data from the many servers SMS is now running, and SMS?s CRM system. The failsafe features and rapid back up and restore allows SMS to give its customers a level of confidence not found with most competitor email solutions. The equipment was installed December 2006 and came on-line in January.

Commented Colin Smith SMS Managing Director ?It is not just the rapid growth in our user base that made us upgrade to NetApp - it is addresses the need for a really robust storage solution that gives our users confidence for the future. Hosting solutions without first class infrastructure are not solutions at all! ?

Commented Keith Pritchard, SMS Technical Director ?Now I can automate our back up processes and start to sleep at night!?

Commented? NetApp ?We are very pleased to have added a quality hosting operation such as SMS to our user base. In the past, only the larger corporates have been able to afford the level of data security that frankly nowadays email demands. Through email hosting companies like SMS smaller corporates and SME?s can have the same level of confidence that their email (and attachments with enhanced email such as Exchange Server) is being really looked after.

About Simply Mail Solutions
SMS is based in Warrington UK and already has thousands of customer email accounts running on its servers. It recently announced plans to recruit more sales and support staff.

About Network Appliance
Network Appliance is a world leader in unified storage solutions for today?s data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992, Network Appliance has delivered technology, product, and partner firsts. Information about Network Appliance? solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

www.simplymailsolutions.com
Contact: [email protected]
Tel: +44 1925 818448