Microsoft Subscription Licensing
Microsoft Subscription Licensing
Disadvantages of In-House Email Solutions
A secure and reliable email solution is vital for any form of business today, whether your business is an SME (small and medium enterprises) or large enterprise level. An inadequate email hosting solution, especially for an SME business, can make or break your business’s external and internal messaging and can ultimately risk your reputation as well as sales. This article aims to briefly explain what in-house email is, what its downsides are and what the alternative to an in-house email solution is.
What is in-house email “hosting”?
In short, in-house email is having physical on-site emails which means that your business sets up and manages your own email servers. An email server is a computer within a network that basically works as your virtual post office. Popular and most used email servers are Microsoft Exchange Server, Novell GroupWise and IBM Lotus Domino.
What are the downsides of having in-house emails?
A long lived myth is that in-house email is believed to be a much cheaper solution than outsourced exchange email hosting. There is some truth in the fact that in-house email servers can give your business emails some flexibility and control since you are not paying for storage. However in fact having in-house email servers is actually very costly. Your email servers need software and hardware upgrades, and you need to hire staff to maintain and support the email servers 24/7/365. Maintaining and updating security software leaves your business with the sole responsibility of backing up emails and making sure that you store the backed-up data in a separate and safe location. This is very costly and both time and labour intensive.
In-house and on-site email servers require on-call maintenance and need to have all the latest anti-virus subscriptions and security update upgrades installed. Internet is still very much like the wild-west where outlaws hijacking steam trains has been replaced by viruses and trojans hijacking computers. You will also need to purchase a new email server approximately every 5 years.
Investments in staff, server hardware, server software licensing, exchange enterprise software and Blackberry server software is a factor you need to consider when going for in-house email solutions. Did you know that in-house email maintenance alone makes up about two-thirds of a SME’s total messaging costs?
What is the alternative to an in-house email solution?
The alternative to having in-house and on-site email servers is to outsource your email servers to an email hosting provider. If your business aims to invest in other areas rather than a large IT budget or hiring technical staff to implement and maintain an entire in-house email server infrastructure, email hosting outsourcing is the ideal solution.
Outsourcing your emails to an email hosting provider obviously means you no longer need to have the physical-in-house, on-site email servers. Choosing a reliable email hosting provider comes with high reliability, performance, installation of the latest antivirus, hardware and software upgrades plus administration and support 24/7/365. To summarise email hosting outsourcing: the email hosting provider owns and is responsible for the data centre, network, devices, operating system and application infrastructure components.
One of the most secure and reliable email hosting companies on the market has to be Rackspace. Their email hosting services recognise your businesses messaging needs and their email hosting solutions ensure your emails are available and secure 24/7/365, with total collaboration and mobile compatibility so your business can always be connected. Rackspace customer service, named “Fanatical Support”, has won several customer service awards.
Further reading:
For more information on Rackspace UK visit their section on email hosting to find out more about their services.
About the Author
Matt writes articles on email hosting
Norton/microsoft office?
I had Norton 360 and microsoft office 07 installed on my 3 computers at home, then one of my computers has broken and is getting replaced on the insurance. Both office and norton say they are licensed for use with 3 pc's.
Will i be able to get office and norton on my new computer without paying extra or buying a new subscription since my old computer is broken and not in use?
most likely you will get it back with your Replacement computer the programs u had should be on it if u dint get a killer virus that erased the old hard drive but when you go to reinstall it if not then your product key should allow you to put it on the new one
Microsoft Subscription Licensing
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SAP Business One Recovering Failed Implementation or Second Opinion
If your implementation is simple without customizations and historical data migrations it is very unlikely that you are reading this publication. Likely that in your situation you either are trying to force through massive historical data export from legacy accounting and import into Business One or maybe got complex SDK programming project in limbo and over budget. Generic consulting firm which is typically located in neighboring town has so-called sales engineers and functional consultants. These professionals are good in such areas as standard business logic executive presentation, user training, setup GL account balances. But what they likely do not do very often are complex data migration and software development. Several regional consulting organizations might have to share the same SDK programmer or technical consultant on the subcontracting agreement. But when you do such human error sensitive job as programming subcontracting model might be too loose to provide reliable quality assurance and bug fixing. If your project went into limbo stage let's review the way out:
1. Consulting firm revenue structure. You need to understand how consulting industry works. The revenue typically splits fifty to fifty to software license selling margins and billable consulting hours. If you already paid for the software through your original reseller and decide to switch to nearby competitor for fixing up failed implementations these new people may say something like this: "Thank you very much for calling our company. However there is no software licenses revenue part and we have to deal with the C# SDK code which was not written by our programmer. We probably are OK if you continue shopping in the area"
2. Regional or Nationwide consulting firms with remote support model and specializing in technical consulting to existing customers. These firms typically have the following motto. We do not have salaried functional consultants and sales engineers to pretend on high initial software licenses margins. However we are specializing in customization, integration, data conversion, complex reporting. We have so-called SAP Business One Software Development Factory or in other words group of dedicated Microsoft Visual Studio VB and C# programmers who are certified in SB1 Software Development Kit, Crystal Reports, ODBC sources import via Data Transfer Workbench
3. Second Opinion. It is important to have a trust in your original VAR however there should be balance between this trust and the feeling that their experience should be questioned as the project goes South. As SAP B1 customer you have to have official VAR at the time. Corporate ERP software vendors do not like the idea of having several certified consulting firms to serve you at the same time without central coordination of the VAR of record. If you decide that it is the time now to sign the contract with new SAP B1 partner to be ready to do it officially with SAP. Let's now take a look at typical failure reasons
4. Historical data conversion. General advise: it is not recommended. Try to consider the following idea. Why don't we just keep our legacy accounting for inquiry only and closed for new data entry? If you do not have this option due to the fact that your legacy software was based on subscription licensing model or another reason consider exporting its data into MS Access database or maybe even text files. Historical data migration project is typically complex and Data Transfer Workbench CSV templates might be too primitive for entering millions of rows in Excel. Here you might need professional SQL programmer who is also experienced in SAP BO business processes and objects structure
5. Complex Customizations. SAP B1 SDK openness to generic Microsoft Visual Studio programmer might be misleading. In mid-size firms we often hear the initiative from IT department folks about programming SB1 SDK internally. Well, it is possible however in the learning curve you might expect such underwater rocks as poor performance (being very slow in custom user interface), issues with table structure and inability to feed or update records directly via SQL insert, update statements and stored procedures
6. Data Export Puzzle from Old Accounting. If you are migrating away from really old accounting package then the data connection technology might be not really known to modern generic programmer. Good example is Great Plains Accounting DOS 9.5 where single Btrieve file may share several relative tables. Even if you were successful in generating DDF files required for ODBC data connection the issuing select statement in Pervasive SQL Control Center you are getting strange rows and have no clue
About the Author
Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, [email protected] 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. He is also the initiator of eFaru project http://www.efaru.com and founder of Alba Spectrum information space
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