Great article from CIO Magazine that discusses the value of Microsoft’s hybrid solution, enabling both on-premise & hosted Exchange messaging to be available simultaneously for a customer while centrally managing both:
As Exchange Grows Up, it Plays More Strategic Role
Long an important product for Microsoft, Exchange Server going forward will play even more of a key role in the company’s plan to extend its collaboration applications to mobile devices and other software platforms.…
In Exchange 2010, Microsoft is highlighting features that integrate its on-premise and hosted versions of the product more closely together, which the company hopes will encourage companies to begin adding hosted services to their on-premise software.
However, while hosted services can be more cost-effective for an organization, some companies may need to keep some employee mailboxes in-house for security or compliance reasons, and continue to run Exchange on premise, said Chris Voce, an analyst with Forrester Research. "For a lot of organizations, maybe a wholly hosted solution is not an option at this point," he said.
Still, being able to synchronize features like calendars and address books between the hosted version of Exchange and its on-premise version will certainly make it easier for an enterprise to create a hybrid environment that allows it to keep some of its employees’ mailboxes on premise, and allow Microsoft to host other mailboxes, Voce said.
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LINK:
http://www.cio.com/article/500011/As_Exchange_Grows_Up_it_Plays_More_Strategic_Role
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