Microsoft Shuffles Hosted Exchange Business

Published: April 12, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft is overhauling its Exchange Hosted Services (EHS) business with a new name, a new licensing model, and a new roadmap, the company announced somewhat recently. The EHS business will focus on four key areas of customer service, to be called Hosted Filtering, Hosted Archive, Hosted Continuity, and Hosted Encryption. There's also another release of the EHS program in the works for April.

Microsoft's acquisition of FrontBridge Technologies and its Exchange Server hosting business last July gave the company a head-start in developing its own suite of services targeted at the most common administrative headaches afflicting Exchange admins, including viruses, spam, and ensuring continuity for e-mail, which is a mission-critical application to many. The acquisition also brought Microsoft eight data centers and 3,100 customers (see "FrontBridge Buy to Boost Microsoft's Service Biz").

This month, Microsoft plans to deliver EHS version 5.3, which marks the next step in Microsoft's program for delivering access to Exchange as a Web service. Some of the new capabilities in this release will include better spam filtering, faster full-text archive indexing, simpler movement of directory services information, better enforcement of security policies (such as requiring strong passwords), and support for additional languages with the Spam Quarantine service.

Following the release of EHS 5.3, Microsoft will set to work on version 6, which will coincide with the forthcoming release of Exchange "12" expected this fall.The 6.x releases of EHS will bring support for calendar and contacts in hosted continuity and archive services, better directory integration, and more support languages supported in the Spam Quarantine.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, says EHS is a key component of Microsoft's "software as a service" (SaaS) strategy. "We're driving to deliver world-class software any way customers choose," Ballmer said. "Exchange Hosted Services will give customers more flexibility in how they deploy, manage and maintain technology."