Outsourcing email allows businesses to reduce capital costs and attain predictable price structures while improving performance, reliability and security. Most importantly, outsourced email allows enterprises to realize a scalable environment and to add new capabilities without upgrading software or hardware.

According to the US Department of Commerce (doc.gov), sending messages is the most popular use for the Internet (79.9 percent of Internet users use email). According to IDC (idc.com), the number of worldwide email mailboxes is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 139 percent, from 505 million in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2005. As a result of the popularity of email, having a system in place for communicating with customers and businesses is a must for any small business.

Many small businesses use the mail service bundled with their shared hosting account or dedicated server, as all hosting companies offer integrated email with their service offerings.

Most often, this assumes the form of readily accessible Web mail, or mail that can downloaded directly to your computer (known as POP mail). Many hosting firms also increasingly accommodate the Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP is gradually replacing POP as the main protocol used by email clients in communicating with email servers. Using IMAP, an email client program does not only retrieve email, but can also manipulate message stored on the server, without having to actually retrieve the messages. IMAP includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; searching; and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, etc. IMAP is more advanced and allows users to check their mail from email clients from multiple locations such as within the office, or from the laptop when on a business trip.

Often, small businesses want to leverage IMAP mail servers with collaborative tools, such as scheduling and shared contact management. Microsoft (microsoft.com) has for many years offered a software package, called Microsoft Exchange, that allows businesses to do just that.

Exchange Server is a reliable and scalable platform that offers managed messaging and collaboration services. The secure email, shared calendars, public folders and instant messaging offer any business improved communication and productivity.

However, the cost of maintaining that in-house corporate mail system with collaborative features can be prohibitive. An inordinate amount of time, skill, effort and money must all be directed to the task. This can be avoided if the small business elects to outsource its Exchange services. With a hosted Exchange Server, a small business can save at least $10,000 in up-front software licensing and server hardware costs, and obtain an email and collaboration solution ready to go within days.

By hosting Exchange collaboration infrastructure and applications with an external provider, a growing business can focus on its core competencies, instead of on implementing the technology.

The main concern that a small business should keep in mind however is that outsourcing mail requirements shifts the burden of uptime from the application server to the network accessing it. By shifting the application to an external location, the business is taking a risk. That risk should be highly calculated, so before transitioning mail services to an outsourcer, a business, no matter how small, should execute proper due diligence.

In order to ensure that small businesses purchase the best Exchange services, managers should consider asking the following questions before making a firm decision:

Where will the data be physically stored? Is there adequate physical security? Will client applications have a secure means to log on to the email server? Does the hosting service have data centers with redundant network connections, backup power sources, and engineers on site 24x7? What about the customer's own network infrastructure? Are its routers protected by an uninterruptible power supply? Does it have redundant network connections in case one fails? Is the hosting company financially sound? How steep is the learning curve in order to master the new system? Is there adequate access to round-the-clock technical support? Most importantly, what precautions has the hosting firm made to ensure that all data is constantly backed up?

By asking the proper questions, a small business can isolate the best Web hosting candidate for its email requirements.