Experience Microsoft Outlook 2003 on Steroids!

We are excited to announce that Voicegateway.com Web Services now provides Microsoft Exchange Server Hosting. Finally, the small business person, or individual can use the same advanced email/collaboration capability that until now has only been available to large corporate users.

Share a global contacts list.  Schedule meetings with your colleagues.  Share public folders.  View your daily schedule on your smartphone or PDA.  Receive emails anywhere in the world on your cell phone with wireless sync.  It's not a dream - all of this and more is available today when you upgrade to our Microsoft Exchange Hosting Service.

With our hosted Exchange email service you can upgrade one mailbox or several to Microsoft Exchange without the cost of buying your own servers, licensing the Exchange server software, and hiring one or more experts to install it and keep it running.

FREE software upgrade: Our Microsoft Exchange Hosting service includes the latest version of Microsoft Outlook 2003 for all of your users absolutely free of charge. For each mailbox that you upgrade or add to our service, we provide a full license for you to run the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. That’s a retail value of $109 per person.

The software is provided in downloadable format and is licensed for use for as long as you use our service. It’s the full version of Microsoft Outlook 2003 – not a demo version and does not time-out or de-activate even if you change providers.

Business-class service at consumer prices - Our Microsoft Exchange service has been architected to provide the highest level of service using high-performance dedicated server clusters and network storage.  We are excited to offer our service with a 100% uptime guarantee.  All email data is backed up nightly and emergency restores are optionally available as required.  Features required by business customers but available to everyone.

Back to Top

What is the difference between POP, IMAP, WebMail and Microsoft Exchange?

When using E-mail software, like most computer tasks, there are several different ways to do the same thing. Each method is slightly different and has advantages/disadvantages. There is no single best solution so it is up to you to choose which option you prefer.

WebMail is the easiest to understand and use as it is always available and can be used alongside other methods. With WebMail, you can access your E-Mail using only an Internet connection and a web browser. The advantage of this method is that you do not have to perform any software configuration. You can walk up to a PC anywhere – a friend, an office, an airport or Internet café kiosk, etc. and immediately begin using your E-Mail.

The disadvantage of WebMail is that you must enter your full email mailbox name and password to login each time you wish to use it. For frequent access, this can be annoying/time consuming. The WebMail interface is designed to be minimalist intentionally. This makes it fast even on slow or moderate speed Internet connections but means it lacks the fancy features of modern software interfaces such as “drag and drop” manipulation of items, rich graphics, and automatic screen updates.

POP Email is the classic software interface that is the most widely used. It connects to the mail server, downloads all the email to your local PC, and then logs off. It was designed many years ago when Internet speeds were slow, servers were big and expensive, and disk storage was minimal.

The advantage of POP Email is that it is widely supported. Just about every email service and email program supports POP. Even specialized devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants (PDA), and industrial systems such as burglar alarms or home monitoring systems will almost always be able to use POP email.

Internet Service Providers (ISP) and hosting companies love POP email because it minimizes the amount of storage needed on their mail servers. POP is designed to remove the email from the server quickly and not leave anything on the server any longer than absolutely necessary.

The disadvantage of POP Email is that it is an old protocol. It was designed a long time ago and has never been updated. It has very limited security and the "download everything/delete from server mode" is not fully compatible with WebMail or distributed email.

When POP mail was created, most people used a terminal connected to a minicomputer or mainframe to process their mail. The concept of a single user having multiple devices and locations (home computer, office computer, PDA, smartphone, casual access from a kiosk or Internet café, etc.) did not exist. POP email does not work well with the way most of us now want to use Email.

The industry created the newer IMAP protocol as a replacement for POP and solution for its' problems. IMAP is a newer software technology that addresses most, but not all, of the limitations of POP Email. IMAP is based on the email being kept on a central mail server and copies automatically downloaded and synchronized with multiple devices/computers.

This means that your home pc, work pc, and other computers automatically synchronize when they connect to the Internet. Without any special effort on you part, each computer will maintain an up to date copy of all your email messages. If you delete a message on your home computer, when you connect to the Internet it will synchronize and delete the message on the server. IMAP is newer than POP, but it has been around long enough now that most modern email software programs (but not all) support it.

IMAP works much better than POP with WebMail. Because of the automatic synchronization, you can use WebMail or your pc interchangeably. Unlike POP email, where all the messages are downloaded to your pc and thus WebMail will often be empty, IMAP synchronization means your email will always be available in WebMail and you won’t have to deal with duplicate or redundant messages when you later use your pc.

IMAP does have some disadvantages too. When you delete a message using IMAP, Outlook will draw a line through the message in your inbox but it isn’t deleted. You must use the “purge deleted email” command to actually delete the message. Some people view this as an advantage – you can mark the messages you want deleted but if you make a mistake you can easily go back and “undelete” the message. Once a day, or more frequently if you desire, simply purge the messages when you are sure you really want them deleted.

IMAP requires a lot more interaction with the server to perform all the synchronization. IMAP works well on broadband connections such as DSL, cablemodem, or WiFi but can sluggish on dial-up or slow network connections. IMAP is much more complicated internally – many email programs that support IMAP have defects or bugs and don’t work as well as they do with POP email. In our experience, only the newest versions of Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook 2003 work well using IMAP. (If you are using older software and wish to use IMAP,  upgrading to the newest version is worth the small investment.)

WebMail, POP, and IMAP all have limitations because of their age. All were created before the era of true personal computing and therefore don’t address a lot of the personal productivity and collaboration that most of us use every day. Email programs now include a lot of capability beyond simple messages such as contact lists (address books), calendars, scheduling, task lists, instant messaging, alerts, and more.

None of these features can be used with the email server via Webmail, POP, or IMAP. Although you can keep an extensive contact list in Outlook storing lots of useful information about each entry besides their email address (such as home/work/fax phone numbers, mailing address, etc.) you cannot synchronize this information with the server or between computers. Your schedule, calendar, and task list only exist on your pc – they cannot be shared with WebMail or other computers.

It gets worse – similar but incompatible features have slowly been added to some email servers. WebMail has an address book that is completely separate from your pc so if you add a person to your WebMail address book he or she won’t exist in Outlook. Emails you send from WebMail are saved in a “sent” folder inside WebMail but this folder is completely different from the “Sent” folder on your pc. So messages you sent on your pc are only archived on your pc and messages you sent from WebMail are only archived in WebMail. Obviously, this is very confusing and sometimes worse than not saving the messages at all.

The good news is there is a solution to sorting out this whole mess. Large corporations and businesses have been using high-end professional email servers that include all these collaboration, sharing, and full synchronization solutions for quite awhile. Enterprise users employ large multi-processor servers running expensive, high-end software that provides all this capability. The most popular packages are Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell Groupwise.

Microsoft Exchange is not for everyone, but if you use email frequently, constantly fight the limitations described above, and want the full power of shared contacts, calendars, scheduling and flawless synchronization (including sent messages), hosted Exchange is just the solution.

Microsoft Exchange Server works extremely well with smartphones such as the Palm Treo, Sprint PPC, Blackberry, and any phone running Windows Mobile / PocketPC software. If you are a consultant, small business person, real estate agent, or anyone “on the go”, having instant access to not just your email but also your schedule, appointments, and your full contact list on your portable cell phone is a huge competitive advantage that doesn’t have to be something only the big guys have.

Microsoft Exchange has a lot of technical advantages beyond the sharing and advanced features you see when you use it. One of the most important features is that is uses a protocol called “RPC over HTTP” to tunnel data access over the public Internet. Leaving the jargon behind this means that Microsoft Exchange can run over a regular Internet connection without any problem with firewalls or special security settings. Using built-in SSL security all data is encrypted automatically and you’ll never run into the “port 25 blocking” that more and more of our clients are experiencing with their local ISP blocking the use of many email servers.

Microsoft Exchange also includes a brand-new WebMail interface called Outlook Web Access or OWA for short. OWA provides, right from your web browser, a WebMail interface that mimics 90% of the full Outlook program without any special software. You simply have to see it to believe it! With only an Internet connection and a web browser, you get a split-screen display with the ability to drag messages into folders, view your contacts, calendar, and task list, etc.

If you’ve been hearing about the next generation Internet called “Web 2.0” and a cool new technology called AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML), then OWA is for you. It’s actually been available for several years and is the first application that really invented these new techniques. (Because it has only been available in the corporate world and not the general public, most people are not aware of it and have never seen it until now.)

Back to Top

Meat or fish?  Red wine or white?  Protein or fat?  Custom website or template?  Life is full of hard choices and we can't help you plan your diet but we can make creating your website easier.

With our Merchant-in-a-Box.com online store builder you can build an ecommerce site without having to choose between the speed and ease of a template-based sitebuilder and the sophistication and control of a fully custom web design.  Merchant-in-a-Box makes it easy to use both.

This issue's featured site http://www.jackigranmosaics.com highlights the work of mosaic artist Jacki Gran and demonstrates how to seamlessly mix a custom web design with our online store builder.

When you visit the homepage, you're taken to a fully custom webpage design and layout.  When you click on "Gallery" and then "Personalized Art" you are presented with a summary page which will allows you to choose an area and then be transferred into the ecommerce product pages showing thumbnails of the products available for purchase.

Want to know how it's done?  We offer a free 30-day trial so you can use the entire system without any cost or obligation.  If you would like more details on how to integrate our system with your custom site, just let us know.

Back to Top

Outlook 2003 on Steroids - http://www.voicegateway.com/services/exchange_hosting/

FREE blog hosting - http://www.mycblog.com

90-days Free - Submit your site to 200 Search Engines: http://seo.voicegateway.com

Free 30-day trial - "point & click" store builder: http://www.merchant-in-a-box.com

Register a new domain: http://www.voicegateway-domain-names.com

Services Summary: http://www.voicegateway.com/services/default.htm

Update your contact/billing info: http://payment.voicegateway.com

Tech Support Request: http://www.voicegateway.com/support/reqsupport.htm