Exchange Online

Three levels of Exchange Online are available: Dedicated, Standard, and Deskless Worker. Both Dedicated and Standard support Outlook 2003 and later as an e-mail client (although Outlook must be licensed separately), as well as browser-based e-mail access. The Deskless Worker option is an inexpensive browser-based offering with a restricted feature set.

All three levels include Exchange’s core e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring features; virus and spam filtering; regular data backup or replication to provide data restoration/recovery in the event of failure; and the same 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). Notably, the SLA for Exchange has a couple of exceptions that don’t apply to the other services: inability to access the e-mail archiving service, or to access Exchange Online from BlackBerry devices, are not counted as downtime for the purposes of the SLA.

Exchange Online Dedicated

Of the three online levels, Dedicated offers the widest array of features and customization options and the greatest levels of technical support and service continuity planning and periodic failover testing. To ensure adequate bandwidth at all times, dedicated communications links are used to connect the customer’s internal network with Microsoft’s data centers.