FrontBridge Becomes Exchange Hosted Services

Using technology, people, and facilities obtained from its acquisition of FrontBridge Technologies, Microsoft has begun offering Exchange Hosted Services (EHS)—a set of four fee-based services that allow organizations to outsource various e-mail-related functions, such as antivirus, antispam, message archival, disaster recovery, and message encryption, while still hosting their e-mail servers internally. (Despite the name, the services do not require or use Exchange Server or any Exchange components.) The company also outlined the roadmap for some future EHS offerings.

Four Different Services

The name Exchange Hosted Services is misleading, and it appears that Microsoft is merely attempting to capitalize on the Exchange brand. Not to be confused with “Hosted Exchange” services offered by Microsoft partners, EHS does not host Exchange mailboxes; in fact, it does not use any Exchange software components. Nor does EHS require customers to host its users’ mailboxes on Exchange servers—any Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) e-mail server can be used in conjunction with EHS.