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Frequently Asked Questions

Hosted Microsoft Exchange Messaging Solution Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some questions we get from our prospects and our answers:

1. What is hosted messaging?

We provide a total service approach to managing your organization's messaging system.  Basically, your organization would plug its desktop messaging infrastructure into our remote data center.  All of the backend functions of the messaging system will be managed for your organization by us for a per seat monthly fee.

2. As the administrator of my organization's messaging, I am concerned about security of the messaging content.  How can I be sure your security is a good as or better than what our organization is currently using?

Download our security white paper and see how you can be sure.

The free white paper uses Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) file format.  If you do not have a reader for the file, you can obtain it from Adobe's web site click on:

    http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

3. Our IT department thinks that they can manage our messaging cheaper than BS&S.  How can we get to the bottom line and determine which option is the most cost-efficient and best option for us?

We want to make sure you know what our solutions will cost, and provide an apples-to-apples comparison of our costs versus your in-house costs.  Based upon the services you need, we will present a cost model that reflects your monthly costs for our hosted solution.  Our Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model provides detailed information. 

We will work with your IT department to get the data to allow you to make an educated decision based upon costs and facts.  If your organization does not have the transparency to identify your in-house costs, we will use our best efforts to help you get the data. 

If you select us, you can be confident that the TCO numbers we provide will be what you will be billed.  From the minute you are up and running on our service, you will know what you are paying.  You will know because we will tell you before you sign our contract.

4. How do we manage our costs in the BS&S hosted environment?

You will have full transparency with our solution.  We will provide you a cost per seat (e-mail account).  This cost will remain the same each month unless your administrator authorizes an increase in the services your users may access, or users are added or remove.  If you remove users, your total cost will go down by the number of users removed.  If you add users, your cost will increase based upon the number of new users and the level of services you authorize. 

The BS&S solution ensures no surprises and full transparency.  In addition, our itemized monthly billing statement will reflect your service transactions.

5. Will my organization turn messaging administration over to BS&S and Apptix?

Our TECOS Admin product allows your designated administrator to manage your messaging administration.  With our tool this function is easy to perform, virtually error proof, and allows business staff, not technical staff to administer your messaging.  Training required to use the tool is minimal, provided online and will reduce your cost for your message solution administration.

6. Our organization has encountered problems with users deleting messages that we should retain.  Will the BS&S messaging solution help us solve this problem and how?

The following is available depending upon the e-mail archiving rules you have implemented:

1. File "Deleted" Items -- Restoration within 14 dyas without going to tape

2. Mailbox "Deleted" -- Restoration within 30 days without going to tape

3. After 30 days -- Restorations made from tape

1. The amount of e-mail from our customers seems to be growing daily.  Our CFO is hitting us continually about the constant increase in our message system storage growth.  How can BS&S help us better manage cost creep in this area?

Using our TECOS Admin tool, your administrator will define the services and storage rules for each of your users.  When the limits are being reached, Exchange alerts the user and administrator.  At that point the user can take steps to archive messages they want to retain, delete them, or the administrator can allocate additional space.  If the limits are exceeded, none of the users’ messages are lost. 

Based upon an organization’s records management and retention policies, some of our customers want messages automatically deleted.  Outlook client can support your rules and delete messages automatically.

8. Can we allocate our messaging costs by department or function? 

Your monthly bill is provided in electronic form, and can be provided in a format that can be used by any allocation application that will accept a comma delimited input.  When you establish your e-mail environment with our TECOS administrative tool, you can setup users to support a chargeback capability.

9.     How does the BS&S hosted messaging solution help us gain control over virus protection and spam?

Our Trend Micro anti-virus solution is top-notch. Operating systems and applications are “locked down”, using automated tools to, we turn off unnecessary services and ensure tight security settings are in place.

We use ClearSwift Spam & Content Filtering to exercise every commercially reasonable effort to prevent spam from the e-mail system.