Finding the Right Provider
In an industry as new as managed messaging, choosing the right Messaging Service Provider might just be the most important decision you make concerning the future of your company’s messaging system. The right provider will offer the right technology, the right services and the right support and management tools. Here’s a checklist that can help you choose wisely:
The Right Technology
The foundation of a good messaging service is good technology. Your MSP’s messaging architecture should offer:
• Capacity, Performance, Scalability A distributed architecture with independent server scaling, multi-threaded servers, high-performance Message Transfer Agents and dynamic load balancing are essential to effectively support heavy volume and a growing number of users.
• High Availability To ensure that your provider’s messaging infrastructure is always accessible when you need it, your MSP should offer redundant servers and failover, online backups and upgrades, online account migration and message-level transactions.
• Disaster Recovery Online backups, message journaling and message-level transactions ensure that information is ready for retrieval in case of major data loss.
• Administration and Management For ease of management, your MSP should offer an end-to-end monitoring capability; a single master directory with replicated directory caches for redundancy; end-to-end message tracing across all components; server statistics; full and configurable logging; documented procedures for each error condition; and multiple domain support.
• Spam Prevention To prevent unsolicited email, your MSP should offer mail blocking, relay prevention, filtering and easy message removal.
• Internet Standards Support In order to provide interoperability with all email on the Internet, your MSP’s technology should be compatible with all the major Internet email standards: SMTP, MIME, POP3, IMAP4, LDAP, SNMP, ESMTP and TLS.
The Right Services and Features
The real value of information technology, of course, lies in the services and features it enables. Make sure your MSP offers a wide range of standard messaging features for its Webmail client, including the following:
• Company Address Book A directory of employee email addresses and contact information to help keep everyone in close touch.
• Read Receipt Like registered mail, read receipt can automatically notify a user when his/her mail is opened by recipients.
• Mail Priority Users can flag messages with a high, normal or low priority.
• Junk Mail Blocker With this feature, users can help prevent receiving spam by blocking mail from specific addresses or based on specific filtering criteria, e.g. time, subject, etc.
• Vacation Reply A special notice can automatically be sent to email messages received when a user is on vacation.
The Right Support and Management Tools
In addition to technology and services, you should also carefully consider the kind of support and management tools offered by the Messaging Service Provider.
Does the MSP employ a comprehensive support staff, available seven days a week, to provide technical support? Before a customer comes online, does the provider offer planning and design services, and verification and sizing assistance? Does the provider offer training, account set-up and provisioning assistance? Does the provider use an electronic trouble-ticket tracking system to monitor customer inquiries from initial contact to resolution? For more common questions and concerns, does the provider offer online help functionality and e-service inquiry tools?
Another important checklist item: Does your MSP offer the following mail-management features to help you maintain control over your system?
• Multi-Level Mail Administration This feature allows you to distribute the responsibility of email administration across your organization, while still maintaining control over your email in a central location.
• User Management Lets you easily add and remove email accounts and set storage limits for each account as your company changes and employees come and go.
• Alias Management Allows you to set up an alias email address that distributes all incoming messages it receives to a specific individual or group of people. That way, your customers can continue using the same email address even if the personnel behind the email address change.
• Administrative Reports Gives you an easy-to-read overview of your current activity so you can determine the most effective way to manage your email service.
As communications continue to converge around a common IP platform, your choice of a company to manage your messaging platform takes on even more significance. Use the preceding checklist as a guide. Then make your choice — and choose carefully.