“Most organizations that use Microsoft Exchange as their corporate communication tool have staff that uses a BlackBerry device as well. Our clients are no different. During each deployment that I work on, I ask the question, “How many BlackBerry users do you have?”  Knowing that the high cost for BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) licensing usually leads to sticker shock, I cringed each time.

I recently learned that Research In Motion (RIM), the company that makes BlackBerry products, now offers BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express for free! Having your own dedicated BES server will allow for seamless integration between your Microsoft Exchange environment and BlackBerry mobile devices. This eliminates any delays, outages, and other limitations that are commonly found with shared scenarios or relying on your mobile provider.

The first question I asked when hearing about this new offering was, “What were the limitations?” Great news, the majority of customers that I would work with can get by with the Express edition without a problem.

I called BlackBerry to get more details and they filled me in on only a couple minor limitations. First, there is no support for BlackBerry Mobile Voice System which I was told is rarely used anyways. Also, you’re limited to only 40 IT policies. And finally, you are limited to 75 users in a shared environment but allows for 200+ users in a dedicated server environment. From our experience, it’s best to deploy a BES server in a dedicated environment for optimal performance. So for the clients LogicalSolutions.net will work with won’t be limited to the amount of users able to access the BES server.

For the small cost of a virtual dedicated server, we can install the free BES Express application and have you up and running in no time!"

Here at LogicalSolutions.net we recently rolled out an update our own mail server to Microsoft Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 brings with it many new updates and enhancements, especially for you corporate users who may have skipped 2007 and are still on version 2003. One of the largest leaps forward is enhancements made to the Outlook Web App (OWA) feature.  Outlook Web App, or OWA, allows you to access your Exchange 2010 e-mail features from your browser. This helps eliminate the need to be tied to your personal computer configured with Outlook web client.

One major improvement for OWA is the multiple browser support. Previously an Exchange user of OWA would have to use Internet Explorer. In version 2010, OWA is now supported for not only Internet Explorer, but Firefox, Safari and even Chrome.

Click the thumbnail above. You can see that OWA is completely functional in the Google Chrome browser.

Another new feature for OWA is the conversation view. The new conversation view allows you to group multiple threads from a single conversation together. This will make your inbox management far more efficient. If you’re a user of Google’s Gmail email system, you’re very familiar with how this works and probably quite excited to see it come to your corporate email system.

Click the thumbnail above for an example of conversation viewing.

A personal favorite new feature of mine is the shared calendar interface in OWA. In previous versions, you had limited accessibility to viewing calendars. Now with 2010, it’s as if you were on your PC working with the Outlook application. You can even enable sharing with people outside your organization allowing for increased collaboration.

Click the thumbnail above for a better view of OWA calendar sharing.

Finally, as more and more enterprise organizations are looking to outsource their IT needs, additional features are becoming available to allow this to become easier every day.  In the past you were restricted to access your Exchange application through OWA or connecting via VPN. Now with Outlook Anywhere, you can use Microsoft Outlook 2010, 2007 or 2003 to connect to your Exchange server outside your corporate network without hassle.   Benefits of using Outlook Anywhere allows your users to have remote access to the Exchange servers from the internet while using the same URL and namespace that you use for OWA and ActiveSync. Also, there’s no need to purchase an additional secure certificate either. You can use the same SSL that you use for OWA and ActiveSync.  For additional information on the long list of benefits configuring and managing Outlook Anywhere and Outlook 2010, contact one of our Sales Engineers today.  

One of many great advantages the Internet provides over traditional media like print, TV, radio, etc. is the accountability. On your website you have the ability to track just about everything. You can see exactly how many users come to your site, what they did on your site and even how they got there.

There are many tools out there that you can add to your website to help track your analytics, some paid, some free. One of the most robust and useful tools comes from Google. One advantage of Google Analytics is that it flushes out all the search engine crawlers, spiders and bad data that can distort other traffic tools. This gives you the best representation of the true traffic and activity of your website. And the best part of Google Analytics....it's completely free!

The first step is to get signed up for an account with Google. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ and you'll notice a blue Access Analytics button on the right hand side and the ability to sign up below. If you already have a Google account, just use that and sign in. Next, provide Google with the URL of the site you wish to analyze. Then follow the steps of providing what country your site is in, your contact information, etc. Once you click Create New Account, Google will provide you with a block of code. Copy this code. You will need to insert this on your website.

Placing this code on your site is a straight forward process for most sites out there. You simply copy the analytics code in the footer. If you're not comfortable doing something like this, just give us a call. Our Service & Maintenance team can place this on most websites in under an hour. The benefits will easily exceed the time and small investment it will take to get you up and running.

A common obstacle to many internet marketing specialists that utilize Google AdWords has been the use of trademarks or copyrighted keywords in their advertisement text. For example, if you are an electronics retailer and would like to sell an iPod or a Zune, you may be restricted to actually using those trademarked names in the text of your ad. As you can imagine, this creates all sorts of complications for both the advertiser as well as the user looking for products and services.

But it appears Google is changing course. Google announced that starting in June, it would start allowing certain companies to purchase ads that use trademarks, even the ones they don't own. Not only does this help business by letting them use specific keywords in their ads to help attract users and visitors to their site but this has a great benefit to the consumer as well. This move will help reduce the number of overly generic ads appearing throughout their search result network. It seems like a win-win for both businesses and consumers. Although, if you're the company that owns a trademark and no longer have exclusivity in the AdWords arena, you may not be too pleased with this decision.

To read more check out the full article on cnet news: Changes to the Google Adwords Landscape