So you’ve got your UMPC and you’re mobile and you’ve got your data access; maybe 3G cellular or a Wi-Fi hotspot. Naturally you want to check your email; grab your latest messages and perhaps reply to a few. OK, so far. You do what you need to do, but then what? What happens when you get back home to your desktop PC and access your email there. Do you have to download your mail again? And try to figure out which ones you’ve already read and which ones you haven’t? And then go though the process of sorting or filing it again as well? What about emails you sent from the UMPC? Do you have them on your desktop if you need to reference them? If you’re using a standard POP3 email account, you probably do have to have re-mark it as read or sort and file your email and items you sent on one computer aren’t on another. With a POP3 email account, you download your email to each computer from which you access your account and then anything you do to work with your email on that computer happens only on that computer. Since very often your UMPC isn’t your only computer, that situation is less than optimal nor is it particularly efficient. Fortunately, there’s a better option.
If you work at a medium to large company there’s a good chance that you use Outlook as your email client with Microsoft Exchange Server as your email server. There are some clear advantages to using Exchange, like the ability to share calendars and meeting requests and the use of public folders. But a bigger advantage that may not be readily apparent to many users is that your email is stored on that Exchange server, not on your workstation. Actually, a cached copy of your email is stored locally, but it is automatically kept in sync with the server. The point is, if you access your email account from another computer, all of your email is there, filed and sorted exactly as it was on your main computer. So why can’t you have this same capability with your personal email? You can! All you need is to have your email on an Exchange server, just like you do at work.
It’s probably not realistic to expect most folks to have their own personal Exchange email server. The software is expensive and difficult to administer unless you’re trained to do it, and you’d need a dedicated PC for it. The best solution then, is to have someone else own the Exchange server and let you access it. That’s the notion behind hosted Exchange services, a great solution for email. With a hosted Exchange account, you pay a small monthly fee, generally between US$5-10, and get an account with the service provider along with a set amount of disk space for your email (often around 100 MB). They’ll help you configure Outlook on your computers to point to their server and you can either take an email address that they assign you or, if you happen to own your own domain, set your existing email address to receive your email on their server.
I’ll cover the advantages a hosted Exchange service provides over other kinds of email accounts in Part 2.
Loading ...
No comments yet.