Why Outsource? - A Background

The History

Before the age of the industrial revolution, the economy and our way of life centered around a specialization of tasks. More specifically, if you needed horse shoes or iron cooking equipment, you went to a blacksmith. If you needed certain foodstuffs, you visited the baker or a farmer. Everyone did the one thing they knew how to do best, and everyone else relied on that individual or group of individuals to provide those services, either for money exchanged or barter.

The Industrial Age

The industrial age approached and over time, things became conglomerated. Companies became horizontal, handling every aspect of making a product or providing a service. This has some advantages, such as economies of scale, amongst others. This did not necessarily produce the best product or service, as companies and organizations had to become experts in many different fields simultaneously to be successful.

The Information Age

Then computer technology and the information age came along. Organizations took on the additional burden of becoming experts in technology, hoping it would give them a competitive advantage. Most people would agree this has been the case. There are always going to be key technology projects within organizations that will improve and affect their core business. What about that core business? For example, a company that makes rubber gaskets. They spend a lot of time and money on research and development to make the best, most durable and cost effective rubber gasket on the market. Any other business function outside of the making, marketing and selling of rubber gaskets takes that company away from it's core business.

Everyone Else

Companies have accepted that, in order to be in business, one must support and maintain technology for themselves. Why? Everyone else does it. Does a company who makes rubber gasket seals going to provide the best expertise and knowledge to support and evolve their use of technology? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. This is where the outsourcing model comes into play. It also relates back to a recurrence of a specialization of tasks.

The Right Tool

The company that knows how to make the best rubber gasket seals uses a company that knows how to implement and support the best technology. The company that makes a business out of rubber gasket seals uses a company that makes a business out of providing the best technology management and service. Each company is doing what it is best at. The gasket company is optimized for producing gaskets, and the technology company is optimized for deploying, maintaining and evolving with the technology curve, and providing those services to it's customers. It gets back to the old saying, "use the right tool for the right job."

Loose Ends

In addition, technology is generally a variable cost. You're never sure how much you're going to spend until all the money is gone. With outsourced solutions, most services are priced monthly and on a per user basis. In effect, you are leasing our services instead of buying your own. As we know, leasing works very well for some, and not for others. We can work with you to decide what is best.

At Utopia Systems, we live and breath technology. But that's not all, we also understand business, and what it takes to be successful. We want to understand your business. We can make you more successful by freeing your resources to focus on core business objectives. Leave the technology to us!

The Technology

From a messaging perspective, we offer a solution that is quite different from your traditional ISP-based email. If you use an ISP today for email, you may have a web site hosted by your ISP which includes some email accounts. Most ISP's offer, as part of their web hosting, what is referred to as POP3 email services. POP stands for the Post Office Protocol, and the number is the version, which is up to 3. One of the challenges to POP3 is that the default functionality "downloads" or offloads your email, from their servers, to your PC. The advantages for the ISP, are they do not have to dedicate a lot of resources, both in disk space and processor usage. The advantage to you is, you have your email on your PC. If something were to happen with your ISP, you have most of your email. Also, if you have a laptop, you don't have to be connected to the Internet to read your mail and compose new messages. There are some disadvantages, however. If you use multiple computers, or do not own a laptop, you cannot access your email from multiple computers without special configuration of your email software. We offer a web interface to access your email when you are away from your primary PC. The other major disadvantage is if you do not backup your PC, and something were to happen, you would lose all of your information.

Our Solution to Today's Challenges

With our hosting solution, we use Microsoft Exchange Server for our email servers. The major technical difference is we keep all of your email, calendar, contacts, tasks and shared documents on our servers. This gives you the flexibility and choice you need to do business. Because the data is hosted at our facility, as you move between PC's, you can use our web client to access your information. All you need is an Internet connection and your favorite browser. If you use a primary desktop PC, you can use Microsoft Outlook, which can access your information on our servers. Outlook also runs in an "Offline" mode, so in the case of a laptop, you can travel and continue to read existing email, appointments and compose new mail. When you connect back to the Internet, the information between your laptop and our server is synchronized! Outlook is the preferred client when using Microsoft Exchange as an email server. Outlook Express would not be the preferred client for our service as it uses POP3 for email. Although Microsoft Exchange has POP3 capability, again, it does not leave the messages on the server. You can configure POP3 to "Leave a copy of the messages on the server", but it is not a useful solution for long-term use. IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol version 4) is an improvement over POP3 where you leave your messages on the server, and they can synchronize with your PC. However, this does not work for items such as your Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks, only for folders that contain email messages.

Share with Others - Communicate More Effectively

Microsoft Outlook combined with Exchange provides one other unique feature not found in traditional Internet email software. Collaboration. It is the ability to share documents and information with other users in your company. Outlook has what are called Public Folders. These folders can be designed to meet your business needs. Folders can contain messages, documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel Spreadsheets, a company-wide or workgroup calendar, shared task list and shared contact lists. Great for an organization that needs to share common information. And, it's all available using our web client as well!

Keeping Data Safe and Sound

What about data security and reliability? We take every action to secure our servers and prevent Internet attacks. We follow very strict security guidelines so that unauthorized users are not able to access the system. If you use the web-client, we offer SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption between your browser and our server. This is very similar to when you shop securely on line. Also, we store your data on mirrored disks. What this means is, even in the event of a disk failure, you still have access to your data, and the system stays up and running. In addition, we back up servers nightly, and store off-site copies for extra safety.

Customer Requirements

What are the minimum requirements to use our hosted Exchange solution?

High-speed Internet connection (Cable, DSL or Higher)
Outlook 2000 or 2002 Software and Licenses*

*Outlook Web Access Only customers do not need Outlook software
*Dial-up suitable only for occasional use unless 56K is guaranteed.

If you have any questions as to whether this solution is right for your company, please contact us.