Justin quite rightly pointed out hosted servers are the way of future, as the company I work for (www.comtek.co.nz) offer this service thought it would be a good opportunity to do some advertising.

Standard workstation are not designed to share files in a business situation, doing this is much slower and can cause loss of data because Windows XP is not really designed to share files and does have a limit of 10 connections at a time.

Better email and calendar handling – Having a server using exchange control your emails means everything is centralised. The setup and implication of the email address is quick and easier. People can change computers and there emails will be able to follow them. Sharing Calendar with other users is much easier, you can give different users different control of your calendar from just being to view to being able to add calendar events. You can also easily invite people to calendar events.

Centralised Security – Having a centralised security means that you can easily control the data that enters and leaves the office network. Monitoring the status of the computers security on the network is simple done through the server. Updates are done by the server and pushed out to the other computers on the network.

Less risk of data loss because the hosting company take care of everything – Companies that offer hosted services will have multiple drives with your data on, the chances of data loss are pretty much zero as everything will be backed up off site and all of the drives will be in a RAID5 setup with 3 or more drives sharing the same data.  If one of  the drive fail it can be pulled out while the system is running (Hot swapped) so there is no down time and only a small drop in performance while everything is synced up again.

Centralised Backups – because email and data is centralised the backups do not have copy data from around the network to make sure everything is in one place. Which means there is less chance of data loss and everything works a lot faster.

Hardware is taken care of by the hosting company – All you will be doing is renting space on a server, so there is no outlay on hardware for you.  You don’t have to worry about hardware wearing out or becoming obsolete.

Better error/fault handling, automated alerts for faults – Email reports can be sent directly from the server to any email address every week giving you a run down on disk space, event log errors and a raft of other information. Also an email can be sent as soon as certain faults are pickup. This is fully customisable on how often it send out emails and what is monitored

Centralised printing, makes it easier to manage – user profiles can setup so that all network printers are automatically installed and ready to work. Also settings on the printer can be adjusted on the server that affect everyone, things like disabling colour printing.

Remote Access – Secure access to files and emails from offsite – This means that it will be possible to login to a computer from another location and use the computer as if you are there. It’s possible to use all of the programs installed on that computer, also you can print to the local location or straight into the office. Outlook

Outlook Web Access – If is possible to login to a website and view your emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes from any web browser anywhere in the world. Handy you want to quickly check emails or organised your calendar your while at home or abroad.

If you think I’ve missed something or terrible wrong please tell me. I’ve done this as exercise as I’ve been asked a few times by clients and always forget something.

Also thank you to the random websites with the bits of information I found, I made this because I could not find one website with everything I wanted.