LiveOffice Launches Free Cloud-based Email Continuity Service

September 29, 2008

New no-hardware service helps SMBs disaster-proof their internal mail servers

TORRANCE, Calif., September 29, 2008 — Recently, scores of businesses in the southeastern United States have experienced significant email downtime because of Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. In an effort to help these and all businesses protect their email from the unexpected (as well as the expected), LiveOffice, the leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) email archiving solutions, today launched LiveOffice Mail Continuity as part of its fall LiveOffice Mail Archive release. This new service, which the company is offering at no charge, leverages LiveOffice’s cloud-computing infrastructure to provide free email continuity for Microsoft Exchange Server, keeping business email running during a primary mail server failure.

A September 2008 survey conducted by Osterman Research polled 165 IT managers and email administrators at midsize organizations nationwide. The findings reveal that 50 percent of respondents do not currently have an email continuity solution in place. Of those who say they do, nearly half are relying on tape backups. But tape backups fall short for email continuity in several aspects:

• Recovery can take hours, days or weeks.
• During downtime, users have no email service.
• Without business email service, users often resort to using personal email accounts during outages, exposing organizations to security risks, compliance violations and legal liability.
• All data is not recoverable—anything created after the last backup is permanently lost. For example, if backups happen daily, all data between the last day’s backup and the outage is unrecoverable.

“No matter the cause, email downtime is a serious problem for many businesses and impacts millions of users each day,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. “When an employee cannot communicate or share data via email either internally with co-workers or externally with customers, a company’s bottom line is severely jeopardized.”

Nick Mehta, CEO of LiveOffice concurs, “Historically, only the largest enterprises have been able to provide continuous email service, implementing expensive hardware-based replication and clustering solutions that cost thousands of dollars. The average SMB organization is left with nothing but AOL and Hotmail during email outages. With Mail Continuity, we are able to leverage our existing software-as-a-service infrastructure to protect clients’ email environments for free and help them take a ‘baby step’ toward a cloud-based email infrastructure.”

How Mail Continuity Works

Mail Continuity can be deployed in just days and requires no investment in hardware, software or ongoing maintenance. Since Mail Continuity leverages Microsoft Exchange Server’s existing journaling functionality, all administrators have to do is make a simple configuration change and route their messages through LiveOffice’s SAS-70 II-certified, Tier-4-compliant network.

When a company with Mail Continuity experiences a primary server failure, its IT administrator can immediately activate the service through a web-based interface or by contacting LiveOffice toll-free. Users can then access a seven-day rolling archive of their recent messages via a dedicated folder in Microsoft Outlook or remotely through a web-based, Microsoft Outlook-like interface. They also have the ability to compose, read, forward, reply to, spell check and format email during the downtime.

Since Mail Continuity leverages the same infrastructure as LiveOffice’s email archiving offering, clients using the free service can upgrade to the full Mail Archive solution with no additional deployment or configuration changes. With this version, they also benefit from Mail Archive’s robust mailbox management, e-discovery and compliance capabilities.

Introducing Unlimited Outlook

As part of the fall release, LiveOffice also announced the availability of Unlimited Outlook, a feature that tightens Mail Archive’s integration with Microsoft Outlook. These enhanced capabilities provide:

• Unlimited storage at a predictable, per-user-per-month price, eliminating the need to store emails and attachments locally as a means of circumventing mailbox quotas
• Direct access to messages from a web-based Outlook folder, allowing users to quickly and easily search, view and restore historical emails and attachments from their personal archives
• Centralized deployment of the Outlook web folder by administrators via LiveOffice’s CloudLink Console, a pure SaaS, non-stubbing approach to full Outlook integration that leaves zero footprint on client-side machines

Pricing & Availability

While this type of email continuity service has traditionally been offered for thousands of dollars, Mail Continuity is available now for free (purchase of Mail Archive is not required). Unlimited Outlook is available now as a part of the Mail Archive solution.

To signup for free Mail Continuity, please visit: http://www.liveoffice.com/archiving/email-continuity.asp.

About LiveOffice

LiveOffice is the leading provider of software-as-a-service email archiving and Hosted Exchange 2007 solutions, with more than 7,500 clients, 200 terabytes of email archived and a 99-percent client-retention rate. Founded in 1998 and backed by leading private-equity firm Summit Partners, the company has more than 100 employees with deep experience in messaging, including executives and board members from Symantec, Microsoft, FrontBridge and Postini. For more information, call 800.374.2032 or visit www.liveoffice.com.

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