SoftCom Corporate Blog

Greetings,

We get a lot of inquiries from prospective customers asking what the difference is between our Microsoft Exchange offering  and that of our competitors’.  A perfectly reasonable question given the fact that we are all selling the same core software, but how that software is packaged makes an enormous difference.

First, the obvious points:

• Price
• Provisioning - is your account created instantly?
• How much diskspace is provided - make sure to compare what is included + what is charged for additional space!
• What are the service levels like?
• What is the support like

I know we excel on all the above points but what’s often overlooked when looking for a hosted Exchange provider is the management interface. Essentially how easy is it to manage your account after you’ve paid and signed up?

Today, and over the next few weeks, I want to cover some of the things that we do that I feel are really unique in the market. Things that make our offering outstanding.

The first are some enhancements we’ve done to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) - the web-based option of Exchange for accessing your email, calendar, contacts and other personal information - that comes with all of our Exchange offerings.

Our customers can log into the OWA either by going to 

a. http://exchange.mail2web.com or
b. http://exchange.<yourdomainname>.ext ( an option for Business Exchange customers only).

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a stack of buttons on the left-hand navigation. We have added a button at the bottom of the stack, called “My Email Settings”. Click on this button and, while still within the OWA, you will now see a page that allows you to manage your account.

Rather than having to log into a separate control panel to access management functions, you can accomplish most tasks, like changing your password, display name or downloading your copy of Microsoft(r) Outlook(r), directly from the OWA with a single click.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers even have the option of creating a unique OWA login page. The account administrator can even select from a variety of design templates, through the mail2web.com account control panel, to customize the OWA login page.

Check out mine: http://exchange.carthy.ca  

This is very handy if you are setting up an account for someone else and want to give them access to basic management features without exposing the mail2web.com brand (you may also want to customize the logo displayed in the upper, left-hand corner which can be quickly uploaded through the mail2web.com control panel).

We’ve made a ton of other improvements that we’ll continue to write about in the coming weeks.

And of course, if there is a particular feature you want to see, please leave a comment.

Thanks,
John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.