Just when you thought you couldn’t take the pain of reading another blog entry around cloud computing, here comes another one. Please bear with it – I promise it’s not the same as the rest – and could hopefully save you a few pennies by avoiding a costly mistake.

Many companies are considering a move to a cloud-based service (or in reality a hosted-service) for their messaging platforms. For those companies with the correct risk profile this can make a lot of sense. It can significantly reduce cost and for a lot of organizations, particularly smaller ones with limited in-house IT, they are likely to see a significantly improved service. Notably in terms of uptime, reliability, performance, and value-add services such as spam filtering and virus scrubbing.

Microsoft are doing extremely well in this area with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) as part of their Online Services portfolio. We’re big fans and we even use BPOS internally here at KnowledgeMill. BPOS as you would expect is based on Microsoft Exchange. As most of us in the industry would agree, Exchange is a great messaging platform. However, it is exactly what it says on the tin, a “messaging” platform. Kept within the correct limits and guidelines Exchange does a fantastic job, hence it is the world’s most popular collaboration platform for businesses. However, Exchange is not designed to store massively huge numbers of emails, never ending mailboxes, and massive outlook folders. Nor is it designed to meet your records management, email filing, or compliance rules that are specific to your industry. Putting your email service in the cloud does not solve these problems – and can often make it more complicated.

This is exactly why the supporting systems that sit around your mail platform e.g. your archiving system, records management system, email filing solution, or integrated document management solution (you will inevitably still need these), must be designed to work with cloud hosted solutions. Pretty much all cloud providers will prohibit the installation of 3rd party products against their servers – this means that supporting systems are very much likely to be incompatible.

Our products at KnowledgeMill are different and are designed from the outset to work with on-site, hosted, and cloud email services. This is because our core email management product for Exchange – known as Exchange Warehouse uses a unique agent-based approach. The agent which moves emails from Exchange into the ContextStore (our secure and scalable repository) can run both as a desktop service or as a server service. This means you can archive and file emails simply by installing a tiny piece of software on your desktop with no server-side exchange integration at all. We run this internally and it’s fully certified and tested against Microsoft BPOS.

The other really cool thing is that the KnowledgeMill ContextStore can live anywhere you desire – on-site in your own data center, hosted with a hosting partner, in a private cloud or out on a public cloud such as Amazon EC2, Go-Grid or MS Azure. As you can see, we’re ready for the cloud right now or when you decide the time is right for your business.