In these challenging times, it is critical that we have the ability to deliver exceptional service to our luxury clients. We need to be able to respond to them quickly with the information they need. At the same time, we must constantly be on-the-go to develop and grow our business. How can we do both? A solid email platform can provide a competitive advantage.
My email platform of choice is hosted Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The power of Exchange 2007 was previously only available to Fortune 500 corporations with substantial information technology budgets. As real estate professionals, we can now leverage this sophisticated technology at an attractive price, and outsource the management of it. There is no hardware or software to purchase. You just pay a monthly subscription fee based upon the services used.
With Exchange, all of your email, calendar, contacts, and tasks are stored on a secured server (which is backed up) that you can access anytime, anywhere. You can access your information through Outlook, Entourage, or through a web browser using Outlook Web Access. Outlook Web Access has more features than ever and has many of the same capabilities that you would have using the desktop version. If you are a brokerage or working as a team, you can delegate access to an associate as needed so that they can check your messages, schedule appointments for you, update tasks, and more. For access to your critical information while on the road, you can configure real-time wireless synchronization for Blackberry, ActiveSync (iPhone and others), and Good Mobile Messaging.
I have researched many providers of hosted Exchange, and the company that my team and I have been using for the past several years is Intermedia. I have been impressed with the relability of their platform (I cannot even recall the last time there was an outage) and they are extremely responsive to support requests. Pricing for their Small Business 3 plan, which is $35.85/month, includes 3 mailboxes, 6GB of storage, 24x7 support, free Outlook 2007 / Entourage, anti-spam/ anti-virus protection, and more. Additional mailboxes are available for $11.95/month, or you can scale to a larger plan as your business grows. Wireless synchronization is available at an additional charge per mailbox requiring this access - $9.95/month for Blackberry, $2.95/month for ActiveSync (i.e. iPhone), and $19.95/month for Good Mobile Messaging.
For more information about hosted Exchange or to begin using it (30-day trial available), please signup here.
[Disclosure: LUXRETECH is a partner of Intermedia, and we receive revenue for registrations through this link. Thank you for your support of LUXRETECH and our on-going research.]
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