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In today’s fast-paced world along with the growth of cloud computing, customers who use email hosting solution Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange soon might no longer have much use for it at the office. The application works well as an e-mail client, yet Microsoft included messaging capabilities in later releases of Windows causing the offering to be renamed to Windows messaging in 1996 and Microsoft Outlook eventually became its successor.

However, the release of another Exchange product appeared during the same year for servers. The so-called Microsoft Exchange Server, which is an X.400-based client–server mail system that works with MS Outlook, has gained wide usage as it offers wireless synchronization of e-mail on major mobile devices and access to browser-based information.

There are many benefits of using Exchange Server: On site, it has improved HTML e-mail messaging, whereas, off site is has offered mobile messaging.

Another benefit of using the MS Exchange server is that one can use Exchange Web Services to provide the interoperability between servers and client applications, and enable Exchange ActiveSync for mobile phone users to access their e-mail.

It appears though to be the end of client-based computing with the need to move software from clients to a more secure and central place, like a server. It also appears to be the “death” of Microsoft Exchange, as a result of the need for increased mobility and SMBs moving toward the cloud.

 “The influx of browser-based solutions like Zimbra (News - Alert), Zarafa and Google Apps” that offer open source-based distributions and open standards technology for building an Application Ready Infrastructure (API) are increasingly being found to be dependable, secure and stable as well as cost-effective, causing them to emerge as ideal alternatives for Microsoft Exchange and client-based computing.

These days, more and more SMBs and individuals are transitioning to the cloud era as cloud computing offers many benefits to include running apps off-site by a hosted Exchange Server provider.

Cloud-based computing hosting services that include MS Exchange on-premises and online in a hybrid deployment are suitable solutions for offering the flexibility of in-house applications and the use of an off-site (remote) server-based cloud infrastructure.

There is for now still a need to run MS Exchange Server on-premises, but being able to have use of it online at any time, anywhere and delivered as a cloud service, hosted by Microsoft (so-named Microsoft Exchange Online) or offered as an email hosting solution (Software-as-a-Service) in the cloud can free a business from needing to manage multiple applications on-site.

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