MS announces “Exchange Hosted Services”

Last week, I went to a press briefing to find out what had become of FrontBridge. The answer: a lot!

This press release sums it up nicely; the former FrontBridge services are now known as “Exchange Hosted Services” (EHS). Not a great name, since one of the first orders of business in the briefing was to clear up the difference between hosted Exchange services and EHS. That was easy enough, but imagine having to have that conversation over, and over, and over, and … well, you get the idea.

There are four EHS components: archiving, filtering, continuity, and encryption. The EHS filtering service combines all of the previously unbundled FrontBridge offerings into a single whole. The other services are, to me, more interesting because they provide pay-as-you-go options for services that formerly would have been required to be self-hosted. For example, the encryption service provides a simple way to send encrypted mail to outside recipients who may not have the capability to receive encrypted mail: you send a mail, the service captures it and sends the recipient an SSL-protected link, and the recipient clicks the link to go to the mail. This is a simple and effective approach that, in the past, would have required a hefty investment in Tumbleweed‘s products. The continuity component is interesting, too, although I’d have to give the nod to MessageOne’s EMS product because it supports calendar and contact data, has better synchronization options, and offers BlackBerry support.

My Exchange UPDATE column this week has more details (I’ll link to it once it goes live); the bottom line, though, is that the FrontBridge acquisition is complete, the new EHS products are commercially available and competitively priced, and they offer some interesting capabilities. In fact, you could even use EHS to provide filtering and policy enforcement for non-Exchange systems like Domino and OCS (both of which lack any serious built-in capabilities).