How Managed Exchange Can Increase Your Business?

Managed Exchange can help your business by converting Microsoft Outlook from an email communication device into a critical work tool. Get Better access to critical and frequently used information, Book or reserve popular shared company resources and Coordinate your daily schedules through personal calendar tools by Managed Exchange.

Staff can access their email and Outlook work tools (mentioned above) through a number of web-enabled devices such as: Desktop PCs, laptops, PDAs with GPRS, WAP mobile phones with GPRS, Blackberry mobile devices with GPRS. Data is constantly synchronized and updated, so no matter how staffs access their work tools, they always have the most up-to-date information when online. It helps staff be more organized and get more out of their day.

Managed Exchange is ideal for any business whose staffs need to work together using frequently shared information and need to have flexible access to critical work tools such as email, contacts and calendar when they cannot make it into the office.

Service providers Managed Exchange Solution allows smaller businesses to leverage all of the functionality of Microsoft Exchange, without having to cover the associated capital and operating costs associated with running an Exchange Server in-house. Managed Exchange is also suitable for small businesses with limited IT resources because all service providers are able to manage the back-end for you.

Your Managed Exchange service can generally be activated within one business day. For larger, customized configurations, service provider will arrange with you a suitable timeframe for activation of your service. You can get protection from spam, viruses and malware before they reach your network. No software, hardware or user training required.

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What is Clustering and Load Balancing?

Clustering is often understood to mean the capability of some software to provide load balancing services, and load balancing is often used as a synonym for a hardware- or third-party-software-based solution.

In practice, clustering is usually used with application servers like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Oracle AS (10g). Also being used in that environment are load balancing features found in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) like BIG-IP. (For simplicity, we will talk about "clustering" versus "ADC" approaches.)

Scalability

There are hardware load balancers, of course, but there we talk about "pools" or "farms," the server groupings where application requests get distributed. It is in the software world that the term "cluster" is applied to that same group.

Clustering will typically convert one instance of an application server to a master controller, then process/distribute requests to multiple instances using such industry standard algorithms as round robin, weighted round robin or least connections. Clustering is similar to load balancing in that it has horizontal scalability, a nearly transparent way to add additional instances of application servers for increased capacity or response time performance. To ensure that an instance is actually available, clustering approaches typically use an ICMP ping check or, sometimes, HTTP or TCP connection checks.

Health and Transparency

For load balancing, ADCs support the same industry algorithms, but have additional, complex number-crunching processes, and check such parameters as per-server CPU and memory utilization, fastest response times, etc. ADCs also support more robust health monitoring than the simple app server clustering solutions. This means they can verify content and do passive monitoring, dispensing with even the low impact of health checks on app server instances.

For applications that require the user to interact with the same server during a session, clustering uses server affinity to get the user there. This is most common during the execution of a process like order entry, where the session is used between pages (requests) to store data needed to close a transaction, like a shopping cart.

For the same situation, ADCs use persistence. Clustering solutions are usually somewhat limited as to the variables they can use, while ADCs can not only use traditional application variables but also get other information from the application or network-based data.

More than a few clustering solutions need node-agents deployed on each instance of an application server that is "clustered" by a controller. It may not be a burden as far as deploying and managing it, since it is often in place, but it is still means more processes running on the servers and consuming memory and CPU resources. Of course, it also adds another possible failure point to the data path. Since ADCs need no server-side components, they remain completely transparent.

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What is Cluster Hosting?

Having a web site is a necessity for the success of most businesses in today's technologically advanced society. However, just having a web site doesn't mean that it is going to get the public exposure needed to be successful. That is where web hosting comes into play. With web hosting you rent a place in a server and exposure to the internet. The pricing of web hosting can range anywhere from the bare minimum for free to the most advanced for a varied prices depending on the web hosting company and the type of web hosting you decide to go with.

One type of web hosting that works toward getting exposure to your web site, but is somewhat less common than other types of web hosting is Cluster Hosting. The configuration of cluster hosting tends to lean more toward more complex design, implementation and support. Networking of shared resources of computing, as well as varied implementations of those resources comprises a cluster. It is often referred to as a server farm since is consists of a group of independent servers. However, the group functions together toward a common goal.

If a company experiences an IT system failure, there can be a lot of money lost while the website is down. This is where cluster hosting comes into play. When connected directly to a single server, if failure occurs the user cannot reconnect; whereas with a cluster the user can immediately reconnect and keep going with what they were doing. If one server of a cluster host would happen to fail, there is an automatic backup.

A complex cluster can take data and split it into manageable sections that independent servers can then process. In this way if a single server should fail there is no affect to the others. There are a couple of different kinds of cluster configurations in cluster hosting as well. These include an active/passive cluster and active/active cluster. The active/passive situation involves a passive server being idle until the case where the active server fails. If the active server fails, the passive server then takes over where the other one left off. In the configuration of active/active the whole group of servers can be active and be backup servers to each other. Each server can take on the role of the others in this type of cluster configuration.

No matter the type of web hosting you choose, you should be sure that the web hosting company you choose clearly defines every aspect of their services and the services that are available to you and your company specifically. You should be very careful in your selection of a cluster hosting company. With cluster hosting there is the need to ensure that the web hosting company can provide you with an adequate number of cluster servers to handle the level of traffic your web site will experience. The success or failure of your company infrastructure depends on your choice in a web host.

The main reason for choosing cluster web hosting is be sure that there is a redundancy available in the computer network. This ensures that the network is always available and will not fail. In turn the company's website is always accessible and navigable.

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How To Resolve OST Synchronization Error

In Microsoft Outlook, an offline folder (.ost file) is a locally stored file that is synchronized with your mailbox contents stored on Microsoft Exchange Server. The folders empower you to access them even when the mail delivery or network service is not available. The file converts into a usable .pst file as the synchronization process succeeds. But there can be several synchronization errors, due to which your .ost file might become unusable. In such cases, you might need to restore its contents from a backup stored as a .pst file. If it is not feasible, you should use a third-party tool to Convert OST to PST.

For an instance, you use Microsoft Outlook 2002 or 2003 with an offline folder. You press F9 to synchronize your .ost file with your Exchange Server mailbox, but fail to do so and come across the below error message:

"The file .ost cannot be accessed because it has been configured for use with a different mailbox."

If you close the application and try to perform synchronization again, you receive the same error message.

The Reason:
As the error message suggests, this error is encountered if you are attempting to synchronize the mailbox with an .ost file that is configured to use a different server or e-mail account. This usually occurs if you perform these steps in order:

You synchronize your .ost file with the mailbox 2-You perform some changes in name of either e-mail server or mailbox in your email account profile.

Doing so makes the current .ost file unusable.

Best Possible Solution
Create a new email profile with the desired account settings and restore data using any of the below solution:
  1. You can then include the .pst files maintained as a backup of previous .ost file.

  2. You can also copy this information to a .pst file from your mailbox after changing the changed email settings back to the original state.

  3. If applying the above solutions are not possible, Convert OST to a usable .pst file.


Convert OST to PST are powerful applications that are competent to convert an usable .ost file into a usable .pst file after any type of crash.

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Desktop is an effective utility that converts an .ost file into a .pst file. It can Convert OST by maintaining data integrity. Designed to perform safe file conversion, this utility can restore all file objects including emails, notes, journals, tasks and more. It is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2002, 2000, 98 and 97.

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