Microsoft’s Exchange Online is the hosted version of their Exchange Server. It was initially introduced as part of the Exchange Server 2010 release and gives organizations most of the same benefits that on-premises Exchange deployments provide.

 

Since it’s integrated with the Microsoft Outlook client, companies using Exchange Online can make use of hosted emails, contacts and calendars at $5 a month per user. It is available either as a standalone service or part of the Microsoft Office 365 collaboration suite.

 

Exchange Online provides users with the following services:

 

• Mobile device security policies like "remove device" wipe and PIN lock.

• Mobile access with push email, contacts and calendar through Exchange ActiveSync.

• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and 2010 connectivity with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer browsers.

• Compatible with Apple iPhone and iPad, Microsoft Windows Phone, and lots of Android and Nokia phones.

• 25 GB mailboxes and the capability of sending up to 25 MB of messages.

• Company directory, shared contacts and distribution groups.

• Voicemail preview, company auto-attendant, and call answering rules

• Hosted voicemail that is compatible with on-premises  Lync Server 2010 and PBX phone systems.

• 99.9% uptime commitment with service level agreement (SLA) financial backing.

• The ability to share free or busy calendar data with other companies.

• Deleted mailbox recovery and deleted item retention.

• Ongoing data backup between globally-redundant data centers.

• Ongoing intrusion monitoring and detection.

• Spam/virus filtering with Microsoft Forefront Online Security.

• HTTPs connections

• Policies that allow email data to expire automatically or preserve it for compliance purposes.