Small business, Tips and more...

Exchange labs is definitively a good thing. By principle it is.
We have one important implementation here in Slovenia and we are facing some issues that can affect the overall opinion about the success of the project.
Exchange Labs is not so reliable. In many cases is offline, a few emails never arrive to destiny and for some reason emails are routed to the spam folders on the recipient side.
My advise is: The value of Exchange Labs for your customers is huge, but the service is still not fully functional and that is something your customer should know in order to set the correct expectations.

B4Contact, the company I work for, is finishing an important project that integrates the power of Windows SharePoint Services, Live ID and Exchange Labs. You can see the Web site in www.dostop.si.
So, why is this so important? Well, I will start explaining what the portal does:

1. It enables students to send registration requests to the portal using an interesting workflow that helps site administrators to validate the information and accept or decline the request.
2. Once accepted the server will create the users, Live IDs, and Exchange Labs mailboxes.
3. Users will receive an automatic email notification with the credentials.
4. And other things that not relevant to this post.

All that means that the students will get free access in a fully automated process to Exchange Labs... a huge Exchange organization designed to offer Exchange email. It is free for education institutions.
It is a real opportunity to offer to your local schools the free service of Exchange emails: that includes Outlook Web access, 10GB of storage per mailbox, antivirus and antispam. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook client, includes calendars and all that that makes Exchange a winner in the market.