BlueTie - Low Cost Alternative to Hosted Exchange

It's difficult to justify spending the money and maintaining an Exchange server when you are a Small Business. But Microsoft's Exchange server is pretty much the defacto standard when it comes to e-mail, calendaring, and contact management in today's workplace.

 Many SMBs turn to Hosted Exchange servers to solve this problem. The main cost avoided with Hosted Exchange is maintenance. Essentially, a Small Business is paying for an outsourced vendor to maintain their Exchange environment.

But even Hosted Exchange is still a relatively costly investment. Hosted Exchange can range from $4.95/user to $575/month (on the 50+ user end).

One of the new players on the block is a company called BlueTie. They aren't offering Exchange but their product looks very slick at first glance.

BlueTie's service includes what you would normally expect in Exchange and more: e-mail, collaborative calendaring (and tasks), and shared contact management. Their BlueTie Pro edition also provides IM. The major difference, however, between BlueTie and Hosted Exchange is the AJAX interface - check out their demo (available on the homepage) to see it in action.

The free service is actually pretty comprehensive (and generous in my opinion), providing up to 20 users per account and 5GB of storage per user. The free service does not include toll-free phone or e-mail support and lacks what I consider a killer feature: BlueTie's DirectConnect.

DirectConnect provides Outlook synchronization, POP3/IMAP, and WAP 2.0 mobile support. Synchronization can occur two-ways, Outlook to BlueTie, or BlueTie to Outlook. BlueTie was smart to play nice with Outlook and mobile devices.

BlueTie Pro pricing is very competitive at $4.99/user per month. Of course, you can use the free version too (and in that case, a similar offering is Google Apps for your Domain). If you are looking for a low cost Exchange alternative, you may want to give BlueTie a serious look.

Metrics - BlogTracker from IceRocket

As mentioned previously, metrics are the lifeblood of your web presence. There are a number of blog specific metrics tools available. If you are running a blog only, you'll want to experiment with at least one blog specific stat program.

A blog is a particular type of a website, with specific elements associated with it. Some of those include comments, the fact that each post typically gets its own page, etc. Having a stats package that takes these things into account will paint a better picture for what's occurring on your blog.

BlogTracker is one of the newest blog stat tools on the market. It's provided free through IceRocket - which is a blog search engine.

It's definitely not as comprehensive as some of the other tools (e.g., it doesn't give you information on popular posts). But one of the interesting aspects is that it will give you a rank, based on your stats versus the other bloggers using the tool.

If you haven't used any web stats programs to this point, especially not one for blogs, give BlogTracker a try. It should provide a gentle introduction for you.