LiveOffice and Intermedia, announced on Wednesday that together they are the first to offer fully integrated, cloud-based email archiving with hosted Exchange 2010.

Intermedia is the first company to offer hosted Exchange 2010 and LiveOffice is the first to announce archiving support for Exchange 2010.

This joint offering is the first to give hosted Exchange 2010 users the ability to perform self-service restores on previously deleted items and conduct lightning-fast searches of archived messages directly from Outlook.

In addition, LiveOffice’s centralized and secure online repository enhances customers’ ability to quickly and easily meet legal discovery and regulatory compliance requirements.

“Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to get this level of enterprise technology delivered in a software-as-a-service model that works for small, medium and large companies alike,” noted Michael Osterman, principal analyst at Osterman Research. “Together, LiveOffice and Intermedia are changing the way people think about their corporate email and making the hosted model extremely attractive. Customers maintain control while completely offloading the security and administrative headaches common with on-premise email deployments. It’s a win-win – companies get access to the latest technologies available and free up internal IT resources to focus on other important business initiatives.”

LiveOffice is the top provider of hosted email archiving services with more than 9,000 clients, while Intermedia operates the world’s largest hosted Exchange service, hosting more than 225,000 premium Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. In combination with Intermedia’s hosted Exchange 2010, LiveOffice offers:

• Outlook integration: End users can access LiveOffice Personal Archive from a web-based folder available via Outlook, allowing them to rapidly search, view and restore their historical emails and attachments from their archives, even if they already permanently deleted them from their Exchange mailboxes.
• Secure repository with lightning-fast search: LiveOffice offers an independent, third-party cloud-based archive, where all messages are stored in multiple, geographically dispersed SAS-70 Type II, Tier-4 data centers. With all messages users have sent and received—even those already deleted from their Exchange mailboxes—safely stored and indexed in their archive, customers can instantly enforce email preservation for lawsuits/legal holds and protect attorney-client privileged communications from further review. LiveOffice’s real-time search and retrieval functionality helps customers significantly reduce the time it takes to respond to e-discovery and audit requests, maximizing resources and improving overall efficiency.
• Free archive migration tools: With LiveOffice CloudMerge automated migration tools, customers can easily and securely migrate their legacy email data (messages and attachments) from their current archiving solution to LiveOffice’s hosted archive and have it fully accessible via Outlook—without business disruption. These tools can ingest data from on-premise email stores, other hosted email stores, legacy email archives and personal archives (PST/NSF files).

“We are excited to be working with an organization of Intermedia’s caliber and for the opportunity to extend the reach of our archiving services to a new client base,” said Jim O’Hara, vice president, sales and business development for LiveOffice. “Our archiving support for Exchange 2010 coupled with Intermedia’s hosted Exchange puts a powerful toolset at the fingertips of businesses that want the latest technology without dealing with lengthy deployment times or large data center build outs.”

“We are pleased to work with a top archiving provider like LiveOffice to offer customers increased levels of technology and service,” says Bob Leibholz, vice president of sales and business development, Intermedia. “The combination of our hosted Exchange 2010 and the archiving features from LiveOffice are critical for businesses of all sizes.”

In addition to the new features Microsoft has included in Exchange 2010, Intermedia’s hosted Exchange 2010 service offers:

• Super premium infrastructure, spanning four data centers, to protect email and speed routing: Customers are able to select the data center of their choice – each with multiple Tier-1 Internet provider connections and hardware from Cisco, Dell and EMC – to ensure the fastest round trip for their email. Email records are mirrored in near real-time across data centers, assuring data protection and email reliability even in the event of a disaster. Intermedia’s hosted Exchange 2010 includes the industry’s first 100 percent Data Protection Guarantee as well as a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee.
• Free full-service migration: Using proprietary migration tools, Intermedia is capable of migrating customers to hosted Exchange 2010 from their current email systems, often Exchange 2003 or 2000, Lotus Notes or POP/IMAP. Customers’ accounts can instantly be setup, enabling them to immediately begin using the service.
• Control of the Exchange environment: Unique in an industry that relies on generic third-party control panels, Intermedia’s HostPilot® Control Panel was designed for small- and medium-sized businesses. It enables business owners and IT managers to delegate complex Exchange administration – such as deleting data from a lost BlackBerry Wireless Handheld™ – to non-technical staff.
• Support with an average hold time of less than one minute: Support is available by phone and email, 24 hours a day. Intermedia support representatives are certified by Microsoft and RIM.