IT Freedom TeamUp™ Goes Live!

We're very excited to announce the addition of IT Freedom TeamUp™ to our Network Freedom™ service package. TeamUp is an incredibly rich and feature-packed email, calendaring, and collaboration environment.

TeamUp provides a centralized database store for email, contacts, and calendaring, and it gives you the ability to conduct workgroup activities like delegating mailbox access to your assistant, sharing contacts with other team members, scheduling meetings using free/busy information from everyone's calendars. Moreover, it lets you do this from a wide variety of hardware and software environments, like Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, iPhones, Windows Mobile phones, Blackberries (coming soon), and web browsers (the browser interface is pretty amazing; you might want to ditch Outlook completely).

What's more, we're not charging anything extra for TeamUp. All of our Network Freedom™ customers, new and existing, will see no additional recurring charge on their bill for TeamUp, save for a small setup fee. We're doing this because TeamUp is a great product, and we want to encourage adoption of it. Even you customers running Microsoft Exchange may want to migrate to TeamUp: you'll likely save money, you'll get a groupware environment that beats Exchange in functionality and features, and your email and other information will be housed in our secure, redundant data center in a server environment that is much more robust than you could realistically afford on your own.

We've been watching and waiting for a long time for an alternative to Microsoft Exchange to appear and mature. But why not just host Exchange itself? Exchange is available to Microsoft resellers as hosting option, and several providers already sell a hosted Exchange service. We definitely considered Exchange for our purposes, but decided not to go down that path for several reasons. First of all, Microsoft Exchange is just too dang pricey, so we would have had to charge a significant monthly service fee for an Exchange-based service, which we didn't want to do. Exchange is also a "closed", proprietary system, making it difficult to expand or integrate with other applications and services. Lastly, Exchange is "yesterday's product", in our opinion.

On the other hand, TeamUp provides all of the features of Exchange, has a much more affordable licensing structure, uses open, standards-based protocols, and runs on our favorite platform, the trusty, open-source Linux operating system. TeamUp is produced by a company called Zimbra, now a Yahoo company, and is a much newer product than Exchange. Hence, it was built with the Internet in mind, so in my opinion is much more of a "tomorrow" product, so it's something we can extend and expand on over time.

The team has been working very hard on the deployment, testing, and documentation of TeamUp for several months, so it's thrilling to finally be able to deliver this baby. My thanks to the entire team.

If you are curious about TeamUp and would like more information, feel free to contact me. The easiest way is to just shoot an email to info@itfreedom.com.

Regards,
Carey