Messaging systems - e-mail, voicemail, fax, and instant messaging - have become the main conduits of business. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, product plans, marketing strategies, and more are transmitted by messaging systems and retained in their databases. Calendaring, scheduling, and task list features keep employees productive. It is especially important for SMBs that are working hard to grow to get the most out of their messaging system. That means that it has to be highly reliable and available and outperform the pace of business. Reliability and performance have to remain consistent as the SMB scales the messaging system to accommodate increasing amounts of data and new users.

This paper outlines the critical requirements - reliability and availability, scalability, security, and performance - of an SMB messaging environment. It describes and end-to-end messaging solution that meets those requirements, can be configured to the unique needs of SMBs, and reduces overhead by simplifying the procurement process, implementation, and ongoing management.