If you're a small business (or even a "medium" one) you might suffer from the "accidental IT person" syndrome. That is, the person with a knack for computers somehow accidentally becomes the IT person for the business. That's perfectly fine when it comes to keeping people's desktops running or setting up the file server. But email is growing to become a mission critical need for all businesses. When email goes down, the business goes down.

Adding to the problem is that the skills required to do email correctly are hard to find and require a lot of experience to develop. Unlike a lot of Microsoft servers, you can't just drop an Exchange server in your network and expect it to work perfectly for long -- unless you build its enviornment correctly.

Alternatively, you can outsource this critical service to an outside vendor with layers upon layers of redundancy. In this podcast, I talk with Apptix, one of those very vendors that prides themselves on being a perfect fit for the SMB. In fact, they're the largest email outsourcer in the world. Learn from Apptix Director of Engineering James Bond about what's cool and exciting in the world of Exchange outsourcing, and what you need to know to do outsourcing correctly.

Oh, and yes, that is his name, and we even talk about a few funny stories about his time at the Pentagon...seriously... James is also an entertaining speaker, which makes this interview a whole lot of fun. Its worth a few minutes of your time...