Sydney based law practice Law Partners Solicitors and Barristers (LPSB), has cleared network congestion and continual downtime by replacing its in-house Microsoft Outlook solution with hosted Exchange Server.

LPSB was established in 2003 and has six offices across NSW. E-mail is a primary means of communication between staff across sites, within offices and to it clients.

The practice replaced Microsoft Outlook with a hosted e-mail solution after it repeatedly crashed due to increased Internet usage.

LPSB managing partner Andrew Daniel said e-mail downtime served a critical blow to the company.

"When we had an issue we had to wait in a phone queue, sometimes for 30 minutes, and this was leading to decreased office productivity, which translates directly into decreased profits in our business," Daniel said.

"I knew that we had to look for an alternate solution as checking our e-mail was becoming slower and sending and receiving e-mails frequently failed.

"We conducted an analysis on the cost of implementing an in-house Microsoft Exchange server and discovered the initial setup cost for server and software would be between two to three thousand dollars and technical support and administration costs could be around $150 per hour."

LPSB switched to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 through a software-as-a-service model after evaluating cost savings between in-house and hosted offerings.

The solution, hosted by Emantra, uses NetBox Blue spam, content and virus filtering,12 mailboxes and a Web control portal.

Daniel said the hosted Exchange solution has stopped network downtime and increased productivity.