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Small business e-mail and collaboration should be as easy as making a telephone call. In addition, the technology should be so reliable that outages are treated with the same incredulity as telephone outages. But it isn’t.

Technology has gone a long way toward addressing these issues. Antispam solution providers, for example, battle daily to try to differentiate their particular technology by adding yet more layers to an already bewildering array of techniques designed to outwit the cunning spammer.

Meanwhile, many larger corporations still deploy a range of security solutions at different layers in their network architecture. Not unusual would be to have one vendor providing an antihacking firewall, another providing an antispam and antivirus gateway, and yet another providing e-mail server software. This leads to a level of complexity that is unmanageable for the small business, where the desirable response to an increasingly complex problem is a solution that provides increasing simplicity.

Unlike large corporations, who have teams of people committed to integrating, updating and maintaining complex, often multilayered e-mail and collaboration platforms, small businesses have fewer, less-specialized staff who have multiple areas of responsibility. They generally have neither the skills nor the time to devote to evaluating, purchasing, configuring and maintaining multiple solutions all related to the same basic services.

Installing a small business e-mail and collaboration solution should as be easy as plugging in the power, plugging in the network, firing up the administration console, entering basic TCP/IP data to configure the server, then adding users. No special training should be required, and the solution should be intuitively simple to add and delete users and to integrate the solution with the rest of the office network security. It should also be as reliable and secure as the phone system.

Solutions are available that allow for a simplification of this web of complexity. There are a number of vendors who are able to deliver robust, high-functionality, all-in-one solutions that will deliver the e-mail and collaboration needs of the small business market. These products enable multiple people to share the management of several e-mail accounts, allow access to those accounts from work, home and on the road, and provide for the setup of meetings with fellow employees.

There are two possible explanations why these solutions have not been more widely deployed within the small business community. First, small businesses baffled by the apparent technical complexity of the issue are likely to either rely on hosted services provided by their ISP, or on the advice of local systems integrators and resellers that might steer them toward more complex solutions. Often, these services only offer the most basic e-mail services, but the perceived risk of moving either to an in-house solution or to a more sophisticated solution prevents small businesses from addressing their additional needs.

The second explanation is that the vendors of all-in-one solutions have simply failed to effectively communicate the alternatives to the market, and have allowed the market to be dominated by a small number of complex, relatively expensive solutions.

To some degree, the market will help address this imbalance. Increased competition will continue to drive down the prices that value-added resellers and systems integrators are able to charge to the small business market. This, in turn, will force them to be more creative in reducing their cost base, which will involve adding more non-mainstream solutions into their inventories.

Unless vendors of less-complex, all-in-one solutions are better able to communicate their existence to the small business market, however, thereby driving demand up through value-added resellers and systems integrators, there is unlikely to be any significant change. Without this change, small businesses will continue to suffer from services that are either too basic to meet their needs or too complex and expensive for their requirements.

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This article was provided by John Davies, chairman, founder, president and CEO of Rockliffe, Campbell, Calif.