Global Micro Hosted Services are available to your company over your Internet connection. It may replace applications that operated within your company network. The traffic that previously was confined to your network will now travel between your company and the Internet. You must ensure that your company’s connection to the Internet is configured correctly and that it has enough capacity to handle the network traffic.

network configuration
If your company protects your connection to the Internet with a firewall or proxy server, refer to the table below to see the ports used by Hosted Exchange.

The computers on your network must be able to successfully perform standard Internet DNS lookups. If your computers can reach standard Internet sites, your network meets this requirement.

bandwidth considerations
Global Micro currently offers these collaborative services: Hosted Exchange and Hosted SharePoint. Each of the services has its own bandwidth requirements.

There are many variables to consider when estimating network traffic. Some of these variables are:

• The services that your company has subscribed to
• The number of client computers in use at one time
• The type of task each client computer is performing
• The performance of your Internet browser software
• The capacity of the network connections and network segments associated with each client computer
• Your company’s network topology and the capacity of the various pieces of network hardware

The following sections provide guidelines for estimating the bandwidth usage of each service. Detailed specifications are beyond the scope of this topic. For more detailed information about estimating the network traffic for each service, please contact our support desk.

hosted exchange
The information in this section will help you begin to estimate the network bandwidth that your company will need to run Hosted Exchange.

The estimates provided in this section are based on the following assumptions:

• The average message size is 50 kilobytes (KB).
• Every message delivered is read.
• Half of all incoming mail is deleted.
• OWA clients log on and log off two times per day.

To apply this information to your company, consider the following examples. Each example assumes that the users are in the same time zone and that they perform most of their work during the same eight hours of the day.

Example: If your company has 100 heavy Office Outlook 2007 users, here’s how to calculate the average network traffic, measured in bytes per second.

Network bytes/sec = (100 heavy users × (5,200 KB/user ÷ day)) ÷ (8 hr/day × 3600 sec/hr) = 18.5 KB/sec

Assuming a daily peak of twice the average usage, your network connection would need to support approximately 37 KB/sec.

Example: If your company has 100 medium OWA users, here’s how to calculate the average network traffic, measured in bytes per second.

Network bytes/sec = (100 medium users × (12,220 KB/user ÷ day)) ÷ (8 hr/day × 3600 sec/hr) = 42.4 KB/sec

Assuming a daily peak of twice the average usage, your network connection would need to support approximately 84.9 KB/sec.

hosted sharepoint
The information provided in this section will help you begin to estimate the network bandwidth that your company will require to run Hosted SharePoint. This information is based on the following assumptions:

• An average interaction (page load) transfers approximately 100 KB.
• A typical user generates about 36 interactions (page loads) per hour.
• About 10 percent of a company’s users will be active at the same time.

To show how to apply this information to your company, consider the following example. This example assumes that all of the users are in the same time zone and that they perform most of their work during the same eight hours of the day.

Example: If your company has 1000 Hosted SharePoint users, here’s how to calculate the average network traffic for each user, measured in bytes per second.

Network bits per second = (100,000 bytes/load × 8 bits/byte × 36 loads/hr) ÷ 3600 seconds/hr = 8000 bits per second

A company with 1000 users would have approximately 100 active users at any one time. Those 100 users would require approximately 800 x 8000 bits per second or 800 kilobits per second of available network bandwidth. Assuming a daily peak of twice the average usage, your network connection would need to provide approximately 1.6 megabits per second of network bandwidth.

In addition to the bandwidth requirement, Hosted SharePoint requires a network latency of no greater than 250 milliseconds.