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Intermedia, a vendor of Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange hosting, will offer free migrations to its hosted Exchange 2010 customers when the service debuts. If "free" fits into your budget you might want to take a look.

Company officials hope the free migration offer is of particular interest to SMBs looking to upgrade from Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003. Jonathan McCormick, chief operating officer, Intermedia, said the migrations will be handled to "minimize disruption to their business and preserve the value of their existing Exchange set-up.”

The vendor's Exchange Concierge team will perform the migrations using proprietary tools for hosted Exchange 2003 and 2007: "The tools are being readied for use with hosted Exchange 2010, in part through the hosted Exchange 2010 beta Intermedia launched in May 2009. Exchange 2010 is not yet available for sale from Microsoft," they explain.

You can get the free migration if you're a new customer or existing customer upgrading to an Intermedia Exchange 2010 hosting plan. And because Intermedia's Exchange 2010 beta is hosted, no software downloads or installations are necessary, of course.

In July TMC's Anil Sharma reported that Intermedia expanded its partner program in Latin America: "With the expansion, technology providers in Latin America can offer customers Intermedia’s business productivity suite of Microsoft products, including Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and SharePoint 3.0."

The Latin American expansion "comes on the heels of Intermedia’s success with a select group of partners in the region," he reported.

Intermedia officials said providers would now be able to offer the service under their own brand, managing it with a private label version of Intermedia’s end user control panel – now available in Spanish and English. Intermedia also offers Outlook 2007 in Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese and 14 other languages.