Hosted Exchange

MartMax

Hi

Just a quick shot here. Has anyone used hosted MS Exchange service? How do you find it against other solutions? I am looking around again, for a small firm less than 10 employees if it beats running costs of own mailserver.

marty

steve-hosting36

Hosted exchange should definitely beat the TCO on an in-house server, especially for a small company of less than 20-30 users. Hosted options often include anti-spam, anti-virus, blackberry / pda support and other features (like sharepoint integration) for a simple monthly fee, instead of the capex, software licensing and maintenance otherwise required.

In terms of how it runs, with a good control panel, it's actually simpler to admin than an in-house box too

m_stan

I know it doesn't answer the question, but just in case - Google are looking into providing GMail for the enterprise on your own domain. This is the way all software services will be delivered in the future - Software As A Service. I work for one of the on demand players, so I'm a little biased in this area

Read about it here.

seamus

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Hosted exchange should definitely beat the TCO on an in-house server, especially for a small company of less than 20-30 users. Hosted options often include anti-spam, anti-virus, blackberry / pda support and other features (like sharepoint integration) for a simple monthly fee, instead of the capex, software licensing and maintenance otherwise required.

In terms of how it runs, with a good control panel, it's actually simpler to admin than an in-house box too

I have to agree completely. Email is one of the most troublesome of services to run in-house because of all the things Steve mentions above. It's also so heavily used, and so important these days that the "IT Guy" in a company could find himself bombarded if the mail system goes down. If your intranet server goes down, people will give out, but they'll continue working. If the mail server goes down, that signals some people to the coffee machine, and the bosses' blood pressure to go up.

Unless you have a few hundred users, a dire need for your mail server in-house, or a dedicated server admin, then hosted mail is really your only man.

Do some hosted exchange packages allow for Outlook integration (via vpn tunnelling, etc), or does it purely appear as a standard POP mail service to the client?

Asok

It can be both seamus with outlook 2k3 you can now use the rpc connection to access the nyom exchange features on a hosted exchange.

MartMax

cheers guys. i'm still looking for an affordable and reliable hosted exchange provider. then i will make the proposal to the client. let me know if anyone has any good provider accross their mind!

mart

Serbian

m_stan wrote:

I know it doesn't answer the question, but just in case - Google are looking into providing GMail for the enterprise on your own domain. This is the way all software services will be delivered in the future - Software As A Service. I work for one of the on demand players, so I'm a little biased in this area

Read about it here.

I think you linked to the wrong page there...

steve-hosting36

You'll find the going rate for Exchange 2003 is about 10 euro per month per user/seat - mainly due to the MS per seat licensing, and the much more significant infrastructure and skills needed to do Exchange properly (which is why most hosts don't provide it at all).

That said, that will include Outlook 2003 (full software) as well as Outlook Web Access (OWA) and probably a degree of AV/A-spam service.

tom-thebox

It can be a gift not to support exchange yourself, I have a nightmare everyonce and a while I wake up in a cold sweat, I dream that I am an exchange admin

too_sleepy

Hi

Can anyone recommend any of the Exchange host providers?

Until now I've been using the usual pop email with the web hosts. This isn't really a goer anymore and the performance of the email and web hosts hasn't been great. I usually look to Irish companies but I'm worried about the reliability.

One other questions, do I only have two choices for web hosting
1) Dedicated server, where I need to manage everything
2) shared, suffer poor performance as it's shared with other sites.

mneylon

too_sleepy wrote:

1) Dedicated server, where I need to manage everything
2) shared, suffer poor performance as it's shared with other sites.

You can also get managed dedicated and managed colo

steve-hosting36

Why would you be worried about the reliability of Irish providers? Why not visit / tour some of them to allay your concerns?