Advantages in running own email server

I've been pondering this one too. I have my own domain and in order to get push, I've set my hosting up to forward a copy of the email to my gmail. This way, I have the simplicity of not hosting it myself, and I get push email for my own domain. It's cheap as I use a basic service for £40 per year (inc domain).

I was looking into hosting myself on a dedicated IP but I just don't think it's worth the hassle (especially if there is a fault) in terms of availability.
 
£33 per user per year plus VAT, a domain is £10 max.

It's not terrible. If you really wanted to get the costs down then Exchange Online Plan 1 is £2.50 a month per user.
 
Thing is, I have unlimited email addresses, whereas you pay for each new one with a managed service.

Costs me £40 per year for the hosting, plus £10 for the domain. And as I've set it to copy to my gmail, I get push email.
 
You can have as many aliases as you want on either of the above services, you only pay for each physical person using them.

You also get push with Exchange ActiveSync.
 
There are a few reasons why you wouldn't choose office 365 for email or hosted email In general, financially I struggle to see how it works for big organisations over 150 users. When you have this many users chances are you will have in house servers and using virtualisation. Cost of exchange is peanuts even with cals
 
It's nowhere near peanuts if you add on the cost of sitting it behind something like Mimecast if you aren't having redundant links out to the internet, staff time to look after it, over 7TB of storage required to give people 50GB mailboxes, more if you want to give people archive mailboxes that are included with Office 365 etc etc. Then the time required to patch the system, upgrade to a new Exchange version roughly every 3-4 years, not to mention that if the users want Office on iPad then you're looking at Office 365 ProPlus subscriptions anyway which are only ~£5 a month less than E3.

The biggest benefit of getting running mail servers out of the sphere of responsibilities of your IT department is that they are freed up to do something that might actually move the business forward.
 
Lets be honest here, people are still using Exchange 2003. Unless your business requires bleeding edge Exchange updates you can usually sit on the same version of Exchange for 7-10 years. Dont get me wrong I love new kit but spending more for the sake of it is exactly what Microsoft what you to do. I agree with the redundancy but space is relatively cheap and again I'm not talking about 10 users (Office 365 all the way) I'm talking about businesses with 150+. They would usually have inhouse servers and IT inhouse or outsourced looking after the IT anyway for their other needs unless completely cloud but thats rare at this stage. So adding Exchange tasks to that is not a biggy if Exchange is configured correctly to begin with. Office 365 is just Exchange online so how you setup users etc.. and the work involved is the same. And yes I'm not talking about backend database management/backups just purely from the administration point of view. I love Office 365 and refer it to most of my clients but not all needs are the same.
 
Also I don't know many businesses that allow for a 50GB mailbox, its bad management in my eyes. 2-5GB max in order to keep databases in check. Of course the boss usually has the 25gb+ mailbox but the other staff lock with a quota.
 
We recently imposed a 2GB archive limit - exchange 2010. Even I'm annoyed with this!

Like most companies we buy one skip one for exchange - Had 2003 skipped 2007, have 2010, skipping 2013.

Same with Office, we're on 2010 for that.
 
krozor said:
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Well if you're not going to compare like for like then of course the financials will never add up :confused:

You're right, Office 365 is more expensive than Exchange 2003 that was set up once a decade ago and is still running. It's also better in every way.
 
krozor said:
Lets be honest here, people are still using Exchange 2003. Unless your business requires bleeding edge Exchange updates you can usually sit on the same version of Exchange for 7-10 years. Dont get me wrong I love new kit but spending more for the sake of it is exactly what Microsoft what you to do. I agree with the redundancy but space is relatively cheap and again I'm not talking about 10 users (Office 365 all the way) I'm talking about businesses with 150+. They would usually have inhouse servers and IT inhouse or outsourced looking after the IT anyway for their other needs unless completely cloud but thats rare at this stage. So adding Exchange tasks to that is not a biggy if Exchange is configured correctly to begin with. Office 365 is just Exchange online so how you setup users etc.. and the work involved is the same. And yes I'm not talking about backend database management/backups just purely from the administration point of view. I love Office 365 and refer it to most of my clients but not all needs are the same.
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You are mixing and matching lots of different things.

- Not updating your systems has nothing to do with giving Microsoft money. Most places running Enterprise software are paying some sort of maintenance, which entitles them to free upgrades.

- Enterprise storage is incredibly expensive.

- Having in-house servers and in-house IT staff has very little to do with running Exchange. Messaging is a specialist subject, which is super high visibility (everyone from the CEO down are affected by any issues) and requires a lot of ongoing support. In other words, looking after a messaging infrastructure consumes a disproportionately high amount of time. It's also harder to hire generalists that are also good at Exchange, or you have to hire a specialist who is not going to be any good at anything else.

- "As long as Exchange is setup properly to begin with", but that is a huge assumption. Who exactly in your generalist staff is going to do that? Anyone can mount an ISO and click next next next. Setting up Exchange properly with all the necessary moving parts is a complex project that requires knowledge and experience.

- 150 users @ £7 a month is £12,600 a year. That's maybe a quarter of a half-decent IT person's salary. How are you going to pay for: software licenses and maintenance, hardware purchases/depreciation and support, storage purchases/depreciation and support, let alone hosting (rack space, electricity and cooling), staff salaries, training for your staff. I haven't mentioned compliance, archiving, backups, reporting... Oh, and don't forget for £7 a month you get full desktop Office suite included. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's probably going to be pretty bare bones.

Bottom line, organisations with hundreds of thousands of employees are deploying Office 365. The numbers obviously work quite well.
 
Yes Rotor, I'm sure there are many big organizations using office 365 but what I'm saying is that the Office 365 mould doesn't fit everybody.

The benefits have been done to death and I'm firm believer if they have priced it correctly and it makes sense go with 365..... I have several clients that fit into the bracket where it wouldn't make sense though. This is because of a few factors:

They already have servers running bespoke apps with vast amounts of space, adding a Exchange 2013 VM would be a one off cost, yes I know it needs to be maintained but as my clients outsource their IT needs to my business its considerably cheaper in regards to Exchange maintenance than the price you quoted. I would say i spend very little time on Exchange on a per week basis.
Backups are already included because of the servers in place and other needs. Amazon S3 is so crazy cheap its not worth thinking about, Lets face it in my 15 years experience Exchange is pretty rock solid. SMTP backup is a simple and effective option if you have a decent host/ISP it at least gives very basic redundancy if the internet was to go down. We have other MX record routes we can rely on too.
All the training and staff costs is squashed because its outsourced and the power used would be very little on top of what they are currently using.

Also storage is cheap, not sure where you are buying your hardware from but storage space for our servers was not expensive unless you run HP servers but again you can work round their limitations on only using their brands.

I do agree if it was new business starting up cloud does make financial sense and there apps can be on the cloud go for it.
 
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