Company email system, what are my options?

mosfet

mosfet

mosfet

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I joined a new company back in April and have since taken on more and more responsibilities, mostly regarding their IT situation, or more accurately: the abysmal state of it.

There's around 20 employees with a little over 20 machines (Windows and Mac OS) in near constant use. Email is provided by our web host, easyspace, and all the Windows machines have Outlook 2003 on them.

Outlook 2003 is possibly the least stable, slowest and most unpredictable piece of software I've ever used, I'd love to migrate everyone over to a new system, but it'll be a huge amount of work.

I thought at first about simply moving over to Thunderbird or alternative, but since we have a 10Mb symmetric leased line would I be better off running our own mail and web servers?

I'd love to get opinions on this from people who've had to deal with small business IT solutions.
 
Thunderbird is a nice lightweight email client but it doesn't have basic collaborative features such as calendars, scheduling and address books which is why most organisations go with the killer Outlook/Exchange combo. Zimbra and Scalix are the two open-source alternatives to exchange but both are faily immature and not ready for production. If you really want to go with Thunderbird, look at google apps (£25 per user per year).

10mbps is ample for a 20 user hosted solution so you don't need to worry about that. Hosting mail servers internally will probably save you 0 bandwidth because messages are downloaded once and cached within the client.
 
Outlook is used by 84k people at this company alone without major drama, so its pretty OK really.

If its crashing all the time i'd maybe be looking at the actual OS its running in etc etc
 
Never seen many problems at all with outlook 2003, what are your main issues?

With only 20 employees it's probably overkill to have a full exchange environment although it does give a lot of nice features over pure pop3\imap mail, it's not that expansive in the grand scheme of things.
 
Sounds like an ideal environment for SBS 2003 - Exchange, Sharepoint, Database & Firewall (if you want them)
 
Another vote for exchange (either direct or as part of SBS) although my boss doesn't agree i like how well it integrates with outlook and windows mobile devices, unlike scalix and all the others it just 'works'

If you're having reliability problems with outlook then it may be connectivity issues with your mail provider (if their servers are busy or a bit 'wobbly' then you may get connectivity timeouts which occasionally manifest themselves as outlook lockups)

At work we use postfix/dovecot with amavisd/spamassassin on NetBSD which works 100% reliably, it's never had any system related downtime it just doesn't have anything in the way of calender/tasks/contacts but i'm working on adding that via iCal/CalDAV and LDAP.

If the office doesn't make much use of the extra features, run a simple pop/imap server, if they do, or will find them highly beneficial, run exchange, (or i suppose scalix if you absoultely cannot spend the money - there is an outlook connector available)
 
For your situation again I would be looking at SBS 2003, with over 100 clients all running office 2003/2007 none of them have any performance issues, a lot of the time its low powered PCs running everything that are the root cause, not to mention resource hungry anti virus packages and spyware. I have looked at linux alternatives and personally have had a go at using them, great they are, but from a support perspective, if your the IT onsite, you have to know it back to front unless you want to be spending money on outside consultants everytime something wants doing.

Just my 2p
 
Just to repeat all the same stuff, does sound like a prime candidate for an SBS install.

So do all the clients connect over pop3 to the guys hosting the mail servers, or are they running a 'proper' exchange setup for you?

I set something up simple for my folks little office, the guys who host and look after their domain/website just setup pop3 mailboxes for everyone then I just used the pop3 connector in Exchange to pull the mail down to the server for each person. I know it's not an ideal solution, but in practice it's worked really well for them. Of course one of the downsides is you are still reliant on an external company somewhere along the line.
 
sparkey196 said:
Thunderbird is a nice lightweight email client but it doesn't have basic collaborative features such as calendars, scheduling and address books which is why most organisations go with the killer Outlook/Exchange combo.
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No-one uses any of these functions, but if they were provided then I'm sure they would be.

daz said:
Are you sure Outlook is the problem and not your email provider's servers?
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This is a suspicion, but regardless: a slow email server should not bring a whole client machine to a halt, surely?

Ev0 said:
So do all the clients connect over pop3 to the guys hosting the mail servers, or are they running a 'proper' exchange setup for you?
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Just a load of POP3 boxes individually set up.


SBS seems like a good solution, I'll take a look in to it now. What sort of initial cost, both software and hardware, are we talking about? For say 30 clients?
 
Vtec9k said:
You could probably get a cheapish dell server and SBS for <£2k and extra CALs are about £250 for 5.
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Can be done very cheaply, think I paid about 600 for the server and OS 2 years ago, you can probably get something a lot better for the money now. Downside is the cals are pricier on the face of it as they incorporate all your exchange cals as well. SQL and stuff only comes with SBS premium edition.
 
A couple of things worthy of mention:

1. SBS 2008 is on the way (end of the year). Is going to be x64 ONLY, with 2x Server 2008 Licences & Exchange 2007, and with a recommended MINIMUM RAM of 4Gb! If you'd rather use the 'tried and tested' 2003 then make sure you get Software Assurance & you'll qualify for a free upgrade to 2008. Also bear in mind that there is NO in-place upgrade ability for migrating from 2003 to 2008.

2. SBS includes a POP Connector which can be mapped by individual accounts to POP3 mailboxes or via 'catchall' accounts. Very useful for migrating clients/users off POP3 onto Exchange.

3. SBS, contrary to popular belief, DOES let you have additional servers (member servers and Domain Controllers on the same network). Which brings me on to:

4. SBS CALS also cover any additional servers you add on your network, thereby saving costs on additional CALS for member servers used as application servers etc.
 
I've set up an SBS server for a very small business and its a very good solution for a quick AD/exchange environment. Like one of the posters above I set their POP3 connector to poll every 15 mins for new messages and deliver it to their Exchange mailboxes.

Easy to set-up and manage
 
also, doesn't SBS come with licensces for outlook? (2008 with 2008, 2003 with 2003 if you get my meaning)
 
VeNT said:
also, doesn't SBS come with licensces for outlook? (2008 with 2008, 2003 with 2003 if you get my meaning)
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SBS 2003 includes Outlook 2003 licences. Exchange 2007 (included in SBS 2008) doesn't as M$ changed the Exchange CALS - assumed everyone was buying office anyway... :rolleyes:
 
JonnyT said:
3. SBS, contrary to popular belief, DOES let you have additional servers (member servers and Domain Controllers on the same network). Which brings me on to:
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Very true, but also remember that it does NOT let you have another SBS server in the domain, other flavours are fine but you can't have 2 SBS installs on the same domain :)
 
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