Company email system, what are my options?

[mosfet]

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.

 

[mosfet]

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.

No-one uses any of these functions, but if they were provided then I'm sure they would be.

Are you sure Outlook is the problem and not your email provider's servers?

This is a suspicion, but regardless: a slow email server should not bring a whole client machine to a halt, surely?

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?

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?

 

[mosfet]

That sounds like the ideal solution for migration, cheers!