Hosted Exchange / CRM System

SiHH

SiHH

SiHH

Soldato
Joined
4 Mar 2004
Posts
3,019
Location
Hemel Hempstead, Herts, U
Hi guys,

I am starting a business soon where email and contact details will be critical.

I currently use gmail for my personal email but to be honest, I would rather pay for a service and ensure things are backed up and have access to support if necessary.

I am toying with the idea of going down the hosted exchange route/push email for my iphone which will be great for the email side of things.

Are there any CRM systems that link in with Exchange in anyway, Ideally I would like one set of data for my contacts that I can access easily from my phone and via the web or software client from the laptop. Also any recomendations on hosted exchange, sadly my current webhost runs linux so I will need a new host.

SiHH
 
Microsoft Dynamic CRM integrates with both SharePoint and Exchange but can be a bit expensive on the hosting side - £50 pcm for a licence i believe. Exchange though is cheap, cobweb (the uk's largest hosted solutions provider) are offering 5gb exchange 07 mailboxes for £3.27 pcm with push email etc inclusive.

I lie, it was a few years ago that we looked at pricing, they use microsoft dynamic crm in different guises ranging in price from 14.99 to 39.99, depending on your requirements all of which integrate with exchange. We were looking to go down this route initially but ended up coding our own custom solution using SharePoint.
 
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VinceB1 said:
Microsoft Dynamic CRM integrates with both SharePoint and Exchange but can be a bit expensive on the hosting side - £50 pcm for a licence i believe. Exchange though is cheap, cobweb (the uk's largest hosted solutions provider) are offering 5gb exchange 07 mailboxes for £3.27 pcm with push email etc inclusive.

I lie, it was a few years ago that we looked at pricing, they use microsoft dynamic crm in different guises ranging in price from 14.99 to 39.99, depending on your requirements all of which integrate with exchange. We were looking to go down this route initially but ended up coding our own custom solution using SharePoint.
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I work for Cobweb and he is somewhat right, it's 2GB Exch 07 mailboxes for £3.27 p/m *if* you go for a 36 month contract and aren't fussed about getting extra support (i.e people to help walk you through things).

If you go for the same but on a 12 month contract then it's more like £3.99 p/m. Added support is about ~ £2 extra p/m per user if you need it (you may not if you're savvy enough though :)). I don't work in sales so these are just based on memory, but best to give the sales guys a call to go through requirements!

Blackberry and Outlook client licensing are optional extras if you need them as well, ActiveSync comes as standard if you go for the Business Email mailbox.

Cobweb do have a UK call centre though, which is based not too far where I live.
 
Eulogy said:
I work for Cobweb and he is somewhat right, it's 2GB Exch 07 mailboxes for £3.27 p/m *if* you go for a 36 month contract and aren't fussed about getting extra support (i.e people to help walk you through things).

If you go for the same but on a 12 month contract then it's more like £3.99 p/m. Added support is about ~ £2 extra p/m per user if you need it (you may not if you're savvy enough though :)). I don't work in sales so these are just based on memory, but best to give the sales guys a call to go through requirements!

Blackberry and Outlook client licensing are optional extras if you need them as well, ActiveSync comes as standard if you go for the Business Email mailbox.

Cobweb do have a UK call centre though, which is based not too far where I live.
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Excellent, many thanks for the info.

I must admit, I am wondering if using my Iphone 3G is going to annoy me, it certainly is prone to being slow some of the time and with email it could become frustrating.
 
SiHH said:
Excellent, many thanks for the info.

I must admit, I am wondering if using my Iphone 3G is going to annoy me, it certainly is prone to being slow some of the time and with email it could become frustrating.
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It's not a complaint i've heard voiced about using the iPhone with an Activesync account configured, but I haven't personally used one with it so wouldn't take that as gospel or anything :)
 
looks like I got a special deal :) mind you we are still on the 03 platform with Zantaz but on the new pricing, just as soon as you work out a migration plan for our few hundred gig sitting in archive all should be good!
 
VinceB1 said:
looks like I got a special deal :) mind you we are still on the 03 platform with Zantaz but on the new pricing, just as soon as you work out a migration plan for our few hundred gig sitting in archive all should be good!
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Zantaz, the bane of my existence!

To be honest with Exchange 2007 it almost removes the need for an archiving solution like Zantaz, the added mailbox storage per user over the Exchange 03 sizes means you can store so much more at the mailbox level.

Same again for Exchange 2010 when that arrives, the mailbox sizes there are touted to be much larger as storage costs are reduced, i'd expect to see mailboxes somewhere in the region of 10-25GB being mainstreamed.
 
Something has popped into my head actually.

Im not familiar with how data would work using push email to the Iphone. Does it operate in a similar way to Blackberry or am I likely to exceed my 1gb cap with o2 quicker than I would with a blackberry?

Hope that makes sense. Im sure i read somewhere that when forwarding an email for instance, the Iphone has to download any attachments first whereas on the blackberry this isnt the case ?
 
I was using a blackberry on the platform but recently changed over to iphone/palm pre. last month I used 90.05mb with the iphone, that includes occasional browsing. On the blackberry this was around 10mb (email only)....

The blackberry simply compresses the messages over the bes. I would be very supprised if you managed to push over 100mb a month on email alone with your iphone.
 
Blackberry only downloads part of the message unless you want to read the whole thing, so if you need to open that attachment it can go and fetch it but by default it won't. It can alse download just the message headers and you choose whether to read the whole thing or not.

From personal experience though I think ActiveSync is more reliable.

If the iPhone has to download the attachments even if you don't need to read them then you will almost certainly use the bandwidth faster compared to the Blackberry.
 
Eulogy said:
Blackberry only downloads part of the message unless you want to read the whole thing, so if you need to open that attachment it can go and fetch it but by default it won't. It can alse download just the message headers and you choose whether to read the whole thing or not.

From personal experience though I think ActiveSync is more reliable.

If the iPhone has to download the attachments even if you don't need to read them then you will almost certainly use the bandwidth faster compared to the Blackberry.
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To be honest I don't think it does, or at least looking at the bills in front of me it would indicate that the iphone downloads the full message but attachments on demand.

Its a 100% increase from 10mb to 100mb monthly but I can assure you my monthly attachments equate to more than 100mb.
 
SiHH said:
Fair points. Decision decisions..
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Just to throw a curveball out there, I think the iPhone suffers from some mail sync issues, for example if you forward/reply an email on the iPhone it won't sync that status to the mailbox properly. Stupid problem really, but it's an Apple one rather than Exchange related but they don't seem bothered about correcting it for some reason. (at least some people have reported this to us, but most people may not even notice this problem).
 
Eulogy said:
Just to throw a curveball out there, I think the iPhone suffers from some mail sync issues, for example if you forward/reply an email on the iPhone it won't sync that status to the mailbox properly. Stupid problem really, but it's an Apple one rather than Exchange related but they don't seem bothered about correcting it for some reason.
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Also from another point of view I have a client that I put on the platform, small business with 5 or so users and the guy that runs that cannot praise the iphone/hosted exchange combo enough. This is possibly one that you might not really notice.

I have to admit though I did prefer using the blackberry with the bes as it offers far more control.
 
Eulogy said:
Just to throw a curveball out there, I think the iPhone suffers from some mail sync issues, for example if you forward/reply an email on the iPhone it won't sync that status to the mailbox properly. Stupid problem really, but it's an Apple one rather than Exchange related but they don't seem bothered about correcting it for some reason. (at least some people have reported this to us, but most people may not even notice this problem).
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Interesting.

I am quite tempted to do some testing via google apps actually just to get a flavour of things. Not a true test I know but If i sign up to Cobweb (which look great btw) then im stuck in a contract and if things arnt quite as expected then Im screwballed :p
 
SiHH said:
Interesting.

I am quite tempted to do some testing via google apps actually just to get a flavour of things. Not a true test I know but If i sign up to Cobweb (which look great btw) then im stuck in a contract and if things arnt quite as expected then Im screwballed :p
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True, but Cobweb do offer Trials as well :)

Edit - also contract lengths are 1, 12, 36 months, though things get cheaper the longer your contract
 
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