inhouse exchange or hosted

niknaksky

niknaksky

niknaksky

Associate
Joined
19 Dec 2009
Posts
39
Hi looking for some advice.

Currently the company I work for has 8 sites all running on workgroups.
All email is free with the various hosted websites we have.

Users at the sites have one email address each but different @domain.com

Do I create a central exchange and use outlook anywhere and host the 8 domain addresses or go with hosted exchange or leave the email as is.

The reason for the change with the email will be -
Backup of email
Shared calendars
Global address list

These are the only things they want that they cannot get now.

Can the above be done with the email solution they have now with third party apps?

The backup of email could have the .pst files backup along with the file server but as I understand it’s not best practice to have the .pst's on a network share.

The rest of the sites will eventually have a server dropped in and things tightened up with AD but that’s another discussion to have in another thread.
 
round about 50 users spread accross 8 sites.

They have no licencesing in place at the moment as well so thinking hosted is looking a good option at the moment.
 
I'd always prefer to run my own, but if you don't know exchange very well then hosted might be the best bet.

Hardware plus software will pay for itself over time, but it'll take some time and may be more hassle than it's worth for you
 
Hosted, then you don't have the hassle of running your own Exchange and coming in at 3am to fix it when it dies.
 
sldsmkd said:
Hosted, then you don't have the hassle of running your own Exchange and coming in at 3am to fix it when it dies.
Click to expand...

In years of implementing and running exchange environments, its never "died" unless someone who didn't know what they were doing fiddled with it
 
For a small and now even some large organisation the Exchange online services are quite hard to argue against. If you just compare what it'd cost to buy a couple of servers and licenses then it doesn't look so good but once you start to add all the factors in like AV, Anti Spam, management, backup, resilience and DR it makes quite a compelling story
 
iaind said:
In years of implementing and running exchange environments, its never "died" unless someone who didn't know what they were doing fiddled with it
Click to expand...

Then you're lucky; Hardware fails. You can mitigate somewhat by having redundancy, but that's overkill for a 50 person installation.
 
J1nxy said:
For a small and now even some large organisation the Exchange online services are quite hard to argue against. If you just compare what it'd cost to buy a couple of servers and licenses then it doesn't look so good but once you start to add all the factors in like AV, Anti Spam, management, backup, resilience and DR it makes quite a compelling story
Click to expand...

Not to mention the time (maybe you did with management, but it's worth mentioning again!). These guys have economies of scale you can't hit with 50 users.
 
So many people going down the saas route.

Was at a Qualys conference the other week and their CEO was saying they are using SaaS products for all their stuff now.

Reckons the transition to this way of doing things will be a lot quicker than the transfer from mainframes to client/server setups.
 
I would to online services too, I am currently looking to move us from SBS 2008 to Office 365 in the new year, main reason is the lack of bandwidth in our office, making remote working near impossible, stick it all online and that goes away
 
Id say if your budget allows and you have the enviroment to use then host it your self. But i would make sure you have a nice level of redundancy (i.e standby server).
 
Ev0 said:
So many people going down the saas route.

Was at a Qualys conference the other week and their CEO was saying they are using SaaS products for all their stuff now.

Reckons the transition to this way of doing things will be a lot quicker than the transfer from mainframes to client/server setups.
Click to expand...

Its one of those things where the cost point is now around the right number for a lot of people. Its also hit at the right time where people are looking to upgrade and dont have the capex to spend but a fixed monthly charge they can deal with.
 
He was also saying he had a sportmans bet kind of thing with Bill Gates as he reckoned it's be 10 years from whenever they spoke about it that everyone would be using SaaS, but Bill reckoned it'd take 20/30 years as before with the transition away from mainframes.

Chap said he still had a few years left to win :)
 
Ev0 said:
He was also saying he had a sportmans bet kind of thing with Bill Gates as he reckoned it's be 10 years from whenever they spoke about it that everyone would be using SaaS, but Bill reckoned it'd take 20/30 years as before with the transition away from mainframes.

Chap said he still had a few years left to win :)
Click to expand...

This thing cycles every 10 years or so :) Remember Sun and their thin Java clients ;)

For a small company of 50 users, there's a many better ways to spend your time and money as an IT admin that benefit the organisation more and make your life easier and more interesting. I've looked and dealt with internal Exchange, hosted Exchange and GoogleApps and the hosted option has the right balance IMO.

If you have 5 or 20,000 users then the balance is different of course.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom