Spec me a hosted exchange provider

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

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Hi all....

I need to find a hosted exchange provider. I just need two mailboxes for a business I run.

I need large mailboxes (25GB seems to be the ideal) and I need included anti-spam and anti-virus. I also want someone who has a redundant backup on multiple locations incase their server farm burns down.

Anyone able to recommend anyone?
 
No, haven't tried anyone yet. Was hoping for recommendations of companies worth looking at.

Everyone seems to have a pretty slick website. Some though I know have poor support and poor reliability.
 
Which companies shouldn't we recommend then? ;)

Office 365 is is very aggressive on price - £2.82+VAT per user per month.

I've moved my personal email to O365 (as have some friends) and all good so far :)
 
office265
25gb mailboxes, fully backed up and something like £3 a month
uses forefront antivirus and antispam which I find to be one of the top 3 antivirus/antispam solutions


Honestly, for the price when most others are at least double price and half storage you'd be stupid to go elsewhere and I can't understand why people do. Been using office365 myself since it came out and couldn't be happier (I've used 3 other hosted solutions and none were as good.)
 
Bry said:
office265
25gb mailboxes, fully backed up and something like £3 a month
uses forefront antivirus and antispam which I find to be one of the top 3 antivirus/antispam solutions


Honestly, for the price when most others are at least double price and half storage you'd be stupid to go elsewhere and I can't understand why people do. Been using office365 myself since it came out and couldn't be happier (I've used 3 other hosted solutions and none were as good.)
Click to expand...

I don't like the direction Microsoft is taking recently with respects to many of it's products/services, they are disbanding Forefront/TMG:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-c...nt-changes-to-forefront-product-roadmaps.aspx

Windows 8 looks like it's a bit of a disaster compared to Windows 7.

They are also severely undercutting competition in the Hosted Exchange market, of which many resellers are actually Microsoft partners and pay licensing to Microsoft anyway. A recent 25% increase in CAL licensing for On-Premise Exchange is evidence of this.

They seem intent on kicking everyone into the Cloud for as much as possible, in my opinion it's a short sighted move. I am not against Cloud services by any means, but they have their time and place in a business, and so does On-Premise.
 
Eulogy said:
I don't like the direction Microsoft is taking recently with respects to many of it's products/services, they are disbanding Forefront/TMG:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-c...nt-changes-to-forefront-product-roadmaps.aspx

Windows 8 looks like it's a bit of a disaster compared to Windows 7.

They are also severely undercutting competition in the Hosted Exchange market, of which many resellers are actually Microsoft partners and pay licensing to Microsoft anyway. A recent 25% increase in CAL licensing for On-Premise Exchange is evidence of this.

They seem intent on kicking everyone into the Cloud for as much as possible, in my opinion it's a short sighted move. I am not against Cloud services by any means, but they have their time and place in a business, and so does On-Premise.
Click to expand...

I agree on every point and don't get me started on forefront protection for exchange being discontinued.

However, as a hosted exchange solution office365 is the best on virtually every point
 
Well I tried out the trial of Office 365, and from a subjective point of view, as I work in the Hosted Exchange industry, it seems to have it's ups and downs:

Pros:

Was very quick and easy to setup a trial.
The panel interface is pretty nice.
I didn't need to use it, but having a SharePoint site would be useful for most businesses if they don't already run one.
Very cheap!

Cons:

S/MIME is not supported in Office 365 OWA.
I wanted to use the Remote PowerShell commands, but the guidance on how to use this was hidden away and took a bit of time to find.
I sent an email to my @outlook.com address, did not get delivered, did not get NDR'ed. Still wondering where that one went.
Everything was assuming I was in the US, all the time zones/languages for everything etc.
Initially my Lync integration into OWA would not work, started working after a while though.

If anyone can answer how they stop spammers using the service I would love to hear it, it looks like you can send out emails as soon as your trial is ready without any billing info, surely this is being abused by spammers!

Also you can tell the driver for removing the EMC from Exchange 2013 is to improve the user experience for Office 365 users, who can only really use the web based ECP tools:

http://exchangepedia.com/2012/07/exchange-2013-dude-wheres-my-exchange-management-console-emc.html

Couple more cons off the top of my head:

Patriot Act
Can't guarantee your data is stored in the UK

How is their support by the way? decent? not had to use them?

Edit - my emails finally got delivered to my outlook.com address 5 hours later! Looks like it got stuck on one of the Hub Transports for Office 365:

Received: from AM2PRD0311HT001.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com (157.56.249.149) by
AM1EHSMHS008.bigfish.com (10.3.207.108) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id
14.1.225.23; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:19:44 +0000
Received: from AM2PRD0311MB434.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com ([169.254.11.64]) by
AM2PRD0311HT001.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com ([10.255.162.36]) with mapi id
14.16.0190.008; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:19:36 +0000
 
Last edited:
Eulogy said:
Well I tried out the trial of Office 365, and from a subjective point of view, as I work in the Hosted Exchange industry, it seems to have it's ups and downs:

Pros:

Was very quick and easy to setup a trial.
The panel interface is pretty nice.
I didn't need to use it, but having a SharePoint site would be useful for most businesses if they don't already run one.
Very cheap!

Cons:

S/MIME is not supported in Office 365 OWA.
I wanted to use the Remote PowerShell commands, but the guidance on how to use this was hidden away and took a bit of time to find.
I sent an email to my @outlook.com address, did not get delivered, did not get NDR'ed. Still wondering where that one went.
Everything was assuming I was in the US, all the time zones/languages for everything etc.
Initially my Lync integration into OWA would not work, started working after a while though.

If anyone can answer how they stop spammers using the service I would love to hear it, it looks like you can send out emails as soon as your trial is ready without any billing info, surely this is being abused by spammers!

Also you can tell the driver for removing the EMC from Exchange 2013 is to improve the user experience for Office 365 users, who can only really use the web based ECP tools:

http://exchangepedia.com/2012/07/exchange-2013-dude-wheres-my-exchange-management-console-emc.html

Couple more cons off the top of my head:

Patriot Act
Can't guarantee your data is stored in the UK

How is their support by the way? decent? not had to use them?

Edit - my emails finally got delivered to my outlook.com address 5 hours later! Looks like it got stuck on one of the Hub Transports for Office 365:

Received: from AM2PRD0311HT001.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com (157.56.249.149) by
AM1EHSMHS008.bigfish.com (10.3.207.108) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id
14.1.225.23; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:19:44 +0000
Received: from AM2PRD0311MB434.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com ([169.254.11.64]) by
AM2PRD0311HT001.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com ([10.255.162.36]) with mapi id
14.16.0190.008; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:19:36 +0000
Click to expand...

Ive done two 365 installs now one for a medium size orginization 30+ users and another for a 2 user orginization with SBSE Im also one of many admins for my works 365 portal which we are testing / using lync

I have to agree with your pro's totally, they have more benifitis 25gig of storage EXCELLENT remote monitoring of device, you can set up policys essentially a fully featured exchange but with a nice web interface.

Their remote support is fantastic, personally so far I prefer calling the americans as they seem to have more insight and not to be reading off a sheet, the european support so far has been ok not the greatest. You normally get the americans after 6pm UK time but you can call them directly.

As for the patriot act I have no clue but your data is not being stored in the uk, their main datacenters are in ireland and the netherlands for europe with backups/failovers around the world for instance hong kong and several in the states.

as for powershell you have to look deep into a few syncronization folders on your adfs server but ive found a quick google offers all of these abilities never found it too troublesome......

as for other cons I cant confirm S/MIME as ~I havent implemented nor used it however distrobution groups is annoying as you have to use adsi edit if you do it locally again your issues with outlook.com address are beyond me ... =S

apart from their (being microsoft) requirements of 4 servers which is total bs imo (if you stick to their documentation and dont use SBSE. with sbse you can just use 1 as it simply copies your settings and dosent syncronizes) I managed it with 1 physical and 1 virtual

as for exchange 2013 I didnt know it was being used for 365 yet to my knowledge it isnt but i may be wrong so apologies now.

Personally its abit of a hassle on the inital install however with their excellent support and general community with everyone being there before its well worth the move !
 
Last edited:
I have zero server administration experience.

I simply want to have two users with hosted exchange mailboxes.

What I need is for the domains we have to point at it. I also want to be able to set aliases - support@domain, sales@domain etc. That kind of thing.

How complicated will it be to set things up?

Why do I need an SSL cert?
 
Office 365 is easy :)

I use it for me and the wife with our own domain and dns hosted in office 365 :)

You should be able to get it running in a few hours :)
 
spudbynight said:
I have zero server administration experience.

I simply want to have two users with hosted exchange mailboxes.

What I need is for the domains we have to point at it. I also want to be able to set aliases - support@domain, sales@domain etc. That kind of thing.

How complicated will it be to set things up?

Why do I need an SSL cert?
Click to expand...

if your wanting single sign on (SSO) you will need a "proxy server" adfs that is outside of your network (acording to microsoft documentation) to use as the sync agent between your domain and the cloud.... otherwise 365 dicates the passwords and policies for the users in the cloud....from a security perspective you should do this however it can be in the domain and in the same iprange / subnet if need be

Teledude said:
Office 365 is easy :)

I use it for me and the wife with our own domain and dns hosted in office 365 :)

You should be able to get it running in a few hours :)
Click to expand...

agreed for a few users without a domain
 
knowlesy said:
if your wanting single sign on (SSO) you will need a "proxy server" adfs that is outside of your network (acording to microsoft documentation) to use as the sync agent between your domain and the cloud.... otherwise 365 dicates the passwords and policies for the users in the cloud....from a security perspective you should do this however it can be in the domain and in the same iprange / subnet if need be
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I didn't understand ANY of that.

:(

Do I want SSO? This is all sounding very complicated. ;)
 
knowlesy said:
Ive done two 365 installs now one for a medium size orginization 30+ users and another for a 2 user orginization with SBSE Im also one of many admins for my works 365 portal which we are testing / using lync

I have to agree with your pro's totally, they have more benifitis 25gig of storage EXCELLENT remote monitoring of device, you can set up policys essentially a fully featured exchange but with a nice web interface.

Their remote support is fantastic, personally so far I prefer calling the americans as they seem to have more insight and not to be reading off a sheet, the european support so far has been ok not the greatest. You normally get the americans after 6pm UK time but you can call them directly.

As for the patriot act I have no clue but your data is not being stored in the uk, their main datacenters are in ireland and the netherlands for europe with backups/failovers around the world for instance hong kong and several in the states.

as for powershell you have to look deep into a few syncronization folders on your adfs server but ive found a quick google offers all of these abilities never found it too troublesome......

as for other cons I cant confirm S/MIME as ~I havent implemented nor used it however distrobution groups is annoying as you have to use adsi edit if you do it locally again your issues with outlook.com address are beyond me ... =S

apart from their (being microsoft) requirements of 4 servers which is total bs imo (if you stick to their documentation and dont use SBSE. with sbse you can just use 1 as it simply copies your settings and dosent syncronizes) I managed it with 1 physical and 1 virtual

as for exchange 2013 I didnt know it was being used for 365 yet to my knowledge it isnt but i may be wrong so apologies now.

Personally its abit of a hassle on the inital install however with their excellent support and general community with everyone being there before its well worth the move !
Click to expand...

My comment was about the fact that Exchange 2013 is driving the Exchange Admin to the EAC console, and they are clearlly doing this to provide a better experience to the Office 365 crowd, whilst removing what many consider to be a great admin tool (the EMC as it's known in Exchange 2007/2010).
 
spudbynight said:
Unfortunately I didn't understand ANY of that.

:(

Do I want SSO? This is all sounding very complicated. ;)
Click to expand...

spudbynight said:
Went with MS in the end and it looks like everything is OK...

Thanks for the advice guys.
Click to expand...

Yeah you want sso also known as single sign on if you want your Microsoft domain passwords etc and security policy's to sync up to the cloud / office 365 and glad to hear :) with office 2013 round the corner (if you went for an e3/e4 license) you will enjoy the amazing benefits of full on office 2013 :)

Eulogy said:
My comment was about the fact that Exchange 2013 is driving the Exchange Admin to the EAC console, and they are clearlly doing this to provide a better experience to the Office 365 crowd, whilst removing what many consider to be a great admin tool (the EMC as it's known in Exchange 2007/2010).
Click to expand...

ah my bad, I have to agree with you there however I cant deny that the web interface hasn't not stopped me from doing what I wanted although Id never call myself an exchange guru or even a common user of it to even have a decent weigh in on it.
 
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