Email Solution: Exchange vs. Hosted Exchange vs. Google Apps

[evilspoons]

Hi, I was hoping someone could chime in with some information or experiences with a centralized email system for their business.

I am working at a small business with about 25 users. We currently have a Windows Server 2008 R2 box acting as domain controller, and an email system that is simply a bunch of POP3 accounts. Everyone's computer runs Outlook (or Outlook Express, ugh) and downloads its email by itself.

My boss is doing a lot of travelling now and he's finding having to use remote desktop to view his email frustrating - he doesn't want his phone to download it from the POP3 server separately because then everything has to be organized twice.

I have a vague idea of how Exchange works and I know that it would centralize our email to our server. We could then use the Exchange web access and/or add an account to our smartphones to view our messages with the same folder structure/organization we see on our Outlook clients in the office (correct?).

The issue is that this costs time in setting up and mucking around with a complex piece of software on the server - Exchange.

Google Apps for Business seems like a good alternative, but then I also found out about Exchange Online (hosted Exchange), which has the same pricing as Google.

We're concerned about (1) getting our big blob of data to the server so there's no loss of archived email, and (2) we'd like to be able to back everything up every now and then in case the whole system just blows up. I'm also curious what happens when you lose your internet connection - does email just become inaccessible?

Ideas, experiences, etc - what are your thoughts on these systems?

 

[Sid59]

Hi, I was hoping someone could chime in with some information or experiences with a centralized email system for their business.

I am working at a small business with about 25 users. We currently have a Windows Server 2008 R2 box acting as domain controller, and an email system that is simply a bunch of POP3 accounts. Everyone's computer runs Outlook (or Outlook Express, ugh) and downloads its email by itself.

My boss is doing a lot of travelling now and he's finding having to use remote desktop to view his email frustrating - he doesn't want his phone to download it from the POP3 server separately because then everything has to be organized twice.

I have a vague idea of how Exchange works and I know that it would centralize our email to our server. We could then use the Exchange web access and/or add an account to our smartphones to view our messages with the same folder structure/organization we see on our Outlook clients in the office (correct?).

The issue is that this costs time in setting up and mucking around with a complex piece of software on the server - Exchange.

Google Apps for Business seems like a good alternative, but then I also found out about Exchange Online (hosted Exchange), which has the same pricing as Google.

We're concerned about (1) getting our big blob of data to the server so there's no loss of archived email, and (2) we'd like to be able to back everything up every now and then in case the whole system just blows up. I'm also curious what happens when you lose your internet connection - does email just become inaccessible?

Ideas, experiences, etc - what are your thoughts on these systems?

If you don't have the resources to manage an exchange server, weigh the pro-cons of a hosted exchange.

My company is 120 people and we moved from a shitty pop3 service to google business apps.

Google Apps needs you to have Google Apps Sync running, it's the "middle man" that syncs your email. You cannot directly add googles mail server to outlook and be happy, everything runs through Google Apps Sync.

It treats everything like IMAP, so the changes you make on your phone, browser, or outlook all sync at once.

I've never used a hosted exchange but if you have specific questions about Google Apps, let me know.

 

[ric1287]

Hosted Exchange is pretty good for that size. I ran a test pilot of it for about 20 of our 300 users and while I wouldn't use for 300, if I only had 25 it's fine.

I think it runs about $10/user/month and only takes a couple hours to set up. Blackberry support kinda blows, but OWA/Outlook/Smartphone-Activesync works fine.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Does hosted exhange only give you email and calendars? Or do you get sharepoint and other functionality? I use google apps for my family, as well as the lab I work at. Some of the extra features like shared calendars, docs collaboration, sites and talk have turned out to be quite useful. I thought wave was useful too, but Google is killing that in 2012.

 

[ric1287]

I believe you get a small amount of storage for sharepoint as well and you can expand if needed, we didn't use the feature but I know it's there.

 

[Nothinman]

Does hosted exhange only give you email and calendars? Or do you get sharepoint and other functionality? I use google apps for my family, as well as the lab I work at. Some of the extra features like shared calendars, docs collaboration, sites and talk have turned out to be quite useful. I thought wave was useful too, but Google is killing that in 2012.

That would depend on the host. I know you get some level of Sharepoint with BPOS/O365 but I don't know about other providers.

I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to that stuff so I'm not really a fan of hosted services. A good example of why is earlier this week one of our clients reported Outlook was asking for their passwords over and over again with some people able to get back in and others not at all. Support for their hosted Exchange (not MS in this case) said that they had made changes to their autodiscover setup and everyone needed to quit Outlook and get back in and report back if it worked or not. This was done in the middle of the day with no warning, probably because they figured no one would notice. But if you've been working in IT long enough you know that someone always notices any changes you make.