Hosted exchange

[justcallmethefixer]

Anyone with experience of moving to hosted exchange in a small business?
We are considering this at work and I am one of the decision makers,
I would like to hear the pros and cons from a users point of view. Thanks

[justcallmethefixer]

Anyone?

[Cindy34]

Only have experience from around 15 years ago. It was fine, worked most of the time (server was in the US, our offices in the UK).

[NetworkGuy]

No personal experience, sorry, but one of my clients was using Exchange Server for their UK and other staff (total of about 15) until about 8 years ago.

They swapped to an alternative (MDaemon mail) when the Exchange server hard drive died (cost about 5K for Vogon to retrieve the mail as MD and senior directors wanted all their mail in case of public enquiries, etc, etc - client is a consultancy firm for DoT, big logistics firms, ports, airports, railways, etc). Cost of replacing all PCs (because new version of Exchange for the server would have forced upgrade of Windows and the PCs they had) meant MDaemon (which had better off-site features for web mail, POP, IMAP, etc) saved 10-15K.

If looking at hosted solutions (seem to cost around a fiver per person per month if you take up 12 month minimum contracts), my concern would be ease of exporting all the data if you chose to switch the hosted exchange service provider (whether on grounds of price or reliability problems with your first choice).

I've just found that the hosting firm I am using (and generally happy with, as Xilo offers multiple mail servers so a much more professional offering than many hosting firms) does not have an 'export' facility (to allow the rules for the hundred+ mail forwarders for one domain/company to be downloaded). While their mail service is reliable and works well, the lack of this option is quite a pain as I wanted an easy way to compare the mail servers' rules so I could be sure the backup was identical to the primary.

I mention the mail forwarding situation only as an example of a widely available feature not being available on the hosting I'm using, and while the general benefits of their mail service are better than many others, this downside means that it would be more awkward moving away from them (should they, for example, boost their charges by 100% one year).

It may be worth having a trial of 3 to 6 months before committing to a firm (even if it costs a bit more to do so) thereby allowing you to identify any shortcomings and be able to 'move' if you don't want to commit to the firm after your initial trial. I'm certainly looking at alternative reseller hosting options for some 1000+ domains where e-mail is less of a problem, while disk space and traffic are unlimted, and 24x365 support can be had, at a third of the price.

[justcallmethefixer]

Thank you, Microsoft hosted exchange is the option being considered against our current exchange 2010 on the in house server.
We need something that works well on windows 7 and iPads/iPhones.