Exchange 2003 Standard or Enterprise

[Zorba]

Hi all, first post and wasn't sure which forum to use. I have a 32 bit Server so Exchange 2007 is not an option. My question is do I need Exchange 2003 standard or enterprise. I ask because of diferences in licensing costs. We have around 650 pupils on roll plus staff. Is the 75GB limit for the information store in the standard edition sufficient in the real world? I appreciate any advice you can give me.

[CyberNerd]

do you even need exchange?

http://www.zimbra.com/

may be what your looking for

[User3204]

There are other alternatives.

We have Mdaemon from http://www.altn.com

 

It costs though, although there is a 20% educational discount, you can download a trial. It gives me everything that I want, the only extra is the plugin to make Outlook work, which is still cheap.

 

No limits to the disk space, as it stores messages in separate files.

[Zorba]

Thanks for for the information. Call me chicken but Bill Gates is all I know. I love to learn new things but time is just not on my side so i was looking to deploy something soon. I just don't think I have the time at present to get my head around Linux.

[Zorba]

Any Exchage users out there willing to comment?

[DMcCoy]

100 members of staff have accounts so far. Over 16GB used already. Only been migrated to exchange for a year and I left lots behind on our ancient version of mdaemon.

[mortstar]

Hi Zorba - which school in Coventry are you at? I'm Network Manager at Whitley Abbey.

 

As people have said you should really think about other solutions. Zimbra is just as easy to setup and rollout as Exchange server.

[User3204]

Mdaemon works on windows only.

 

I did have Exchange running a few years back, but it was for staff use only, there didn't (at the time) seem to be any way to have users from another domain (IE our student domain) have accounts on the exchange server.

 

I found that these users had massive amounts of disk space.

The few users we have that use outlook, would have large PST files too, but I have moved this back onto our Mdaemon server, so it uses less space (don't understand how).

 

Mdaemon, could be installed an running (as a trial) within minutes - or so they say.

[Zorba]

Hi Mortstar- I am at Barr's Hill. Are you running Zimbra? If so are you willing to talk me through it's implementation?

[srochford]

Mdaemon works on windows only.

 

I did have Exchange running a few years back, but it was for staff use only, there didn't (at the time) seem to be any way to have users from another domain (IE our student domain) have accounts on the exchange server.

 

I found that these users had massive amounts of disk space.

The few users we have that use outlook, would have large PST files too, but I have moved this back onto our Mdaemon server, so it uses less space (don't understand how).

 

Mdaemon, could be installed an running (as a trial) within minutes - or so they say.

 

Space saving could be down to single instance storage - ie if I send a message to 2 people and we all have PSTs then there are 3 copies of the message (my sent items and their 2 inbox items). SIS means there's just one copy in a DB with links to it in the sent items, inboxes etc. Exchange does this (and I'd guess most other "proper" mail systems do the same)

 

(Incidentally, it's also used in WIM files to save space but that's a whole other story!)

 

You can get Exchange running pretty quickly - I don't think it's the basic install which takes the time with anything like this - it's working out what you do with it later :-)

 

To answer the OP question, 75Gb is a lot of email space - nearly 100Mb for each user so you should be fine. There are other benefits to Enterprise (mutliple storage groups, for example) which might be worth considering.

 

If you do go for standard and then decide you really need Enterprise, it's very easy to upgrade (we did it last year) - it just costs money :-(

[ZeroHour]

Enterprise I believe is not that much more so I would probably just buy it.

The limits of standard though wont be a problem if you implement a proper mailbox limit.

We only let staff have 40mb before they cant send email and 80mb before they stop receiving email. Pupils only get 2mb mailboxes here also.

Remember you can just have a staff store and a pupil store so that 150gb

[zag]

Standard is fine, SP2 has a 75gb mailbox store limit.

 

You wont reach that unless you have 4,000 users+

 

Exchange is by far the best email system around imo.

[webman]

Standard is fine, SP2 has a 75gb mailbox store limit.

 

You wont reach that unless you have 4,000 users+

 

... and impose an 18MB quota on everyone

[CyberNerd]

Standard is fine, SP2 has a 75gb mailbox store limit.

 

You wont reach that unless you have 4,000 users+

 

... and impose an 18MB quota on everyone

 

crippled by default...

[webman]

Totally. As I understand it with Zimbra, you can just get another server, install and configure the Zimbra mail store component and bingo your storage is expanded

 

Our Zimbra trials are getting even closer to completion and will soon be ready to implement fully once we get the hardware.

[ZeroHour]

Exchange is not for storing data really, well files anyway. Thats what your my documents is for. Also 18mb of email @ 5kb a message (remember no files if you use file space properly) is 3500 emails

[CyberNerd]

Totally. As I understand it with Zimbra, you can just get another server, install and configure the Zimbra mail store component and bingo your storage is expanded Smile

 

or just add another disk and expand the partition. You notice zimbra has a built-in document storage module. no limits except the size of the backup.

 

Our Zimbra trials are getting even closer to completion and will soon be ready to implement fully once we get the hardware.

 

nice one, we've just completed the our fist year in production.