onsite, hosted or cloud

[jjohnsoncantell]

Greetings,

 

Our email contract is up for renewal soon and its time to start looking at the competition and alternatives. We currently pay for a hosted exchange system which we mainly access through owa. My main question is do i go for an in house exchange system or do i stay hosted. For the number of accounts we have and the mailboxes we have i dont think it is that badly priced but we are limited in that we cant create users/groups, share write access to calendars between staff and other annyoing little things. All this would be solved by an internal exchange setup although we can pay extra to our provider for the access to create users/groups.

 

In your opinions is it worth paying for our own exchange setup and all the setup/training/running costs that go with it or to continue with a hosted system, whoever it may be with?

 

Thanks

James

[Edu-IT]

School or Business? You could look at Google Apps or Office365. How many mailboxes are you talking?

[zag]

There is no need to pay for hosted exchange, Microsoft give it away for free with Office 365.

 

Its very good. We run it here.

[jjohnsoncantell]

its for a school system.. We use gmail/googleapps for the students but its not very professional for the staff. Believe it or not ive not really heard of office365 yet, i must have been under a rock..

[zag]

We use gmail/googleapps for the students but its not very professional for the staff.

 

Office 365 is virtually identical to running a local exchange server. I've never noticed any difference in real world usage anyway. You can even powershell into the server if you really want to.

 

I assumed Google Apps was the same but maybe not!

[Michael]

we are limited in that we cant create users/groups, share write access to calendars between staff and other annyoing little things.

 

You can do all this in Office 365 or Google's offering.

 

If you think longterm, in terms of hosting a server, keeping it up-to-date and secure as well as upgrading Exchange Server - either Service Packs or completely new versions - a cloud based solution takes the pain out of all this. Just manage users/groups/permissions and enjoy healthy mailbox sizes.