Moving to Googlemail from Exchange 2007

[cjohnsonuk]

We're currently running Exchange 2007 but often experience downtime either at the weekends when the ADSL line drops (and we can't do anything about it) or during the day when some configuration or another doesn't do what its set to and the email tries routing itself round in circles.

 

As staff use email more and more for students submitting work and as students need more and more storage I'm considering "outsourcing" the provision of email servers so we can focus on other support issues.

 

We've considered moving to Gmail for schools before but at the time we were on Exchange 2003 and thought moving to Exchange 2007 would be the better option. When it works well its great but...

 

Has anyone else moved to Google mail? What are the drawbacks? Are there any ongoing problems? What limitations are there? Has anyone made the move and regretted it?

 

Initial quotes from google for email services including 7gb storage per user, positini services for esafety etc are around £4.25 per user which to me seems exceptionally good value. However with 1600 pupils and 200 staff its considerably more expensive than the cost that I can quantify for managing our own internal email on Exchange 2007. Whats difficult is working out how much technician time we need to look after it and how much the downtime costs the school in terms of lost productivity.

 

What value can you put on a reliable /dependable email? If staff lose confidence in using email then this has long term effects on the use of "e-communication" tools such as email.

 

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

 

I tried searching for previous threads on the subject of googlemail but its showing loads so I'm presuming its picking up people's email addresses.

 

ChrisJ

[Dos_Box]

Isn't there an issue with the DPA and possibly 'sensitive' email being held on a service that scans all of the mail on it's servers for it's own purposes?

I may be wrong and Google does not do this for school email, but I would look into this.

I have Exchange 2007 and have found it almost flawless, (certainly very reliable). Why is your ISP connection being cut at the weekend? Do you not have a JANET\RBC connection?

[cjohnsonuk]

We think it was the router dropping the line but as we're not in to test we can't be sure. A reboot on a Monday morning almost always cures the problem.

I think one of the problems with Exchange 2007 has been the changes we've had to make to allow for the additional space everyone is using. New servers have been added and old ones removed but the GUI tools don't show the full picture The memory requirements on each box are going up too and according to MS recommendations we need 4 maybe 5 Exchange servers, an edge server, an external CAS server, a hub server, and a Storage group server. We'd thought of having to SG servers to split staff adn student data onto separate boxes to spread the load. That's 5 servers that need looking after!

 

The comment on DPA is noted although surely all spam filters do the same looking at peoples email and Phorm does the same with every web page. As part of esafety we need to scan every email for "inappropriate content" too. I thought there was someting about looking at emails that was different in the eyes of the DPA if it was a machine doing the looking as opposed to a person....

 

Setting up a smtp connection through our Janet connection has not been tried yet but is on the list of things to consider.

[K.C.Leblanc]

Have you given seriouse consideration to have the ADSL line upgraded to leased line or SDSL. ADSL isn't really designed for this sort of use.

[Soulfish]

Most large US companies (Amazon, Google etc) are part of the EU/US Safe Harbour Data Protection agreement (or just host their data in the EU!) so you should be covered under DPA.

 

Have you looked at the MS live@edu (Live @ edu :: The Future of Student Collaboration is Here) stuff? You can get a 10gb hosted on a Exchange 2010 platform and supported by MS, with little or no cost.

[cjohnsonuk]

The adsl is really just a backup for our leased line. As the restrictions on traffic on the leased line are more restrictive (originally we could only get outgoing on port 80!) we set up email to go out over the other link.

[cjohnsonuk]

Have you looked at the MS live@edu (Live @ edu :: The Future of Student Collaboration is Here) stuff? You can get a 10gb hosted on a Exchange 2010 platform and supported by MS, with little or no cost.

 

I've not looked. Do you know if this does this allow us to scan emails for inappropriate content, quarantine them and forward on to a moderators address for action? Does it do spam and virus filtering? My hotmail spam filter doesn't give me confidence in this service when compared to my gmail account!

 

Chris J

[Theblacksheep]

The memory requirements on each box are going up too and according to MS recommendations we need 4 maybe 5 Exchange servers, an edge server, an external CAS server, a hub server, and a Storage group server. We'd thought of having to SG servers to split staff adn student data onto separate boxes to spread the load. That's 5 servers that need looking after!

 

 

I think by MS standards we SHOULD have the same, however considering our students have tiny mailboxes and the mailflow isn't that big one old server (2X2core, 4gb ram) was fine (except for the C drive space).

[Dos_Box]

The memory requirements on each box are going up too and according to MS recommendations we need 4 maybe 5 Exchange servers, an edge server, an external CAS server, a hub server, and a Storage group server

 

No you don't. Depending on your setup you will need one or perhaps 2 (depending on your internet connection\firewall arrangements). I have just one server (Server 2008 x64) running mine, but be sure to get a quad core and LOTS of RAM and you should be fine. As for storage OWA now will tie directly into your user areas, so storage will be AD controlled if you have your policies set.

[mstechie_2002]

We are looking into using live@edu in our district for our students. Does anyone have experience with it? Our students do not have emails through the district so this will be a new setup.

[elsiegee40]

Initial quotes from google for email services including 7gb storage per user, positini services for esafety etc are around £4.25 per user which to me seems exceptionally good value.

 

Purely as a comparison for costs

 

RM EasyMail

 

£1.24 per user with default 20 Meg of space...

 

 

£239 for each extra 1GB! (NOT per person)

[ZeroHour]

tbh mailboxes should never be big. Quota it and get people into using archive files. Exchange/gmail/anything is not meant to be a big storage platform even though it can be used as such. We have 40mb mailboxes here for everyone, no exceptions and have taught people how to archive mail and manage their mailboxes and it works well. With remote access as well accessing archives is simple and MS are adding some form of remote archive access into exchange 2010.

I would look at getting a upstream mail hoster to route through such as messagelabs. If your net dies it caches all your mail until your net is restored and it could easily be cheaper but you need to beat down mailbox sizes as their really is no excuse.

[Nick_Parker]

What we do is use gmail as an upstream hoster/spam filter and then download all the mail via pop to our exchange server.

This means the mail is always going somewhere when our ADSL lines go down and its provided fairly decent spam/virus filtering.

[jamesb]

There are one or two concerns about gmail - Use Google Mail, violate European and Canadian privacy laws? Thank USAPATRIOT Act (The Googlization of Everything)

 

I don't know how current these are, as I can't check googlemail's privacy policy from work.

[linker3000]

If you are not really using all the collaborative features of Exchange and only really using it as a mailbox manager, would you consider moving to a Linux platform?

 

You already have the server power and all the required software is free, including the anti-spam and antivirus apps. No need to mess around with a server-for-this and a server-for-that.

Edited May 19, 2009 by linker3000

[CyberNerd]

If you are not really using all the collaborative features of Exchange and only really using it as a mailbox manager, would you consider moving to a Linux platform?

 

We moved our student mailboxes to linux because at the time it had better collaborative features than exchange !

Zimbra offers Open Source email server software and shared calendar for Linux and the Mac

[linker3000]

Agreed, I have looked at both Zimbra and Scalix for collaborative functions - ZImbra has the better features, and Scalix installs better on exiting platforms. I am tempted by OpenGoo for their current and forthcoming document collaboration features, but their email app needs some work.

[john]

As someone that has to use Scalix as the LEA implementation I would avoid it, we do not have a good time with it. It may be due to poor implementation perhaps by the LEA but the concepts behind it that we see and use make it look like say Windows 3.1 VS XP Pro we all would probably have XP Pro for its features, usability etc. Fine Scalix is email but just seems so out of date and old.

[nicholab]

Why not change provider of ADSL or move to bonded adsl form a buiness provider? You could always host your server in a co-lo.

[techy32]

Hi,

 

We are using Google Apps for education for the last two years. I do not see any problem in using it at all. We have only once down time for an hour when the google mail was down in the world. Apart from that we do not have any problem. Currently it supports 1250 users free of cost. We do not need anymore so did not ask for it.

 

I think google apps is the best solution for up to 7GB of mail boxes. In the time when everybody is depending on email for communication we should go for something reliable not like restarting server every day or week.

 

Thanks,

Shoaib

[morganw]

We've been using Google Apps for nearly a year now, used to be on RM Easymail. Initially there were a few issues with some members of staff accidentally deleting their emails as they though that gmail labels were the samething as folders - so they would label something and then delete it instead of archiving it.

 

You get 66% discount on postini security and filtering products too as long as your grand total bill for the year is over £2000, which doesn't sound that cheap but actually compares well to other services with filtering and 7GB of storage.

 

Performance wise it'd only ever been down a couple of times and it always seems to be going a decent speed. I really like it. The best bit is that it has directory sync and SSO funcationality built into the educational version so if your backend structure is nicely organised you could get something that is effectively zero maintenace.

 

I was really interested in Microsofts Live@Edu as well, but for full integration with AD I think you need to invest in MS server products whereas Google was free to try out all the functionailty. Maybe the Microsoft solution would have tighter and smarter integration though.

 

The main issue so far has been setting up other applications and utilities that expect an onsite SMTP server, we are currently investigating a hosted offsite relay as SWGFL block direct access to smtp.gmail.com, we had it working intermitantly for a few months but it seems more reliable to relay the mail first rather than go straight to gmail servers.