Exchange 2010. Or not?

[PiqueABoo]

Live@Edu is being morphed into "Office365 for Education". Perhaps we'll know more this time next week after MS have been at BETT but in the mean-time look at what I posted here mid Dec. The slide in that presentation is handy because it has info I haven't seen anywhere else e.g. we already knew the (school) managed collaboration will be done on Sharepoint, but the slide has numbers for the disk space.

 

It's defo worth out sourcing exchange as it's one less hassle to deal with.

 

There is less to do, but you still have things to deal with when it's outsourced. I don't think Exchange is much trouble at all, including Exchange 2003. If it ain't broke don't fix it.. with an existing Exchange, unless the current requirements change (e.g. you want a lot more additional mailboxes than the h/w will handle) or some other factors turn up (e.g. server goes out of warranty) I would wait until O365fE has fully arrived.

[bossman]

@pran:

 

Why not move to G-mail which would integrate with your google apps instead of adding more cost to the schools budget.

 

Or your first choice: Zimbra which is free or you can purchase the enterprise version.

 

We use Zimbra here which we are in the process of virtualising, total accounts is less than yours but over 1000.

 

It all depends on how your staff and students use their accounts plus you are in control and not some corporation.

[zag]

Just to update on our situation. We are currently running an old exchange 2003 box. The server is around 7 years old now so its time for an upgrade

 

We've decided to go with Live@edu for the upgrade and not exchange 2010. Its cheaper, has loads of storage and takes the server admin out of our hands which is great.

 

Testing live@edu with outlook, its totally transparent to the end user. Students will have to log in each time on webmail but I'm sure over the years we will find a solution to Single sign on.

 

So next summer we are going to move wholesale over to it for teachers, admin staff and students. Since we are becoming an academy, I'm going to go the whole hog and have a new shorted domain name as well.