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Wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction... used to work in IT in the late 90's so Im sure it's all moved on a bit!!
Current set-up is 21 users, with Outlook 2010 using BT Business Broadband POP3.
Management are moaning and saying we are out growing POP3 and the email is slow, limited toys. For some reason internal emails (when they go out and come back in) take bloody ages, BT have looked at it and given no real answer.
Anyway if we were to go down the route of a dedicated in-house server what would be the cheapest option.... from crap past knowledge.
New entry level sever with SBS (Small business server) installed.
In the old days we have a dedicated static IP on the server, using black magic our internet provider sets up their MX records to point all email to our static ip and the firewall does its magic?
I'm dead against it as if there is an email problem it will be left to me to sort out whereas now its 99.9% BT's problem leaving me to get on with my job.
anyway has it moved on much, would this be the cheapest way?
cheers
Yes and no. You can either do it in-house using SBS2011 or use a hosted exchange (frikkin cloud!) where you rent mailboxes off a service provider.
In-house = need to support it in a professional manner.
Hosted exchange = pay around a tenner a month per mailbox.
this is a simplistic view of it, but your two options. Any questions let me know. This is what I do.
cheers and thanks for the reply.
my biggest fear is coming in one day and everyone flipping out as there's no email coming in, then spending god knows how long tyring to sort it.
a mate did suggest going to hosted gmail business i guess similar to hosted exchange,(he works for a large bluechip and they moved from exchange servers to gmail and saved millions), my worry here though is this will only be as good as our actual internet speed? as in everyone will have a browser open all day?
it's been a while, stick with me.
am i right in saying if we did go down the SBS route, this takes BT out of the questions totally apart form still having them as our provider. that is INTERNAL mail will be instant'ish?
another problem we may have is that a few users in our contracts department currently send large email attachements (client drawings), i have looked at 'dropbox' etc (suggested on here) would this feature be part of hosted service? that is an intergrated file management feature.
the thing i love about hosted aswell is the fact theres no PST's and all that nightmare!
i'll stop there, im going off on one!
cheers
MB, yeah, you get the idea. You can use google but you can also use Microsoft 365 or have a quick google for hosted exchange. It's big business these days.
If support is an issue then definately go down the hosted route so you won't be stuck with the problems!
Hosted Exchange works in the same way as exchange server essentially. An email comes in to your mailbox with your provider, your outlook downloads a copy of the email and you work as normal. It's not like POP where you remove the email from the server. You have a full copy of your mailbox locally as well as online that you can access through Outlook Web Access (OWA) or webmail to you and me! They should also do your anti virus and anti spam too.
Each one of your PCs keeps a connection to your exchange provider so even if you send an email to the guy next to you it will go out and then back in your internet connection. When you send emails, the email will sit in your outbox until it has been uploaded to your service provider. This can be a pain if you're used to an in-house email server, but you're not so it shouldn't be an issue for you.
Another thing to beaware of is that when you sign up to a hosted exchange account, you will have to upload your existing PST files. this will take a LONG time and best done on a friday afternoon and left to run all weekend.
A lot of hosted exchange systems come with sharepoint, a Microsoft filesharing and collaberation system. Dropbox on steriods. Some people love it, some hate it. Drop box is nice and simple but not as secure.
If you go SBS, you will have full control of your email configuration, not just what Google / whoever want you to have access to. It will also mean that BT will be out of the loop except for internet access. Is your domain name managed by someone else other than BT? Internal emails will be instant and you are in control of mailbox sizes without paying any extra. SBS is great but you need someone who knows what they're doing to install, maintain and fix when they rarely go wrong.
Sounds like the hosted route is for you TBH. Some companies are put off by costs. At roughly £10 per mailbox per month you will be looking at £210 ex VAT per month, £2520 per year, £7560 for 3 years, £12600 for 5 years. YOu should stack these costs up against a SBS and proper support as you can sometimes be cheaper doing it in-house.
We run an internal exchange server, but pay our ISP to provide an SMTP feed (AKA store and forward) for the domain. That way we get best of both worlds. We publish their MX address for the domain (rather than publish our own) and they then punt any mail for us to an external IP address on our ISA server which then routes it our mail server.
If our server or internet connection goes down for whatever reason, they hold onto the mail for us for up to 4 days and if we have an extended outage they can, if required, provide the facility for us to access it via webmail.
We have also configured our firewall to only accept SMTP traffic from their MX, which is admittedly a bit belt and braces, but you never know.
If we had a better internet connection I'd probably consider a hosted option if I was setting it up from scratch, but having inherited the current setup, my experience is that the ongoing maintenance for the internal exchange server is fairly minimal although I have had a couple of hairy moments to do with message store size hitting it's limit (we're running Exchange 2003, standard edition).
Apart from that the only other issue we've had in the 6 months I've been here has been when the ISP in question changed the IP ranges for it's punt servers without telling us, meaning our firewall was rejecting their connections for a while. Took a while to figure out what was happening and we had about 4 hours without incoming email, but was actually relatively easy to fix once we knew what the problem was, and all of the backlog came through without any problems.
message store size hitting it's limit (we're running Exchange 2003, standard edition).
SP2 upped it to 75 but you also need to change in in the registry. Pre SP2 caused me a few headaches for growing stores!!!
That's a pretty good setup you have there.
SP2 upped it to 75 but you also need to change in in the registry.
We're on SP2 and already did that and still hit the limit with 35 users - no-one here had ever done any archiving and with the standard edition you can't set up additional message stores either.
Cue me whipping around the office showing people how to set up offline archives and publishing a weekly "Hall of Shame" of the worst offenders for mailbox size! We're now got about 30% headroom.
Office 365 (or Google Apps if you're that way inclined) is a no-brainer for organisations at that sort of size.
£6.50 per user per month for 25GB mailboxes/calendars with excellent webmail and sync to most mobile devices, plus hosted Sharepoint and Lync too. Antivirus and anti-spam all taken care of too.
Total cost for your size for 3 years would be about £5k, quickly speccing up a Dell including enough disk space and SBS including enough CALs is about £3.5k. Add a UPS, backup solution, outsourced mail filtering via Messagelabs or similar and it's hard to see where you'd be saving money.
cheers all, excellent replies 🙂
now for my numptyness.... stay with me again please.... 😉
PG can you clarify as my minds not what it used to be..
i understand the hosted exchange is similar to in-house dedicated but what is the advantage over hosted exchange to our current outlook2010 > BT POP3? (im being dull i know!) is the hosted exchange simply IMAP not POP3 and the only real advantage over what we have is you Can check it at home? we can do this already as the BT business account has OWA and you can set the account to keep a copy on the server??
i have to be honest i dont want the hassle of looking after an internal server even though there are obvious benefits as my knowledge is limited, but i quite fancy giving it a go - i could probably just about set it up BUT when it comes to upkeep sorting problems could take a while and id have to cheat and sign up to 'experts exchange' 😉
then again i have a meeting later in the week and i know the MD will...
1 - Snort at the long term costs of 'cloud'
2 - think in the long run it will be cheaper for me to look after it after the initial purchase of the bits n bobs.
'if' we went the internal hosted route am i correct in saying i'd need/do the following (basic laymans terms)-
1 - Entry level server with MS Server, say 4Gb RAM, RAID 1
2 - Copy of MS exchange (less faffing than SBS?)
3 - CALS for exchange? or do i need CALS for the server aswell?
4 - Suitable AV for the exchange server
5 - Our work domain is hosted by BT so this should make the MX record saga easier?
6 - Change everyones local outlook 2010 from POP3 to point at the server
7 - I would like to keep the PST's local rather than on the server as less faffing but i guess that defeats the point of the exchange server slightly as they dont get backed up?
thats enough for now, don't wont anyone opening a vein!
cheers!
Ummmmmmmm....
SBS is probably a better deal if you'll need Windows too.
Hardware requirements are quad-core and 8GB RAM minimum RAM these days for SBS 2011, ideally 10GB+. You'll want at least that for a non-SBS Exchange 2010 server as well.
How much is your time worth? Just dealing with backups takes time - say half an hour a day for someone swapping tapes or external drives and checking logs - that's 2.5 hours a week, or 390 hours over 3 years. At minimum wage, that's £2371. Installing patches, probably another 30 mins once a month. Dealing with any problems, hardware dying, calling the vendor and arranging a replacement disk / power supply / etc? More time and thus cost.
Going to any "proper" solution gives you:
- calendaring - proper meeting requests, scheduling resources (meeting rooms, pool car, etc), all in your mailbox and shareable with others if necessary.
- cached mailboxes - so all your mail is on the server and on your computer, so easy to find stuff via webmail, etc.
- Outlook Anywhere - so your laptop users can just connect to the internet at home, in a cafe, etc, open Outlook and have it connect and sync without faffing about with VPN.
- activesync - so "push" mail to iPhone, Android, Nokia, etc.
- Outlook Web App - webmail that works great across different browsers, etc.
If you're doing it in-house then doing all the external-facing stuff securely is a bit of a headache really.
SBS does give you a load of benefits beyond in-house email (having machines on a domain and manageable, central file storage, printing, etc) but running your own email systems can be a complex business. If you're a bigger organisation, running in house makes sense because you can have people you train up to know what they're doing, do the day-to-day management (backups, etc) and deal with things when they go wrong. The whole idea of anything "cloud" is outsourcing all that to people with big datacentres and the economies of scale that let them do highly-reliable replicated versions of the same service at a small monthly cost.
cheers again...
think you have swayed me, i still have nightmares of 12 years ago where the registry got corrupted on an exchange server and 200 people shouting at me.
im still a bit confused with the hosted exchnage compared to our current set up and the benefits though?
+1 what Simon says.
Hosted exchange is like having your own email server but it is looked after by guys in a data centre. You get full mailbox synchronisation so your calendars, contacts, sent items etc are kept online in your webmail as well as on your desktop. If you switch machines, you don't need to transfer PST files, you just log in and set up outlook and all your mail is downloaded. This will take a while though for large mailboxes and will impact your ADSL. Your emails are backed up, you get email to smartphones (except Blackberry's), sharing calendars, contacts, out of office replys, anti virus anti spam.
Hosted exchange is not for everyone but it sounds like it's the right fit for you. If you also require an in house server for file sharing or applications then SBS is better but only if it is installed an maintained by professionals. I go into a lot of companies and rescue them because they have tried to do it themselves. The most recent job was a real mess. They lost 3 months worth of data and about a weeks worth of downtime, really nasty! My advice would be for you to not take on this responsability!
Don't even think about a standard exchange server (i.e. non SBS). they are trickier to set up and are way more expensive.
cheers guys great replies virtual pints for all of you!
We have file servers sorted and backups as from past experience ive been burnt here aswell so ive got backups of backups and its taken off site etc.
I think i can sway them not to have it in house (they will drop on the floor when i get prices), i do the technical sales and the IT on the side but i have to hold my hand up and say enough is enough at some point. I'm not going to fall into the trap and think i can do it myself, it would have to be outsourced.
cheers
me again, on elast hting, just went onto the BT site and they over 365....
what do you make of this 'if you have time' ;)...
[url= http://business.bt.com/broadband-and-internet/internet-communication/business-email/ ]BT 365[/url]
Cheers
MB, if you're at 21 users and management want more toys, It might be best to get an assessment from an IT consultancy. Any good one will do this for free. They will be able to discuss all the options, give demos and make suggestions that should help improve productivity and uptime. Management may be more likely to spend if it comes from a "Pro".
Yeah that'll do it. My only concern is that it has the letters "B" and "T". Good pricing though but this normally comes at the expense of service.
MB, if you're at 21 users and management want more toys, It might be best to get an assessment from an IT consultancy. Any good one will do this [b]for free[/b]. They will be able to discuss all the options, give demos and make suggestions that should help improve productivity and uptime. Management may be more likely to spend if it comes from a "Pro".
Not unless the answer you want to hear is one that involves spending lots of money with them.
The kickback a partner gets for setting people up with O365 is minimal - for an org of this size it would be less than £50 a year. They'd MUCH rather sell you SBS (making margin on hardware, software and charging for installation) along with a nice expensive support contract.
Oh you cynic! 🙂
Without knowing much more about the company and their actions I don't think we can say what the conclusion would be.
It could go the other way completely! staff could be more productive and the company more competitive. I've been to companies in the dark ages and with a little technology they have become a more solid business and have expanded.
Too many factors for us to discuss on a forum but having a chat with a reputable IT company in the area could only be a good thing, it may open your eyes to a few things, you can always say no. 🙂
I got in a consultancy here for a free half day assessment soon after arriving and would definitely say its worthwhile. They produced a pretty comprehensive report detailing improvements which they picked up on, some of which was stuff I was already aware of, others I wouldn't have had a scooby on without them coming in but was subsequently able to fix myself.
Yes, of course they want our business, but they were also pretty generous with the free advice and they will be getting work from us in the future as a result (I'll probably use them to do our server virtualization if nothing else).
As PG says, you can always say no!
I'm moving our company (30 staff) from internal (SBS 2003) to Google Mail. Time for new hardware, and we're moving away from SBS...
Best thing I can advise is [b]get an IT company to assist you with it - DO NOT rely on internet forums, especially a bike one![/b] Sounds like you have nowhere near the skills in-house required...
Setting it up is the easy part (especially SBS - 'click' next, 'click' next...)....
....diagnosing why Exchange has keeled over at 2am, recovering failed RAID arrays, and finding the source of dropped packets is the hard part...
I can point you towards an IT support company (previous employers) based in NW London.... I was their field engineer, who would be visiting you on-site...
cheers all...
stop, your bringing back the nightmares!..diagnosing why Exchange has keeled over at 2am, recovering failed RAID arrays, and finding the source of dropped packets is the hard part...
well i had a quick meeting with the boss, gave him rough costs of SBS internal route and i nearly had to give him CPR.
anyway i said if you want it done you need proper geeks in as my skills have been lost and stuck in the 90's.
IMO 21 users its not big enough for a dedicated internal SBS etc, i think first off is move from BT when the contract is up, they have been crap and too big for their boots.
If budget allows, look at SDSL + externally hosted mail (Exchange / Google Apps). The cloud is useless with zero web connectivity.
We're on 6.5Mb up AND down here 😀 ( IIRC around about £3.5k/yr, 99.9% uptime guarantee )
I disagree that 21 users isn't big enough for SBS internally - it's designed for *exactly* that scenario. 5 users upwards (5 CALS included with OS license). In fact, SBS 2011 Essentials is designed for up to 25 users.
What you don't have is the skills in-house to look after the SBS box - it's quite common to have an external IT provider manage your SBS network.
And just to say, I'm a Microsoft Certified Small Business Server specialist... so I sort-of know what I'm talking about ha ha 🙂
Ali
MB, if you're looking to upgrade your internet connection too, also look for bonded ADSL connections. It's basically 2 connections merged into one big one. We are starting to get 4 x bonded connections which is giving us an upload up to 10Mbps and it's cheaper than SDSL. Virgin/cable/NTL are in the process of bringing out big connections too. Just depends what's availible in your area.
I have several SBS' out there for 2-5 users and they would be lost without it. It's not about size really, more about what you need. When companies get to over 40 users I start to look at the full version of the server software, so you're definitely not to small for a SBS.