Hosted Exchange

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ratbert

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#100162 4-Apr-2012 12:02

We're looking at retiring our old Exchange server and moving to hosted Exchange. Most service providers in any field are great until something goes wrong, and that's the point at which you discover whether you made a wise choice of providers or not

Onenet looks good but I would like to hear of others experience with them, especially how problems were handled if they occurred. Ditto for any other locally based provider.

I would prefer an NZ-based provider, but if anyone has had problems with Microsoft Exchange 365 I'd be interested to hear how well that was handled too.

freitasm

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#605004 4-Apr-2012 12:05

Office 365 works well. Because they have a huge infrastructure things can be "easily" fixed. For example a DNS problem in their Singapore datacentre was causing A/NZ users to lose connection to their services. They managed it by moving mailboxes around the world to other datacentre while fixing the DNS problems.

Outages will exist in any service. The real thing is how the providers recover from these. Office 365 works.

Zeon

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#605009 4-Apr-2012 12:10

Do you specifically want Exchange or are you looking for a similar feature set? If its the feature set you are interested in check out Smartermail:
http://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/mail-server-software.aspx

It has virtually all of the features but is much cheaper and in my opinion, more reliable (being someone who has run 2003, 2007 and 2010 Exchange servers). We host Smartermail with customers running up to 100 mailboxes. Some details here:
https://web-2u.co.nz/index.php/webemail-hosting

Feel free to PM me if interested.

Otherwise for Hosted Exchange i would really recommend talking to Belton IT:
http://www.belton.co.nz/

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ratbert

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#605072 4-Apr-2012 14:08

Thanks for the feedback Mauricio, that's the kind of info I'm looking for.

Zeon, personally I would be happy to ditch Exchange but my employers want to keep it so I guess we'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future. Any particular reason you recommend Belton?

Zeon

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#605146 4-Apr-2012 16:01

ratbert: Thanks for the feedback Mauricio, that's the kind of info I'm looking for.

Zeon, personally I would be happy to ditch Exchange but my employers want to keep it so I guess we'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future. Any particular reason you recommend Belton?

Ah no fair enough. Yea people get really linked into Exchange. It's getting to the point now where its becoming such a complex beast you kinda need 500+ users to make it worth managing. i used to spend hours every week doing just basic stuff but now spend less than an hour a month maintaining Smartermail with 300+ mailboxes.

Yea the reason i recommend Belton is two fold. A) they are really professional and always quick to assist with any problem B) their technical know how is excellent.

I've worked with them for the past 18 months for a large client and also pass their names onto smaller ones too.

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