• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

alternatives to exchange?

T

t0mmyr

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 9, 2000
Messages
1,878
we use kerio here at work, just wondering if you guys use or like any alternatives, i hear exchange can be pretty expensive to keep
 
Exchange is the defacto standard. If you are worried about admin overhead/licensing, you can always look at a hosted solution. You pay X amount per month per mailbox, and they handle everything on their end.
 
you could look at somethign like Zimbra, or look at cloud solutions like google apps for e-mail.
 
I'll second Zimbra. Good replacement to Exchange if you have the time to learn all of it's little quirks and what now
 
I'm loving GoogleApps right now. Especially since Standard is free for up to 50 users. If you don't want to manage anything except some user accounts, there you go. If you want to use Outlook, though, you'll need to pony up the cash for Premier.
 
We use Groupwise where I work -- I'm not the admin for it, but it's fairly nice from what I hear.
 
t0mmyr said:
we use kerio here at work, just wondering if you guys use or like any alternatives, i hear exchange can be pretty expensive to keep
Click to expand...

My company has been planning an exchange migration as well, but some of the upfront costs are discouraging..until we found this..

I work for 2 companies. One company owns the other one, so i manage both of them. I'm the in house IT. One of them has been using USA.NET for their exchange hosting. Awesome company, great customer service, no issues whatsoever. The only downside is their price. It's like $16.95 per user per month for only 250 MB of storage. Not alot of space!! We have just been archiving the user's emails pretty often to get the emails off of the server. Also, If you want blackberry support it's an extra like $5.00 a month.

The other company i manage..we have an in house Novell GroupWise server...it's been a real pain in the ass to support this thing, and keep it up and running. Sometimes it abends..sometimes not..Anyway, long story short: we've been having the discussions of moving to exchange. At first it was all about hosting it ourselves, maybe even move the other company off of USA.net and onto another in house exchange server. But the upfront costs are too great, and then if we want redundancy..it just adds to the cost.

Then we stumbled on to Microsoft's hosted exchange solution. Yes, Microsoft themselves have their own exchange service..AND..it's only $5.00 per user per month..and that gives you 25 GB's of storage!!! Activesync is free. BlackBerry use costs $10.00 extra per user per month, which makes no sense, but i'm sure it's just the BB license fees. So, when we do this, we will probably move away from BlackBerrys, just because of the license fees, and frankly the hardware sucks. We just bought a user an iPhone as a test, and so far so good. SO we might move to iPhones or Droids when we switch exchange providers.

Good luck man, I hope all of this helps.
 
AfterLogic has some pretty nice features.
http://www.afterlogic.com/

IceWarp is also pretty good.
http://www.icewarp.com/


You don't get the auto-configure outlook stuff, but you do get LDAP sync so passwords are matched, etc. Alternatively you can just tell them to use the built in webmail, which is pretty robust on IceWarp, but AfterLogic has the basics and is boatloads cheaper.
 
I'll third Zimbra. We have it in our domain hosting 500+ mailboxes with it tied into the exchange box.
 
If you can afford exchange in house get it hosted, it will make your life so much easier. We host exchange for $10 a mailbox for 1GB of mailbox space. Any device that can connect via Active sync is free to connect and Blackberries are $10 a month. We also offer encryption, and archiving for extra fees. Generally speaking under 100 users it is cheaper to host then it is to have exchange in house.

On the flip side, Exchange 2010 has been handed down from the gods and is amazing so if your on the edge of not knowing if you want exchange or not, just take the plunge.
 
XOR != OR said:
Exchange is the defacto standard.
Click to expand...

I would have said this 5 years ago.

As for alternatives...I would think as everyone else suggestion Zimbra or Google. I personally use Postfix but you need to understand mail and Linux to run your own dedicated mail server.
 
You could look into IBM Lotus Live, hosted mail starts at $3 a user per month.

And before people go ape shit for me mentioning Lotus needs to take a close look at 8.5, its a pretty bad ass product. I support a 4 server Lotus 8.5 Cluster with BES and Extrafax and its a pretty darn solid setup.
 
In house > *

what do you do if a hosted service goes down, or the internet goes down? You're screwed. At least if the in house server is down, you have full access to it and can get it back up and running. Nothing like having an It manager up your ass when a hosted server is down and there's nothing you can do about it.

As for alternatives, I can't help, but glad to see there are some. I honestly don't see the big thing with exchange, it's very primitive to say the least. The admin back end is very low featured and to do anything involved you either have to script it or it can't be done without some weird workarounds.
 
The only hosted service I know has had a major outtage was Gmail lol and it happens a lot with them it seems.

If you internet goes down, your business is screwed anyways, almost all of my customers are very cripled if their net goes down, even with exchange onsite (mail still does not go anywhere)

Reliability is one major factor you need to look into when considering a hosted solution.
 
I agree. I would always want my email hosted in house where it's safe / secure. I have a weird paranoia about the worlds #1 search engine hosting my email and important documents for me. Not to mention the flexibility and features who get to embrace over external hosting. There are so many limitations and caps on external mail/web hosting.
 
k1pp3r said:
You could look into IBM Lotus Live, hosted mail starts at $3 a user per month.

And before people go ape shit for me mentioning Lotus needs to take a close look at 8.5, its a pretty bad ass product. I support a 4 server Lotus 8.5 Cluster with BES and Extrafax and its a pretty darn solid setup.
Click to expand...

I used to admin a Lotus environment.......never again. Seriously even after the migration to 8.5 (which did make things a lot better then they were) it was still a PITA. We also had a hard time training new admins or interns because everyone had only ever used exchange / outlook and had never touched Lotus.

Lotus and Groupwise / Novell in general are on my lists of never again.

As far as in house vs external goes it really is a cost thing. How much do you depend on email, how much can you spend, how many user's do you have, do you need BES as well? Just doing the math for a 25 person exchange organization with say 10 Blackberries, and 15 iPhones.

Dell Poweredge R710 w/ Windows Server 2008 R2 standard (assuming you don't have the environment to virtualize). (E5620, 12GB of RAM, 3x 250GB SATA drives, all the other goodies). $4,000 from Dell website.
Microsoft Exchange 2010 Standard $690
Microsoft Exchange 2010 Standard user cal's x25 $1625
Buffalo Terastation 6TB (Backup storage) $1800
Blackberry Server Express w/ Bronze support ($450)
GFI MailEssentials $425 for one year

Total Cost: $8990.

Now that total cost is under $10k which is good and for a lot of places would be a no brainier, but lets also add in a few things here. You need an IT person or outsourced service to manage your server(s) (about $35,000 a year or more). You need to power and cool the server (Lets say $1800), if you already have say Acronis for your environment you need to buy the Exchange addin to properly backup the server (another $500). By the end of the first year to maintain an exchange environment you have spent Close to $50,000 in the first year to maintain an in house exchange environment AND you don't get encryption (should you need it). For a company who already has an IT guy on staff and already has other servers, this isn't really that big of a deal and you are back to looking at your $10,000 price tag, however maybe you are a company that doesn't have a full time IT guy, just a contractor on retainer, or maybe google is your only IT you are looking at that $50,000 figure. If you were to host through my company for 25 users and 10 BBs you would end up paying $4200 a year.

I have to agree that if I am working somewhere I definitely want everything except the website in house where I can watch it and have instant access to it, but for smaller companies generally it just doesn't make sense. If you depend 100% on exchange and need 100% up-time and your internet takes a dump it doesn't matter if it is in house or external you are dead in the water. If you have it hosted and the service provider is having an outage you can't do anything and it sucks, but thats not much different then having the same problem on your own server and possibly having a longer outage because you don't know how to fix what is broken. Not to mention in many large hosted environments if you have a server go down it is usually not that big of a deal because the exchange server's are virtual and thus just get moved to another host making the outage very short.

Again it all comes down to what makes the CIO or CFO (usually if no IT person the CFO takes care of it) more comfortable.
 
Last edited:
Lotus / Novell in my opinion of dying technology. Never heard of any good experiences from using them. I remember migrating Lotus Domino to Linux Postfix.
 
C7J0yc3 said:
I used to admin a Lotus environment.......never again. Seriously even after the migration to 8.5 (which did make things a lot better then they were) it was still a PITA. We also had a hard time training new admins or interns because everyone had only ever used exchange / outlook and had never touched Lotus.

Lotus and Groupwise / Novell in general are on my lists of never again.
Click to expand...

To each his own, I have had no issues learning lotus (i am 99% exchange) the biggest tool, lotus support. I will agree that there are not a lot of lotus admins out there, but is not that darn difficult to learn
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top