Question

Exchange Vs. Non-Exchange Emails Services

Asked by: compdigit44

I'm in the process of searching for an email hosting provider for my company of 60 employees. Right now we use our parents companies Exchange server but since we will be seperating from our parent we need to find a email hosting provider since hosting email inhouse is to costly for us right now. Currently my users use Outlook 2002 & Outlook 2003. The only calendaring they use is to schedule meeting to see if someone if free for a particular time slot. Here are my questions:
1) What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an hosted Exchange server versus a non-Exchange server?
2) If we use a non-Exchange server using IMAP can we still schedule resources like meeting rooms for our meetings?

Please advise

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Asked On
2007-07-12 at 05:26:10ID22691441
Tags

exchange

,

vs

,

imap

,

hosted

Topics

Data Hosting/Data Havens

,

Exchange Email Server

,

Outlook Groupware Software

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: leewPosted on 2007-07-12 at 05:36:05ID: 19470926

IMAP and POP are e-mail capabilities.  They only handle e-mail.  Scheduling is a groupware function that is only available to Exchange and other groupware servers.

How exactly is hosting your own e-mail too expensive?  You buy Exchange Server, you buy a server, and you pay for a static IP address.  Using a third party for hosted Exchange is going to be EXPENSIVE in the long run... even short term, at $10/user/month, that's $600/month.  x12 months, that's $7200.  You can definitely buy exchange and windows server for that much.  And if you lease the server from Dell, HP or maybe IBM, your monthly fees will be FAR less than hosted exchange.

Of course, you could look for other software to handle your scheduling... but then you (and your employees) have to spend man-hours learning new software, possibly changing their work habits, and of course, evaluating products.  The lost productivity will increase the cost significantly...

 

by: compdigit44Posted on 2007-07-12 at 05:43:10ID: 19470978

So your telling if you want to schedule a meeting or resource you need to use Exchange and IMAP cannot do this correct?

 

by: leewPosted on 2007-07-12 at 05:45:30ID: 19471000

IMAP has no calendaring functionality - it's MAIL.  That's it.

 

by: war1Posted on 2007-07-12 at 06:59:42ID: 19471721

Greetings compdigit44 !

Here are some methods to maintain a group calendar without Exchange
http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/scheduleall.htm

If the above methods do not work for you, you need a third party program like OfficeCalendar
http://www.officecalendar.com

Best wishes, war1

 

by: djxtremePosted on 2007-07-13 at 03:56:46ID: 19479538

Biggest plus to Exchange is data safety.

With a POP3 client, email is stored on the local machine. Where this may not be as big a problem with IMAP as it only reads the email from the server, I've never had good results long term with IMAP.

Exchange stores all your emails in a Information Store. Think of it as a big database that is stored centrally on your server. This can be scheduled to backup nightly to your desired choice of backup medium.

Aside from that, there is the calender functionality also. Where as third party apps may work well, with exchange its all integrated and it works very well. You can even place appointments on other peoples calender's, or share a public calender and assign it to a meeting room.

Exchange 2003 (or more likely 2007) is a fabulous piece of software, and will scale almost infinatley for your business needs.


In my opinion, plump for the exchange server. Yes, it may cost more up front, but done right you wont have to worry too much about it for years to come.

GL!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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