Internal email Server: Exchange Set-up & fees too high?? Alternatives?

well just looking @ it quickly yeah looks ok...
Now that you have one quote you can always seek additonal quotes from other suppliers to make sure you are getting best for your buck ...competition is healthy shop around..

if you end up opening it up so you can send email outside your company domain you will need to puchase and setup additional things

Good luck --- get some more opions mine is just one

www.bluehost.com $6.95 per month 2500 pop email accounts.

Microsoft SBS 2003 $350-$500 gives you Exchange 2003

Microsoft SBS 2008 $1200+ but must have a 64 bit server. gives you exchange 2007

I cannot comment on the pricing as I am on the wrong side of the pond.
However the Exchange 2007 license looks like retail box, which comes with CALs. Personally I would look to licence it on volume licensing which will be cheaper.

However 40 users puts you in to SBS 2008 territory, which will be cheaper for you. SBS allows a maximum of 75 users. Do you already have a Windows domain? If not then there are no WINDOWS CALs on the list.

If you go with SBS then you do not need the Symantec backup software - although you could use the Symantec SBS bundle. Another option would be Backup Assist, which is cheaper than Symantec Backup Exec.

-M

>Is there a relatively simple alternative?

I recommend you look at Mdaemon.  No way do you need to spend a lot of money on hardware, and it doesn't need the same level of IT expertise to maintain as Exchange.

www.altn.com

Looking at the hardware spec again, I would have to doubt if they know what they are doing. Even on a small number of users I always have two arrays for Exchange because it is a high transactional database. One array for the OS and logs, another array for the database. Buy it correctly and it will last you for years. I have Exchange 2003 servers still in production five years later.

To provide protection for the data, RAID arrays are almost mandatory. I wouldn't dream of doing Exchange without a RAID. While you could save money up front, in the event of a drive failure you would lose the money saved quickly. Remember hard disks WILL fail, it is just a matter of when.

If you decide to run something else, then you can often get away with a lot less. I have a copy of SmarterMail running on a single mirrored array quite happily.

-M

OK this may fly in the face of "textbook" setups, but consider this.  If the Server, with all its' RAID, etc. were to fail through, say a mainboard problem, how soon would it be before you could get the company up and running again?  Do you have some kind of (regularly maintained) Hot Spare kicking around?  With a company of 40 people, this kind of contingency is I would say, mandatory.  But what steps are in place to transfer operations from the Live system to get the Hot Spare in operation?  There are one hell of a lot of "what if's" there, and Sod's Law is that the next fault that happens is not on the list.

If you were to use a mail server that ran on ordinary hardware, ordinary operating systems, then performance might not be nearly as fast as with a tuned system, but if you had a disaster situation today you would be guaranteed to be up and running again within a matter of a few hours.  With Mdaemon you could run it on Windows XP, download the program again (old versions are still available if you were concerned about too many changes happening at the same time), migrating the old message store across might take a while, but there are ways to facilitate this.  Because the Mail Server is a completely separate entity to Active Directory, etc. etc. there is nothing to stop you setting up users in different directories whilst the migration takes place, so users wouldn't have historic stuff immediately, but current stuff would be rolling in almost immediately.  Over the years of using Mdaemon I have had to do this a few times for clients and they appreciate the fact that there is, hour on hour, demonstrable progress in recovery from catastrophe to complete recovery.  

I still have clients running Mdaemon on ordinary Windows 98 and Windows 2000 pc's!  These are, however, not companies with 40 employees, it has to be said.  Mdaemon is not at all fussy about what it will run on - I have had glitches running it on SBS however where you have to make sure anything else that may be mail-related is not started, have had instances when Microsoft updates have decided to tinker with SMTP causing Mdaemon to display its' panic red icon in the Systray, but absolutely nothing that has caused extensive head-scratching.  With real-time logging switched on in Mdaemon, diagnosis of problems are a breeze compared with Exchange.  Mestha makes Exchange seem easy too, but he is a specialist in this field, the cost of having someone like him come and sort out difficulties will make you think several times before picking up the phone.  My clients who run Mdaemon tend to have *no* in-house I.T. presence whatsoever, so they need a low-maintenance system (and so do I, for my sanity's sake).

Yes, it will work with Outlook - use IMAP though.