Re: Silly question of the day #2: Hosted e-mail vs. Exchange on SBS2003

I have three reasons for preferring SBS/Exchange to hosted e-mail:

IMO Outlook is one of the primary reasons to have a computer. Aside from ordinary e-mail, there's calendar, tasks, and contacts, including the ability to share all of those features among users. In our business, we use meeting requests constantly, and we have a large shared contacts database. I don't imagine any of that is possible with the hosted service (unless it's actually hosted Exchange). For the traveling users, Outlook over RPC provides the same experience from any connected location, plus the ability to work offline if no Internet connection is available.

My second reason depends on the hosting company. When I last had hosted e-mail, the hosting company had an aggressive and undocumented spam control plan that caused me a lot of problems. I could never predict when a sender would be unable to get mail to me without my having to call tech support and get them unblocked. (At one point, they blacklisted the IPs of all of Israel, with the excuse that it was near terrorist areas. It took me an hour to get one sending domain/IP white listed). With Exchange, I control which messages come through and which don't.

Closely related to the second reason is hygiene. Although they denied it, I was pretty sure that the hosting company was bypassing AV at times of unusually high traffic. At one point they admitted to bypassing spam filtering, which I could live with as a rare occurrence, but to me it's critical to have messages virus scanned before they hit the desktop PCs.

"Cary W. Shultz" <cshultz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:%23P1$rMblIHA.4480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Good afternoon!

I know that this question is asked and answered often, but:

Question: why would it be a better idea to leave the e-mail with the current hosting company (who also hosts their web site) vs. moving to Exchange 2003 SP2 when we are moving a client to SBS2003? Now, Internet connection at the facility is excellent...we are not in Timbuktu! They are just down the road from Virginia Tech....

Reason behind the question: same client, same setup (see previous question). The guy who is kinda in charge of this new account does not want to move them over to Exchange. Currently their e-mail is hosted by the same company that hosts their web site and the e-mail "just works". They are using various Clients (he does not know what they use...he *thinks* they use the web mail "client" provided by the Hosting Company) to access e-mail remotely. A couple of the guys at this client travel frequently (that is an understatement).

Anyway, my points are that if we use Exchange 2003 SP2 then we can use IMF v2 for anti-spam and, when the guys are on the road, have the option of OWA (I can only image that OWA is 100% better than their current web mail 'client'. I have not seen what they use so I can not be sure, but I have seen 12 - 15 different web mail clients in my time and they all blow!) or RPC over HTTPS.

Thanks,

Cary


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