Microsoft Exchange Sever questions.

[Tim]

The company I work for uses Microsoft Outlooks calender to make appointments. We've had trouble using third party software to keep the calenders synced so that everyone here can see what appointments everyone else has. Moving to a third party calender is now out of the question, so that leaves us looking at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

Can anybody please explain what other benefits, besides seamless calender sharing, that Microsoft Exchange Sever might have for our small company?

 

[yinan]

Global Address List.

 

[oynaz]

Consider using a cloud based solution (Exchange or Google Apps). Exchange Servers are too expensive for small companies, IMO.

 

[spikespiegal]

Dealing with an Exchange cluster right now and trying to talk the client into getting rid of it and going cloud based.

Seriously, it's an illogical platform to support internally - unless for some reason you can't use cached exchange mode; romaing profiles, terminal services (citrix), etc.

 

[Emulex]

hosted exchange works. microsoft provides it. but the integration with all other microsoft apps, and sharepoint/document workflow is brilliant. it's very hard to get the same tight integration (microsoft is doing voip right way this time soon). so it will be integrated better than any non-microsoft product can do. linux products have issues with the latest Active directory levels.

exchange is not that expensive. you get two VM servers (vsphere essentials) and veeam for backup and run your whole business off two decent servers. easy and huge uptime.

i recommend small business just run 1 exchange, 2 qmail pop severs in the open, and use the pop3 gateway to suck messages in (no exposing the exchange server). then use a VPN to let users do their mail remotely and voip. you can run veeam replication from box A to box B so your exchange VM host could die and the other one could be fired up minus an hour or two sync lag (or more if you can afford more).

cloud based - trust me i deal with government entities using microsoft's junk - and its uptime is horrendous. really bad. omgwtf bad. plus you are limited on storage. if you rock your own exchange and everyone wants 20gb in their mailboxes - no problemo. good luck finding a hoster that will give you 200gb (10 people * 20gb) - the overhead is enormous.

This entity that is using Microsoft cloud based service has over several hundred thousand users and downtime over weeks is what we're talking. have to revert to their person gmail or faxing to this government agency. what a joke right?

 

[Scarpozzi]

Best part about Exchange is that you have microsoft for support. There's still a per-user cost associated with it and it is pretty costly, but it's part of the cost of doing business.

From an configuration standpoint, you have 2 calendar options with Exchange. You can either do public folders and configure shared calendars in the public folders for everyone to use, or you can leave it to the users to invite each other to share their calendars and manage rights to each others' resources. (most hands-off method)

Public folders are really bad because they're stored in a database that has to be replicated between a list of Exchange servers (Mailstores). Sometimes replication isn't all that clean and you can have rights that don't always work...it sometimes requires recreating objects or rights to get things to sync properly. In the last revision of Exchange, they released a nice utility for managing public folders and calendar rights called ExFolders. It's made things a lot easier.

For managing user calendar rights, Exchange 2010 SP1 has a few powershell scripts you can run from the command line.

[ PS ] C: \> Get-MailboxFolderPermission username: \calendar
[ PS ] C: \> Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity ‘Username: \Calendar’ -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor
[ PS ] C: \> Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity Username: \Calendar -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor
and you can also run Remove-MailboxFolderPermission username...

 

[MrChad]

We use Mailstreet for hosted Exchange services, and it's been very reliable.

 

[gsaldivar]

Just get hosted Exchange. Apptix and Mailstreet are the same company, while not the cheapest, are reasonably reliable and cheaper than paying hardware/software/labor to maintain a server in house for a small number of people.