Hosted Microsoft Exchange

9 Comments

• i tried this a while back with two different providers and didn't have much luck...not because of them in particular, but when you start talking about exchange over the internet and your machine might be on a domain, behind a *good* firewall, etc...it starts getting tricky. remember, exchange uses rpc most of the communication -- even thought there are published ports, and most providers supply the required information, some require local machine hosts file manipulation to set them.
  
  
  
  if what you are looking for is calendar sharing, etc...there may be other options...MailEnable, IMAIL, MERAK Mail, and other lightweight but powerful mail servers provide calendaring functionality...granted not as robust as exchange, but i think you may not be liking the implementation of exchange over the internet...but if it has changed...then great.
  
  
  
  now if all you want to use is the new exchange 2003 web mail interface...then pick one and go with it...my office uses exchange 2003 and i have yet to connect via outlook because the web interface is rich enough for what i do.
  

• Exchange 2003 has the ability to do almost everything over the internet via HTTP. It is a feature called RPC over HTTP and it works very well. You can do everything in your full Outlook 2003 client without needing to use OWA.
  

• the rpc over http feature is actually a combination of exchange 2003 *AND* windows 2003. since some providers may offer exchange 2003 on windows 2000...this is something you should verify/look out for...but yes, it is a very cool feature as well...
  

• My company did this and hated it. We had Exchange Hosting for about 1 year, and we just had to go back "in house." For us, the main issues were the speed of new email notifications, and downloads in general. There was always a lot of fingerpointing when things went wrong, etc. Not a fun time at all. We used aspone.com. Maybe it was them?
  
  
  
  Just my two cents. Good luck, I hope you fare better than we did.
  
  

• We use Intermedia.NET and have been very happy with the service and support. They made the move to Exchange 2003 recently, it went smooth, and OWA'03 rocks!
  
  

• We currently use ASPONE and there have most definitely been 3 different key issues for us.
  
  
  
  1. We lost 1 full month of mail data because their "backups failed" and they were "unable to restore data".. Totally intolerable
  
  
  
  2. Someone changed the inbound domain for our domain over a weekend. Nobody at our company touched it. The change blanked it out and so for the whole weekend. NO EMAIL. We were told that ASPONE has no eventlogging or other procedure to determine unauthorized changes or mistakes by their own people. At a minimum they would not admit it.
  
  
  
  3. Since the port 135 shutdown by most providers ie comcast, we have been forced to use a VPN which absolutely sucks (laggs).
  
  We have made many attempts to get them to Exchange 2003/Windows 2003, which did indeed happen. But now for the past couple months, the can't seem to get RPC over HTTP going, or Active Synch for our smartphones.
  
  
  
  We are investigating alternatives. ASP should not provide continuous streams of excuses. Whenever ASPONE has a problem, they always invoke Microsoft as in "Microsoft is looking into this". Why can other providers manage?
  
  

• We were on Mailstreet, until they got hit by some virus with their ISS RealSecure Firewall software around March 20 - they were down for 2 or 3 days! They stopped answering their phones and emails. And the WORST part is that they didn't have a 2ndary mx record for mail queueing; our customers' emails to us were all rejected - made us look very unprofessional. In general, I found the Mailstreet service to be amateurish - something I would have strung together in a weekend.
  
  
  
  Anyway, we moved over promptly to 123Together.com and have loved their customer service and uptime.
  
  

• I'd encourage you to check out USA.NET as they're clearly the leader in the space.
  

• Actually, we tried Mi8 and left them. Yes, they're definitely among the oldest providers - but that also means that they have the oldest outdated system. They lack a lot of features, especially in their provisioning - their online administration area is among the worst I've seen from the 4-5 vendors that I checked out.
  
  
  
  A lot has changed with Windows and Exchange since 1997 - they need to gut their provisioning system and build it from scratch. A lot of standard features are either not available or require manual work from them. Plus, they're among the most expensive out there.
  
  
  
  Why pay for an IBM when you can get a Dell at half the price? :)