Benefits of Exchange over external POP/SMTP?

dynamik

It probably goes without saying that I'm an Exchange noob. I'm looking to bring email in-house, and I was curious what benefits I could expect to see from this. We have about 30 people, and security and bandwidth are NOT issues.

undomiel

Makes it easier to be called in at 1 am because the boss can't access her e-mail?

averyjas

As Undomiel alluded to, expect to eventually get calls from all 30 users at some point with email problems. I'm finding 80 percent of calls are related to email issues. It introduces its own set of headaches - good luck and have fun!

royal

OWA
Sharing of Outlook Calendars / FreeBusy
Out of Office
Message Records Management
Control over your E-mail System
Quota Management
Integration with Active Directory
Ability to Create your own Disaster Recovery
Learning Exchange and the Experience it will bring
Archiving/Journaling which can assist with storage control and regulatory compliance
Server Side Rules (like Outlook Rules but processed on Exchange)
Full Mailbox Access for Users
Integration with Sharepoint
Conference Rooms
Ability to Restrict PST Files and force users to place data into their mailbox to ensure all data gets backed up
Entourage Access
Global Address Lists
E-mail Address Policies so you can have users with multiple e-mail addresses
Flagging/Categorizing E-mails with Colors and Tags
Recovery of Deleted Files by a user himself due to the Exchange Mailbox Dumpster

But as others said, you will have to learn all of this stuff and if your Exchange System fails, the restore process for Exchange can be quite challenging.

Turgon

dynamik wrote:

It probably goes without saying that I'm an Exchange noob. I'm looking to bring email in-house, and I was curious what benefits I could expect to see from this. We have about 30 people, and security and bandwidth are NOT issues.

I had a lot of exposure to different versions of Exchange over the years. If you are going to bring mail in, prepare well and as others have mentioned you can expect your support headaches to increase. Running Exchange well requires a good deal of effort on your part. The benefits are the features but again you will need to invest some significant time to get things running smoothly, and before that to understand what services/integration you really need. You have the systems issues of uptime and spam filtering as well as the service delivery of end users to consider. Plan everything very carefully and build a reference model to test if you can. Mail is critical and if it's down for any length of time expect some serious heat. Be prepared to log some support calls to MS to get help when you really need it. Make sure your boss is onboard with that upfront, you will need 4th line support for Exchange particularly if it's new to you. Last time I used it, (6 years ago) it was 250 dollars for an incident.

As for DR. Have a plan and test a rebuild of your Exchange environment before you go live. Consider a mailer as well for the DMZ. We used EXIM on Solaris years back but didn't run OWA. You should find lots of different options to do this sort of thing now including MS solutions. EXIM would queue the mail when we needed to take the mailserver down and ran useful spam filters and such.

You should find plenty of help on here from the MCSE Messaging crowd. Do the Exchange exams as well.

A book on exim and dns wouldn't hurt either.

Running Exchange well is a challenge and if you are going to be setting everything up to migrate to Exchange even more so. Have the boss afford you several months to plan everything properly. The world is full of flakey Exchange installations and freaked out Exchange admins. Don't be one of them, it's a good system if invested in properly in terms of time and money!

Good luck!

dynamik

Thanks for the detailed response Royal. I just want to get the ball rolling with management; it'll take months to get anyway. I wouldn't think of implementing it before I was much more comfortable with the technology. I'm enjoying my studies so far. I can see why you find this so interesting.

How severe will the problems typically be after I get this up and running. I was thinking of making this my last hurrah before moving on to a new job, but I don't want to stick them with something that will be problematic or counterproductive for my own personal gain. Is it common for smaller organizations to run an Exchange server? That seems to be what the standard edition is geared towards.

Edit: Thanks for your response too, Turgon! That was very informative.

undomiel

I know that the company I work for is comparable in size to yours dynamik. I wasn't around for when they decided to set up Exchange, probably because it came with SBS2003. The headaches I've encountered are updates that crash Exchange, DNS issues once when our IP got reassigned. We don't host our own external DNS. Majority of the problems though have been from spam filtering and other company's improperly configured spam filters and SMTP servers. And if one e-mail is "lost" because the spam filter was too restrictive then they will forever blame you for losing their e-mails even when they are sitting right in front of their face.

TechJunky

Outlook 2007 and Sharepoint can now share calanders, meetings and cool features like that. I think for scalability there is a huge benefit. However, there is a lot of support as people here have already stated.

I am a Exchange newb myself relatively speaking...

Migrating is a PITA to say the least. 2000 to 2003 wasn't so bad, but 2003 to 2007 is another story. I am working for an enterprise environment though so that may not be a scale that everyone has to deal with either. Our big problem is space on the SAN and moving mailboxes is a timely process because of course you cant have an outage and with covering multiple states across the US its hard to set a maintanance window considering all users for exchange are hosted in one datacenter. So just the time involved with creating a migration plan is rediculious. Then you have to do test runs etc using another vmware machine etc.

For a small business in one state I would imagine it wouldnt be too bad.

Also, disaster recovery is another thing you have to think about. There really is a lot of overhead IMO for Exchange.

My last company we just outsourced to a hosting company and it was the best decision I ever made. When my boss couldn't receive email I would just call the company and open a ticket. It was no longer in my hands and my job wasn't in question. I think Exchange mailboxes were something like 7 dollars a mailbox per month with 2gb of space.

Turgon

dynamik wrote:

Thanks for the detailed response Royal. I just want to get the ball rolling with management; it'll take months to get anyway. I wouldn't think of implementing it before I was much more comfortable with the technology. I'm enjoying my studies so far. I can see why you find this so interesting.

How severe will the problems typically be after I get this up and running. I was thinking of making this my last hurrah before moving on to a new job, but I don't want to stick them with something that will be problematic or counterproductive for my own personal gain. Is it common for smaller organizations to run an Exchange server? That seems to be what the standard edition is geared towards.

Edit: Thanks for your response too, Turgon! That was very informative.

No problem and good luck with it. I ran Exchange on sites both large and small so there's nothing to stop you there. Certainly immerse yourself in a few good books before hand though and aside from this site locate a few others where you can find experienced admins. Back in the day I think msexchange was one such site worth visiting.

Certainly have some MS support on hand should you need it nearer the time on a pay per incident basis. I think we used them two or three times per year and it was worth the money. Something you should warm the boss up to ahead of time.

On books, have a look around. Good ones were few and far between a few years back but I expect that has changed now. You will find many books telling you about the features and the benefits that's the easy part but you need advice on what would work best in your setting. Just because something can be done doesn't mean you really need it or should even do it. My first exchange environment we laid off public folders for example.

Your looking for books that walk you through how it works and the features but also insightful books that look at the admin side carefully and integration and migration scenarios. Comparisons are good. There should also be some good white papers on the technet site.

If you can get on an Exchange course so much the better. I have sent staff that worked for me on Exchange courses before and they were better for it.

royal

Also, you can get a Technet Library subscription and you have the software to test with as well as 2 free PSS calls to Mirosoft. I got mine my Technet subscription for $200 and have seen it as cheap as $100. Some Microsoft Licensing Agreements such as an Enterprise Agreements can come with free PSS calls as well.

HeroPsycho

If you're looking out for the best interests of your current company, you should also look into Hosted Exchange service from Microsoft or other companies such as Mailstreet.com.

It's becoming increasingly more viable, practical, reliable, and downright cost effective to outsource mail hosting, including Exchange.

Exchange guys like me typically don't like to admit that, but mail honestly will become one of the first core IT services to migrate into the cloud, hence why I'm getting into storage and VMware as much as possible. With my unique background in Exchange, I'm not ready to relinquish it yet, but I can't expect to stay where I am in my career by relying on Exchange skills as the years go by.

dynamik

royal wrote:

Also, you can get a Technet Library subscription and you have the software to test with as well as 2 free PSS calls to Mirosoft. I got mine my Technet subscription for $200 and have seen it as cheap as $100. Some Microsoft Licensing Agreements such as an Enterprise Agreements can come with free PSS calls as well.

Yep. I've had a download subscription since I started my MCSE. I'll definitely be labbing Exchange for 236. Thanks.

HeroPsycho wrote:

If you're looking out for the best interests of your current company, you should also look into Hosted Exchange service from Microsoft or other companies such as Mailstreet.com.

That's the conclusion I've come to as well. They can last without some services for awhile, but losing email would be detrimental to them. There's no one else who can even add a user in ADUC, so they're pretty helpless. I wanted to apply what I learned for the cert, but I'm not going to set them up for a catastrophe just because of that.

Thanks again Turgon. Hopefully you'll start putting out a lot more quality posts once that pesky CCIE lab is out of the way