Fans of Microsoft Exchange Server

Wow!! I know I just told you about the Fans of High End Storage facebook group and are already 21 members and a few lively discussions!! This was all before I could mention the counterpart – Fans of Microsoft Exchange Server!! There are loads of Fans from Exchange admins, to ex-users (who wish their company would convert), to softies, to partners, to ex-softies, you should be there too!! Give your feedback – maybe even win prizes!!

Even if your not on facebook you should join to check it out – it is certainly worth it!!

Related articles today:

• MSCS Clusting in VMWare for Exchange (btw, VMWare IPO is Aug 14th)
• Exchange 2003 front-end server “Loading” message when using OWA

PNWEUG: Next Meeting Scheduled!! -5/23-

May 23, 11:30am to 1:00 PM, MS Office – Civica Bellevue – Technology Briefing Center, Lunch Provided

We’ll be covering Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Services!! If your not familiar with the offering, I talked about it before. Adam Bresson will be out to give an overview of the services, drill into architecture slides, then jump into a Administrator Center Overview for Filtering and show End-User experience for Spam Quarantine.

You need to RSVP at MS

If you can’t make it in person, your welcome to jump on the Live Meeting

Attendee URL:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=MX72R3&role=attend

Meeting ID:

MX72R3

Toll free: +1 (866) 500-6738
Participant code: 178902

Hosting your email may be viable

It was a huge topic at the Connections conference in orlando this spring……and from the looks of the poll results there are a lot of companies who are looking at it as a valid option (or some hosting bigot kept voting). In the poll update series, the Hosted email poll shows hosting ALL email functions can help a lot of businesses

0.0% Yes, but just the archiving/backup   5.6% No way, we’ve got easy to use appliances   5.6% Yes, but just the inbound messaging 61.1% Yes, all email functions should be hosted   5.6% Yes, but just the mobile connectivity   5.6% No way, the costs don’t match our business needs 16.7% Sort of, we want to/are outsource(ing) support of our internal application

Hosted eMail Services

There has been much debate and many new reports about hosted eMail services lately. A lot of this is due to the increase in SPAM, regulations, and viruses traversing the internet. MS has commissioned a paper on the benefits of hosted solutions over in-house messaging management….

David Spark asked me to look at this paper on Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. From the looks of it, the same ask has been making the rounds to Terry Zink and Alec Saunders….but there aren’t very many opinions expressed on the wiki or the discussion group…I started to input my thoughts on the subject and the absense of supporting research…..

The paper itself seems to be based on Osterman Research work and there are some interesting research points that simply aren’t supportive of the claims in the paper. Some of the issues are…..

1. In general the paper’s “findings” are not supported by the research quoted
2. No discussion of the existing market is included
3. No context is given for claims of cost savings or reliability
4. Enterprise environments are not considerred
5. Comparison against tenured appliances is not included
6. Labor is generalized as high cost with no numbers to back it up

Now I’m sure there is plenty of data to support and refute the six items above in the context of hosted messaging services (especially in the case of the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services)…..but they are not included in the paper and there is an opportunity to include them for people to see…..

So if you have an interest in hosted messaging components, you might want to take a look and ensure there is a consise opinion on the wiki fro the community (and other vendors) at large.

If you don’t have the time to comment, at least go vote on the hosting poll….

(results from the poll to be posted soon)