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sanchez
Feb 26, 2003
Google apps is already cheap, anyone who can beat them on price must be missing something. Not sure I'd risk it to save a few dollars per mailbox.

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Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
My firm switched to AppRiver and I loving hate it. I miss Postini, but AppRiver is just really bad. The interface, the administration part, and the fact that we have a 2000+ user domain that we have to switch to individual white lists FOR EACH USER because the feature launched after we switched.

I want to switch to Mimecast.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Misogynist posted:

Please refer to my friend's anecdote from AppRiver of "Sorry your hosted Exchange has been down for three days. If you'd like your service restored faster, your best bet is probably to find a different hosted Exchange provider."

Briantist can corroborate.

Oh we don't host our clients exchange in those environments, we just use the spam service.

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

Oh we don't host our clients exchange in those environments, we just use the spam service.

Even still. A few weeks back, there was a problem with AppRiver servers accepting mail from a pretty common ISP like Comcast or something. Explaining that to customers was horrible.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Gyshall posted:

Even still. A few weeks back, there was a problem with AppRiver servers accepting mail from a pretty common ISP like Comcast or something. Explaining that to customers was horrible.

Wow really? None of our clients reported an issue like that.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

sanchez posted:

Google apps is already cheap, anyone who can beat them on price must be missing something. Not sure I'd risk it to save a few dollars per mailbox.
Google Apps isn't remotely feature-complete compared to hosted Exchange, sadly. It's getting there, and it's probably good enough for a greenfield deployment, but it's not going to convert a ton of shops with existing hosted or on-premises Exchange. The support is also loving dreadful like with everything else Google ever does.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


On the flipside, it doesn't have an unplanned outage record as terrible as Office 365 does.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Caged posted:

On the flipside, it doesn't have an unplanned outage record as terrible as Office 365 does.
Oh, right.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/google-gmail-outage_n_830229.html

Office 365 isn't the only hosted Exchange game in town. It might have the smoothest integration, especially for split on/off-premises, but there's lots of hosted providers like Intermedia out there.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I missed that, might have not affected the UK.

I agree with you 100% that Google Apps is a very difficult sell to anyone who has been using Exchange since the workflow changes are huge. I've been quite fortunate in that nobody I've migrated has been that attached to Outlook.

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003

Misogynist posted:

Google Apps isn't remotely feature-complete compared to hosted Exchange, sadly. It's getting there, and it's probably good enough for a greenfield deployment, but it's not going to convert a ton of shops with existing hosted or on-premises Exchange. The support is also loving dreadful like with everything else Google ever does.

My thought was more, if google apps is $5, are you really going to do better for less? Intermedia is pretty good but they start at $8, I'd be surprised if there was a decent hosted exchange provider that was able to undercut both gmail and 365.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
Man the new versions of Exchange are so dang easy to install and admin and perform so well I wonder why people are still looking at hosted Exchange. I guess when an office has literally zero servers.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Syano posted:

Man the new versions of Exchange are so dang easy to install and admin and perform so well I wonder why people are still looking at hosted Exchange. I guess when an office has literally zero servers.

Not all places can provide the up time that cloud hosts can for the price point.

wyoak
Feb 14, 2005

a glass case of emotion

Fallen Rib
Thanks all, I'll check out Mimecast....we're not looking for the full mail hosting, just the spam filtering and related features, probably should have clarified that

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003



Syano posted:

Man the new versions of Exchange are so dang easy to install and admin and perform so well I wonder why people are still looking at hosted Exchange. I guess when an office has literally zero servers.

Zero servers, multiple locations, teleworking users and maybe understaffed IT all make hosted exchange a pretty good idea.

Office365 that includes Office Pro, Lync, Sharepoint and hosted exchange is, honestly, a great deal for the price. Yes, it totally has some reliability problems MS really needs to work on, but a smaller company who buys cheap hardware is going to be worse.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


EoRaptor posted:

but a smaller company who buys cheap hardware is going to be worse.

I think this is 100% true and honestly I'm kicking myself that I never thought of it properly before. A small business running on-site SBS on some shitbox 5 year old tower server with no UPS, no redundancy and no real internet connectivity to speak of is likely to suffer a lot more downtime than the ~3 days a year that Office 365 is down for. That doesn't mean MS shouldn't work on that number, but it's a good price for what you get.

I have a friend who runs IT for a small company with the aforementioned shitbox server + SBS, who likes to rip on 'the cloud' whenever a large provider goes down, whilst casually forgetting that the place he supports was off for a week last year due to a fuckup.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Even if you are good at the whole server thing, it's sometimes just not something you want to deal with.

We're a SaaS, have all our production assets at a datacenter, we manage all our own servers for our business. That said, I would move to hosted exchange in a heartbeat because it's outside of our core business.

The care and feeding of our client facing systems is what pays the bills. gently caress taking time out of my day to troubleshoot an outlook issue or schedule maintenance time to patch and upgrade the exchange server. Email is a commodity product, it's best to hand it off to someone who deals with it at a far larger scale (and who has their own support department.)

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

bull3964 posted:

Even if you are good at the whole server thing, it's sometimes just not something you want to deal with.


Yeah i get that... I just dont get it totally. "Dealing" with Exchange in so much as differences between hosted and onsite is like a once every couple months thing. Run it as a vm, give it the right resources, and watch 2 decades of engineering that Microsoft has actually done incredibly well just sit there and work.

Stugazi
Mar 1, 2004

Who me, Bitter?
MSFT doubles O365 mailbox size to 50GB

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/30/microsoft-doubles-office-365-and-exchange-online-email-storage-to-50gb/

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Syano posted:

Yeah i get that... I just dont get it totally. "Dealing" with Exchange in so much as differences between hosted and onsite is like a once every couple months thing. Run it as a vm, give it the right resources, and watch 2 decades of engineering that Microsoft has actually done incredibly well just sit there and work.

Yes and no.

I mean, you CAN do that, but that's glossing over a lot of what SHOULD be done for a business critical asset. You have monthly patching, backup, backup testing, DR planning, and high availability planning/implementation. Microsoft is also on a 2 year plan with this server product like any other, so you have to (or at least should) be planning for and doing a migration every 24-36 months.

That's not even getting into the end user portions (Outlook desktop support is second only to printers on my most hated list.)

It just becomes a distraction and it consumes resources that are better spent on the revenue generators.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

bull3964 posted:

Yes and no.

I mean, you CAN do that, but that's glossing over a lot of what SHOULD be done for a business critical asset. You have monthly patching, backup, backup testing, DR planning, and high availability planning/implementation. Microsoft is also on a 2 year plan with this server product like any other, so you have to (or at least should) be planning for and doing a migration every 24-36 months.

That's not even getting into the end user portions (Outlook desktop support is second only to printers on my most hated list.)

It just becomes a distraction and it consumes resources that are better spent on the revenue generators.

Eh, I really dont want to argue with you because youre not wrong ... its just your idea of things that should be done I dont think are as hard as you make them out in a lot of situations and thats probably mostly due to philosophy. For instance, if you do run your exchange as a vm, your backup, backup testing, dr testing, etc should actually be already in place and done for you. Veeam does every single bit of this for us along with automated testing and it was already in place because we have lots of vms.

Same with patching. You should already have a patching mechanism in place and again that stuff doesnt require much effort.

And outlook admin is going to happen wether you have O365 or onsite.

I get not having any servers and running hosted exchange but as soon as you are managing more than a handful I think it makes a lot more sense to bring it back in house

Syano fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 31, 2013

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Syano posted:

Eh, I really dont want to argue with you because youre not wrong ... its just your idea of things that should be done I dont think are as hard as you make them out in a lot of situations and thats probably mostly due to philosophy. For instance, if you do run your exchange as a vm, your backup, backup testing, dr testing, etc should actually be already in place and done for you. Veeam does every single bit of this for us along with automated testing and it was already in place because we have lots of vms.

Same with patching. You should already have a patching mechanism in place and again that stuff doesnt require much effort.

And outlook admin is going to happen wether you have O365 or onsite.

I get not having any servers and running hosted exchange but as soon as you are managing more than a handful I think it makes a lot more sense to bring it back in house
I'm not sure I agree with any of your assertions besides backup.

Patching requires a pretty significant amount of effort to get right, especially if you support a number of different types of clients. In research computing, for example, half the client machines you support are likely to be Macs. Every other Exchange rollup changes some setting that breaks them in some way, to say nothing of service packs, and we're just talking about Exchange interacting with Outlook for Mac.

There's a lot more to running Exchange in a VM environment than making sure your VMs are cared for and fed. MSCS, for one, tremendously increases the difficulty of performing production upgrades or maintenance on a cluster of VM hosts because you can't live-migrate your mailbox servers. Then there's the network and physical aspects of things: "DR testing" is great if you already have the physical infrastructure in place to run a DR datacenter; many companies don't, and the companies that do should probably focus their DR efforts on supporting the core business in a disaster instead of wasting hours or days standing up boilerplate IT infrastructure. Network redundancy is another big problem: most medium businesses don't have the capital spend to have their own ARIN-assigned netblock with multi-homed BGP redundancy. You could colo your Exchange servers and VPN it back to your local datacenter, or run some dedicated DCs for Exchange at your colo in a separate AD site, but this is a lot of plumbing that detracts from IT's ability to focus on the needs of the business.

There comes a point for many organizations where I think it makes sense to bring things back in-house, but that bar is higher every time I glance at it. I think that the more technical your business is, the more it makes sense to move commodity services out of the picture.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Misogynist posted:

I'm not sure I agree with any of your assertions besides backup.

Patching requires a pretty significant amount of effort to get right, especially if you support a number of different types of clients. In research computing, for example, half the client machines you support are likely to be Macs. Every other Exchange rollup changes some setting that breaks them in some way, to say nothing of service packs, and we're just talking about Exchange interacting with Outlook for Mac.


I dont know if I agree. Granted I only have about 450ish client PCs with maybe 5 total Macs, but (knock on wood please smile on me Exchange gods) in 6 years we havent had a problem with an Exchange patch yet. We have had some issues with other patches but this discussion is about the ease of running Exchange not other things.

And I totally agree with you about the other aspects... my point is you dont need those things to match or beat the up time expectations of most organizations

Syano fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Aug 31, 2013

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003

Misogynist posted:


Patching requires a pretty significant amount of effort to get right, especially if you support a number of different types of clients. In research computing, for example, half the client machines you support are likely to be Macs. Every other Exchange rollup changes some setting that breaks them in some way, to say nothing of service packs, and we're just talking about Exchange interacting with Outlook for Mac.



Remember the hosted vendors are applying the same patches, Exchange 2010 SP3 was rolled out recently at intermedia and caused a bunch of weird problems for people. I'm assuming office 365 does patching from time to time, they just don't tell the users, who usually find out when something breaks. The difference with an in house server is you have some control over when to patch, if your cloud vendor wants to patch right in the middle of your organizations busy season, tough luck.

Network reliability is the big one. Assuming your anti spam is SaaS based somewhere and provides email continuity and caching, exchange will be just fine on an ethernet over copper or fiber connection with cable or T1 for backup. If your server is in a location where a connection with a real SLA is unavailable (cable or dsl only), running a mail server there probably isn't a good idea.

Blame Pyrrhus
May 6, 2003

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Pillbug

Misogynist posted:

I'm not sure I agree with any of your assertions besides backup.

Patching requires a pretty significant amount of effort to get right, especially if you support a number of different types of clients. In research computing, for example, half the client machines you support are likely to be Macs. Every other Exchange rollup changes some setting that breaks them in some way, to say nothing of service packs, and we're just talking about Exchange interacting with Outlook for Mac.

There's a lot more to running Exchange in a VM environment than making sure your VMs are cared for and fed. MSCS, for one, tremendously increases the difficulty of performing production upgrades or maintenance on a cluster of VM hosts because you can't live-migrate your mailbox servers. Then there's the network and physical aspects of things: "DR testing" is great if you already have the physical infrastructure in place to run a DR datacenter; many companies don't, and the companies that do should probably focus their DR efforts on supporting the core business in a disaster instead of wasting hours or days standing up boilerplate IT infrastructure. Network redundancy is another big problem: most medium businesses don't have the capital spend to have their own ARIN-assigned netblock with multi-homed BGP redundancy. You could colo your Exchange servers and VPN it back to your local datacenter, or run some dedicated DCs for Exchange at your colo in a separate AD site, but this is a lot of plumbing that detracts from IT's ability to focus on the needs of the business.

There comes a point for many organizations where I think it makes sense to bring things back in-house, but that bar is higher every time I glance at it. I think that the more technical your business is, the more it makes sense to move commodity services out of the picture.

Database Availability in 2010 and forward don't require MSCS for storage layer operations, it's all log shipping. You just place them on VMDKs like any other VM and they are 100% portable. Similar to SQL 2012 AOAGs. I keep 3 mailbox servers that house our 2 databases (for about 2800 mailboxes) and DRS moves those assholes around all day long.

El_Matarife
Sep 28, 2002
So we're looking at writing a BYOD policy. Is there any way to do an Exchange wipe that just takes out email, contacts and calendar instead of the whole phone? I have this sneaking suspicion end users won't rapidly report lost phones to us if they know we're going to nuke them.

Are any of the 3rd party BYOD management packages any good and reasonably priced? I was a big Goodlink customer before ActiveSync launched. BlackBerry Enterprise looks expensive. My Dell guy keeps trying to sell us KACE.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


For an exchange only solution, approach it from the client end. Our policy is all BYOD devices (Android anyways) use Touchdown as the exchange client and that keeps exchange data all within the app and wipes will only affect that's app's storage.

It's $20 /seat and we just buy it for our users.

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
We use Maas360 (it owns) and put links to the apps up on our clients' intranet sites. There is a disclaimer that says poo poo like "WE CAN WIPE YOUR PHONE/TABLET IF YOU DECIDE TO BE AN rear end in a top hat" which I don't personally agree with, but we have clients that have to comply with HIPPA and the like, which also sucks.

Noghri_ViR
Oct 19, 2001

Your party has died.
Please press [ENTER] to continue to the
Las Vegas Bowl

El_Matarife posted:

I have this sneaking suspicion end users won't rapidly report lost phones to us if they know we're going to nuke them.

We're a shop covered under HIPAA and our policy says that if phones are not reported immediately when the employee knows that the phone is missing, that disciplinary action up to termination can result.

It's worked fairly well. I've got a call at 2:30 in the morning saying "I lost my phone in a club and I don't think I can find it." Wiped minutes later.

Blame Pyrrhus
May 6, 2003

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Pillbug

El_Matarife posted:

So we're looking at writing a BYOD policy. Is there any way to do an Exchange wipe that just takes out email, contacts and calendar instead of the whole phone? I have this sneaking suspicion end users won't rapidly report lost phones to us if they know we're going to nuke them.

Are any of the 3rd party BYOD management packages any good and reasonably priced? I was a big Goodlink customer before ActiveSync launched. BlackBerry Enterprise looks expensive. My Dell guy keeps trying to sell us KACE.

We use Airwatch in a hybrid configuration for about 2k phones / devices, it lets you perform a selective wipe that only clears out things like mail profiles and company deployed apps. Basically anything that was pushed out via your MDM policy can be wiped while leaving the phone in-tact.

Dans Macabre
Apr 24, 2004


quote:

Remove-PublicFolderDatabase : The public folder database "xxxxxxxx1\Second Storage Group\Public Folder Database" contains folder replicas. Before deleting the public folder database, remove the folders or move the replicas to another public folder database. For detailed instructions about how to remove a public folder database, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?linkid=81409.

so the thing is I don't CARE. I want to remove this anyway. I don't need any of the data in the public folder.

when I try the replica ps1 script I get error:

quote:

Set-PublicFolder : The parameter "Replicas" cannot be $null or an empty array.
At D:\Exchange\Scripts\ReplaceReplicaOnPFRecursive.ps1:147 char:24

so sad.

Dans Macabre
Apr 24, 2004


I had to go into adsi edit to delete the reference to continue to uninstall. Exchange is where I go to die :(

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM
So after you've repaired a corrupted store with ESEUTIL /P, defraged and run ISINTEG, is there any other action that should be taken?

spiny
May 20, 2004

round and round and round
apologies if this has been covered, I've been reading the megathreads in here as much as I can, but I'd only got to page 20-something for this one ...


I'm after recommendations on how to scan the text content of outgoing messages on exchange 2003, our setup is this:

we are a small company <10 employees
we use Office 2010
we have hosted exchange (2003) - thats all I know about that side of things
I do the IT for our office (so can install local plugins)
my boss would like to monitor outgoing mails for keywords

this has come about as one of the guys here did the "we've all been there" of hitting 'reply all' by mistake and being a bit sweary about a customer, who then read the email, and was upset.

the people who provide our hosted exchange are local to us and we get on well, so they would probably be ok with making changes to our service, if there is say, a plugin of some sort that could scan and then block messages with swearwords in for example.

Is there anything like that still available for 2003 ? non-free is fine

cheers !

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Any suggestions on hosted spam filtering companies?

We've used MailMax and WebSense mail filtering. But the problem is that they silently drop false positives. That means we don't get a chance to whitelist or allow senders and usually don't know we are missing their messages for days or even weeks and this causes a bunch of problems.

What we'd really like it something with a feature that lets us see every single message blocked by the server and search through them, cases like these keep happening and it's biting us in the rear end when it's an important email.

Bob Morales fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Sep 19, 2013

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

spiny posted:

apologies if this has been covered, I've been reading the megathreads in here as much as I can, but I'd only got to page 20-something for this one ...


I'm after recommendations on how to scan the text content of outgoing messages on exchange 2003, our setup is this:

we are a small company <10 employees
we use Office 2010
we have hosted exchange (2003) - thats all I know about that side of things
I do the IT for our office (so can install local plugins)
my boss would like to monitor outgoing mails for keywords

this has come about as one of the guys here did the "we've all been there" of hitting 'reply all' by mistake and being a bit sweary about a customer, who then read the email, and was upset.

the people who provide our hosted exchange are local to us and we get on well, so they would probably be ok with making changes to our service, if there is say, a plugin of some sort that could scan and then block messages with swearwords in for example.

Is there anything like that still available for 2003 ? non-free is fine

cheers !

GFI has a few products which can do things on outgoing emails such as insert those stupid disclaimers or check for keywords and file attachments. Other companies offer similar solutions that tie in to the Exchange message sink

http://www.gfi.com/products-and-solutions/email-and-messaging-solutions/gfi-mailessentials/specifications

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug

Bob Morales posted:

Any suggestions on hosted spam filtering companies?

We've used MailMax and WebSense mail filtering. But the problem is that they silently drop false positives. That means we don't get a chance to whitelist or allow senders and usually don't know we are missing their messages for days or even weeks and this causes a bunch of problems.

What we'd really like it something with a feature that lets us see every single message blocked by the server and search through them, cases like these keep happening and it's biting us in the rear end when it's an important email.

Bob Morales posted:

GFI has a few products which can do things on outgoing emails such as insert those stupid disclaimers or check for keywords and file attachments. Other companies offer similar solutions that tie in to the Exchange message sink

http://www.gfi.com/products-and-solutions/email-and-messaging-solutions/gfi-mailessentials/specifications


Those two posts confused the hell out of me, because it sounds like you're answering your own question. Is your problem that a Barracuda Spam Firewall isn't a hosted solution? Because they do have a message log you can search through for dropped messages, as long as they're not dropped at the connection-level (e.g. rate-limited or something).

Briantist
Dec 5, 2003

The Professor does not approve of your post.
Lipstick Apathy

Bob Morales posted:

Any suggestions on hosted spam filtering companies?

We've used MailMax and WebSense mail filtering. But the problem is that they silently drop false positives. That means we don't get a chance to whitelist or allow senders and usually don't know we are missing their messages for days or even weeks and this causes a bunch of problems.

What we'd really like it something with a feature that lets us see every single message blocked by the server and search through them, cases like these keep happening and it's biting us in the rear end when it's an important email.

Office 365 has filtering only for $1 per user per month:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/e...X103763969.aspx

CISADMIN PRIVILEGE
Aug 15, 2004

optimized multichannel
campaigns to drive
demand and increase
brand engagement
across web, mobile,
and social touchpoints,
bitch!
:yaycloud::smithcloud:

Bob Morales posted:

Any suggestions on hosted spam filtering companies?

We've used MailMax and WebSense mail filtering. But the problem is that they silently drop false positives. That means we don't get a chance to whitelist or allow senders and usually don't know we are missing their messages for days or even weeks and this causes a bunch of problems.

What we'd really like it something with a feature that lets us see every single message blocked by the server and search through them, cases like these keep happening and it's biting us in the rear end when it's an important email.

we use mxlogic which can be configured to send indviduals reports of everything that gets blocked, and an admin can login and see all of the blocked messages.

spiny
May 20, 2004

round and round and round

Bob Morales posted:

GFI has a few products which can do things on outgoing emails such as insert those stupid disclaimers or check for keywords and file attachments. Other companies offer similar solutions that tie in to the Exchange message sink

http://www.gfi.com/products-and-solutions/email-and-messaging-solutions/gfi-mailessentials/specifications

Presumably, I'd need to get the company that hosts our exchange server to install this ?

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Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

spiny posted:

Presumably, I'd need to get the company that hosts our exchange server to install this ?

Yea, good luck if you don't have your own server.

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