Hello knowledgable people. I thought I'd come here for solid advice, rather than the hazy mists of the interweb. I am looking at choosing an IT system from the ground up (from scratch). I was going to go for the MS Exchange Server and Blackberry Enterprise Server, but I see that Google Apps claim to do the same thing (whatever those things exactly are). It seems a lot cheaper (they say 50USD/user or something to that effect).

My question is which to go for? What criteria do I use to make the decision?

Thanks in advance!

you just need an email system? i use postfix for MTA, dovecot for IMAP, thunderbird for MUA. bonus is all are also free. been running for several years now without issue.

Many of your words appear to be in some sort of Sanskrit dialect.

I use thunderbird as my regular email client and I don't find it nearly as powerful as Outlook. Apparently you can use Google Apps with Outlook.

I am not sure if there's a bit of a joke going on that I am missing but your mixing up your techologies if you are being serious. Exchange Server and BES are server side mail systems - for storing the mailboxes of several users. Outlook and Thunderbird and Google Apps are client side applications which connect to the servers to collect their mail from said mail servers.

There are various other server side mail systems for the different protocols mail can be stored, sent and received in some of which have been mentioned but the first thing to say is whether you are building an Email Server from the ground up or something else.

Apparently Google Apps are server side.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/gmail.html

I don't trust google for anything mission critical

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente..._downtime.html

gmail has had quite a bit of bad press recently.

well, if you prefer outlook, use that instead of thunderbird. to be honest. i don't think there exists a good email client. every now and then, i consider writing my own.

for email, you need a few things (simplifying):

- programs to send and receive emails running on a server. most of the world uses something like: postfix, exim or qmail to do the sending/receiving. unless you're doing something weird or wonderful, you don't care, they will all work.
- a program to make emails available for you to download. you can download using POP3 protocol or use IMAP. I use IMAP and the program I use to do this is called Dovecot

the above programs run on your mailserver. i've never used exchange but understand it combines the above two functions into a simple program.

then you need a program to access the emails via POP3/IMAP on your desktop computer/mobile phone etc. For this I use thunderbird (and also webmail).

HTH.

You are right, this is a corporate software solution by google, not to be mixed up with the free consumer applications.

The key question for the right choice is: For how many people are you planning?

Probably 5 to 25 initially, but why?

And who is offering your Exchange Server and BES Service ? I am assuming you are buying a service from a company who are offering to host this service for you and not actually buy the kit yourself ?

Because there are plenty of different solutions out there. It depends on how many users you want to have and how fast you plan to grow.

Example:
- For five users, I would never ever buy something. You can get Outlook boxes hosted on shared hardware from pretty much any phone company or major IT service company. For exmaple Swisscom has it (Obviously the most expensive company, but if you goodle "hosted exchange" you will find millions of others doing it cheaper.)
- For 15 users, I would consider for example the "Microsoft Small Business Server" that has Outlook and much more onboard in one box with loads of stuff a small business might or might not need.
- For 20 users and plans to grow fast, ask the people who are better at corporate solutions than me

or you can use the programs i specified above which scales from one user to thousands of users and can process hundreds if not thousands of messages per second.

Sure. They only require hardware. And a place to put it. And if something suddenly does not work a competent person that can come quickly and fix it.

While you are totally right that it surely is the cheapest solution with a moderate investment, I hope I do not have to explain why hosting was invented: Because some people do not want to care how it works. They simply want a phone number to call when something does not work. And I have the gut feeling that we might be looking at one fo those cases here

I think the cost of supporting those applications may make them less attractive though. A hosted solution is the easiest for 25 or so users I would say Economisto. Either pick one of the multitude of companies that will host your mail on Exchange or use the google one. I am sure they will all offer the necessary functionality which will allow your clients to connect to their email both in the office and on the move. This way there are also minimal support costs as this is delivered in the monthly fee they are charging.

Economisto,

Outlook is far more feature rich then thunderbird it is true; although unless you are a technical guru, you don't get to appreciate it so much. I tried using outlook a while with google, you need to turn on a protocol called IMAP within our googlemail settings.
However a month or so after doing so I had a serious security problem with my mail which caused me embarrassment, inconvenience and missed some new job opportunities... needless to say I turned off IMAP and dont use outlook any more.

Web based mail clients are more and less secure than your thunderbird,outlook clients. More secure cause your mail is held on somebody else's computer, less secure cause you are relying on them to keep it safe. It is more likely that your PC will pick up a virus which will cause you difficulties then a server with copies of your mail held locally, assuming the latter is professionally maintained. Cause mail held locally also leaves you with a greater risk should you lose your PC (laptop) too. On the other hand if all your mail is held remotely, you use a web client to access it, then you need to be online to get it.. maybe inconvenient too.

There are/can be legal implications with email example too, depending of course on your business. If you use google for example and you are in the financial world, then you may be on thin ice; given you will be storing what is called PII (personally identifiable information) on a US server about a Swiss Clients; very much in breach of Swiss Banking secrecy laws...

It is not an easy to answer with very limited information. Send you a PM.

I don't have a lot of advice for your original point, except that I personally find Google Apps to be a perfectly acceptable solution for many people. I've used - and been quite satisfied with - Microsoft's SBS solution as well.

And while I'm one of the "elite" (<cough>nerdy</cough>) few who feels comfortable working with tools such as Postfix on a jailed OpenBSD system, I strongly suggest you stay away from that route unless you really enjoy computers (which your second post above makes clear isn't the case).

However, markalex is right to point out the concern about privacy legislation. It's not all that bad - the Swiss-US Safe Harbor provision went into effect last year, so you might be covered in most cases, depending whether Google hosts their servers in the US and whether they've self-certified (export.gov can tell you that). However, if you're going to go with a hosted solution to save costs, you may find it's just easier to go with a local company - I can hook you up with a reference at Green.ch, if you like.

Cheers
Lance

all solutions require hardware and a place to put it. together with maintenance.

the question is whether you own the hardware and do the maintenance yourself or get somebody else to do it.

the system i described is the one i run. i own my own hardware colocated in the UK and manage the server myself. although the maintenance (aside from setup) has been zero for several years now. it just works.

If you get somebody else to own maintain it, then you don't care how they do it just that:

- it runs
- it's reliable (and they do backups!)
- it's cheap
- the provider is going to be around for a while and you can get your data if the company folds etc.

since the OP was asking about specific SW, I assumed he was going to deploy his own system. otherwise, if he's going 'outsource it' it will simply be a question of features, price, performance and reliability (which coincidentally were the same considerations when I deployed my sysem!)

All agreed. But some points:
- Colocation is in a completely different price leage than renting some exchange boxes here in Switzerland. I do not know the UK prices, but the US is a fraction of the Swiss ones.
- You have not covered any support issues. Colocation means that your provider will only look if his internet and electricity is on, if your server is screwed up, it remains your problem. You manage yours for years, so you simply do not screw it up... but if the OP has to find someone to do it... and that will cost time and money as well.
- I know that many SMEs are doing it wrong, but if you want to prevent legal issues: Certain dokuments, for example everything HR related, have to be stored on servers which are physically in Switzerland. There is plenty of other stuff you have to think of when starting a business, for example the time certain data has to be stored, how you assure that it is not changed...
So the whole question very quickly moves from a technical to legal and business critical question.

I would simply go to either Swisscom/Sunrise, or one of the big hosters as green.ch and get me the products I need for my company. Agreed service levels, not DIY. No capex or headaches and the opex is low enough and scales with the growth of the company. My former employer is Swisscom. As I said before, they are probably the most expensive. But they have a special shop in Lucerne for SME, they can answer all questions on specific Swiss things there (and the OP can afterwards still choose another supplier...).

- Colocation is in a completely different price leage than renting some exchange boxes here in Switzerland. I do not know the UK prices, but the US is a fraction of the Swiss ones.

how much does exchange box cost? obviously for 25 users you don't need a full box, you can probably get a slice of a server for £15 a month or so.

of course, for 25 users and low volume, you probably don't even need to locate it at an exchange. you could probably just have a server in the office as long as you have reasonable connectivity.

- You have not covered any support issues. Colocation means that your provider will only look if his internet and electricity is on, if your server is screwed up, it remains your problem. You manage yours for years, so you simply do not screw it up... but if the OP has to find someone to do it... and that will cost time and money as well.

you can set it up pretty much as fire and forget. mail software is mature and most bugs are ironed out. i run debian and have automatic install of security bugs scheduled so i just get an email each time the system patches itself.

Google offers a fully compatible Exchange replacement out of the box with Premier Apps. Through their Google Apps Connector plugin for BES server the whole package interfaces well with Blackberrys.

I've been using Premier Apps for about two years and couldn't be happier. The package is secure and highly available. E-Mail can be handled by Postini (a google company) - what's safe enough for UBS is safe enough for me. It can also be handled by Google directly. Google doesn't do the e-mail filtering for the Premier Apps it does for the free GMail offering.

In my opinion, Premier Apps are the most affordable workgroup solution for smaller companies that don't want to invest heavily in their own messaging infrastructure.

It interfaces perfectly with Outlook (no need to change e-mail clients) through Google Apps Sync for Outlook. It works perfectly with Android smartphones but also with the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones (both through Active Sync, which is available out of the box and free of charge as well).

I chose Premier Apps because:

- I'm not limited in the choice of mobile phones as all major platforms are fully supported (that is: push e-mail, calendaring and contacts management)
- I can use Outlook like I would with a MS Exchange server in the background
- Managing users is extremely simple. No need to put up with Exchange
- It's comparably cheap for smaller teams
- It's highly available
- It's probably a lot more secure than solutions offered by smaller providers. Let's face it: Google ain't going anywhere and they have a reputation to lose.



peter


ps: I'm in no way affiliated with Google

As others have already mentioned, in Switzerland some kinds of confidential data need to be physically located in the country.

Do Google apps offer a local solution? I had thought that one of the touted benefits was that apps will soon be auto-migrating to their least busy data centre.

Other considerations may be archiving, virus scanning and spam filtering.

Also, will there be any need for an offline client, e.g. for laptop users without a persistant connection?