Microsoft Exchange vs. Mimecast Cloud Archive

You can use Microsoft Exchange Server with peace of mind for e-mail, calendar, communication, scheduling, and collaboration services. Microsoft's Exchange Server is a product designed to provide users with access to the messaging platform from mobile devices, desktops, and web-based systems. Telephony features in Exchange Server support voicemail. Exchange Server successfully offers high availability service with Microsoft Exchange Database availability groups.

Incentivized

If you want to keep your production email system from getting bloated with old, out of date emails and want the archived emails to be easily searchable, Mimecast Archiving is an ideal tool. It is also completely cloud-based, so requires no additional infrastructure to implement it. If you are paranoid about storing your email in the cloud (albeit in a totally secure environment), then Mimecast is not for you.

Incentivized

• As we have a large user base of 11,000 users we use MailTips to avoid people getting confused with people with similar names in the organization.
• The integration between Teams Meeting and Resource booking is generally very good. The Scheduling Assistance makes it easy to scan calendars and find free periods to provisionally scheduled events.
• Marking yourself as Out of the Office and busy is easy, as is sharing your calendar within the team/organization or individuals.
• Voicemail integration and the ability to receive missed chats in your inbox are highly used and useful.

Incentivized

• Message archiving is essential in healthcare and Mimecast makes it easy and at a reasonable cost. One of the features we appreciate most is the search function. Outlook can be pretty frustrating when it comes to searching for messages and Mimecast adds plenty of filtering and search capabilities that help find what Outlook can't.
• Targeted Threat Protection (TTP) is a great service that proxies URL's in email and adds an extra layer of protection against malicious attachments. The addition of TTP a couple years ago demonstrates Mimecast's continued development to meet modern threats.
• Online mailbox can be used for email continuity if your mail server is down. We don't have frequent downtime but it's good to know communications can keep flowing if we do.
• Support is always helpful and timely.

Incentivized

• The two main factors for the better reliability & Uptime of internally hosted Exchange Server depends on Exchange Server configuration and the level of investment the organization is willing to provide for hosting the Exchange Server On-Premise Environment. As the data is stored in the organization’s hardware, any disaster may lead to the loss of email and servers.
• Losing data might affect business continuity and rebuilding it can be costly.
• Security remains a major concern.
• Security of data loss is main concern. To ensure that, organization needs to configure networks, systems and Exchange platform against possible threats.
• Hardware and license costs are high.

Incentivized

• Although many people seem to love it, I think their search capability takes some getting used to. It works and you can find anything you need but it is not as clean as if searching in Outlook.
• When an incoming domain is on the Mimecast's blacklist the email is totally blocked and there is no notification of this so if a user tells me they are not getting email from somewhere I sometimes have to assume this is the issue and go the extra step and add that domain to a white list not knowing if it will really solve the issue.
• The Large File send options in outlook work fairly well but if one is sending a dozen files the receiver SHOULD get an option to download them all into one size but they do not. Instead they have to download each file individually.
• Some of their new client releases can cause issues so you must test the clients well and usually stick with a good one when you get one that works well in your environment.

Incentivized

It is the best, and perhaps only, email solution worth considering.

Incentivized

Does everything we need in the realm of email archiving, does it well and does it at a price point that seems very reasonable.

Incentivized

Microsoft Exchange is well suited for inexperienced Messaging Admins and veterans alike. If you have no idea of the fundamentals of modern email (SMTP, mail headers, MX Records, SPF/DKIM, Encryption, etc.) and just need to get people's mailboxes and calendars the support they need, you can use it with confidence. If you are an old pro and want to leverage and dovetail your Powershell and AD with Exchange, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

Incentivized

Exchange is setup with multiple servers behind load balancers to provide high availability.

Incentivized

I would say it's the best email product I've experienced.

Incentivized

We have a good enterprise agreement with Microsoft which affords us quick phone support. I have found the support staff knowledgeable and prompt with a solution when required. At times it may be difficult to schedule a call back, this is mainly due to our need for calls early in the morning which happens to be during a shift change at Microsoft support.

Incentivized

It does a good job. The support team of the product was good and responsive and was also able to fix the issues I was experiencing at the time. It isn't perfect and takes some time to set up properly in the environment but once set up the product does what it is supposed to do which is what you are paying for.

Incentivized

Implementation/conversion can be quite complex and, unless you have certified Exchange administrators in-house, you should strongly consider a 3rd party consultant for this implementation.

Incentivized

Most of the 365 subscriptions include desktop and cloud versions of Microsoft programs. These "traditional" software may be installed on a desktop computer and used offline without any problems, as long as you have a working Internet connection. Because so many firms still transmit each others file's developed locally using these applications, despite this being an era of cloud computing– there is a strong case for keeping desktop versions available.

Incentivized

Users are not able to delete emails hence Mimecast EIA becomes a very useful tool during e-discovery. For EOA, they offer an inplace archive which means that emails can be deleted if the service is not turned on.

Incentivized

The only time Exchange has failed us is when we did something to cause the failure.

Incentivized

• It has been an important factor in allowing seamless communication with clients and scheduling business meetings, which in turn works in the company's favor.
• Haven't noticed any negative impact Exchange has had on our ROI. The support team is also responsive and helpful.

Incentivized

• We needed a product that would allow us to keep at least 7 years worth of emails as required by the business and Mimecast, with its unlimited archiving, meets this requirement perfectly.
• Being a cloud-based solution allowed us to save on hardware, infrastructure, and maintenance costs when compared to our previous on-prem appliance.

Incentivized