Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I recommend Enterprise Vault, especially over native Exchange archiving when: 1. You have, or may need litigation holds and searches 2. There is a need to archive and set defined retention periods for Journaling 3. You have lots of duplicate large emails that you want to get deduplication of 4. You need/ want to be able to search attachment in addition to emails 5. You want or need Litigation searches or archive retention to be handled by a team separate from your Email team
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web. EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage. EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface. We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports. Speed of archiving data was pretty fast. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The search function in the vault does not work very well. Cost. If not planned diligently, it might add to the overall cost. Not easy get a expert to address the issue fast. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is the best, and perhaps only, email solution worth considering.
Read full review Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Exchange is setup with multiple servers behind load balancers to provide high availability.
Read full review Performance I would say it's the best email product I've experienced.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I haven't research any other software against Enterprise Vault. Office 365 automatically has archiving capabilities that we use in the cloud. In comparison to Office 365, I'd say Office 365 comes out on top. For one thing, we essentially don't have to manage it. It also seems to preform better. However, Enterprise Vault does very well if you have an on-premise email solution.
Read full review Scalability The only time Exchange has failed us is when we did something to cause the failure.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Helps on the data management life-cycle, moving unused data to cheaper storage and/or deleting it after some time, if required. Also helps reducing the amount of data to be backed up on the active array. Read full review ScreenShots