A Great Product But It's Being Left Behind by the Cloud
May 10, 2019
A Great Product But It's Being Left Behind by the Cloud
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Exchange
Everyone in our organization has an email account with our on-premise Exchange setup. This is our primary system of communication internally and externally. We also utilize multiple public calendars to manage meeting and event times for our conference rooms. Most employees setup their email account on their mobile devices so they can stay up to date with the constantly changing schedule.
- Almost everyone, whether in a small non-profit or fortune 500 company, is familiar with Microsoft products. Having an Exchange server that 'just works' with their Outlook desktop program and mobile devices is a huge time saver for any organization.
- The calendar function is extremely useful. Shared and public calendars make it easy to schedule meetings and confirm availability. Being able to attach documents to calendar events is a plus as well.
- The ECP GUI is admin friendly and allows our junior IT staff to assist with account creation and other basic tasks.
- Better built-in spam filters/protection. It would be nice to not have to immediately purchase a spam filter appliance or pay several dollars per mailbox to cut down on spam. This may be a pipe dream since Microsoft is all but dragging people from on-premise to O365.
- No way to disable ECP from being exposed to the outside. It would be nice, for security purposes, to be able to just have it accessible from the LAN.
- CAL licensing can be a pain to manage and keep track of.
- There have been hiccups and downtime with our on-premise installation but overall the local installation has saved us money in the long run versus paying a monthly fee for ~125 mailboxes.
- Our internet service likes to take mid-day breaks every so often. Having a local Exchange server allows us to continue to communicate internally and manage meetings, presentation, and other events at our site.
- Despite the overall good that Exchange has provided our organization it is a time suck. Managing the server, spam appliance, backups, and storage space is a constant battle and has taken away from some of our other initiatives. This is not specific to Exchange but any on-premise email server.
- Microsoft Office 365
Since both products are built on the same technology there shouldn't be a huge difference in features and functionality. However, Microsoft is putting more time and money into O365 and I can't blame them since it's a constant revenue stream. Although I have had good experience with Exchange from 2007-2013 I can feel which way the winds are blowing. Most businesses and organizations will be better served by O365 these days. The finance department likes the set monthly cost of this service, even if it tends to be higher than running your own setup. There's also the ability to completely divest from local server infrastructure and management. There's still a limited use case for Exchange but that group is becoming smaller by the day.