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![[Post New]](/Sysforums/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif) 18/06/2009 04:49:39
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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Hi follow SysAiders
Our organization are considering to move from a Exchange solution to a Google App solution instead, also to integrate an intranet between us, and make offsite access to documents and editing.
But unfortunately we have some thoughts about the migration (moving mails, integration between mailserver and Outlook.. etc.), and what exchange features we could miss.
Have any of you done this migration from Exchange or are using Google Apps at the time being? Or do you see any possible downside of this change.
BR
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18/06/2009 07:16:24
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EbroIN
Elite SysAider
Joined: 25/03/2009
Messages: 244
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Hi DK_Sysaider,
as I understood you already have a working Microsoft Exchange Environment implemented within your company? So you have the "best possible" integrated solution for your favourite PIM software (as I understood you are using Outlook).
Why would you forward your data to google? I would avoid sending my business communcation to google at any cost! This might sound kinda paranoid but I don't like any dependency from a 3rd party if I have the chance to keep the data and management in house.
I cannot answer your question regarding integration Google applications, because I don't know what Exchange features you are using, but If you only want to enable offsite access I'd rather recommend SPS integration and VPN access to an OWA/SPS frontend server.
Just my 2 cents 
best regards - EbroIN
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18/06/2009 07:52:31
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costuneurox
SysAider
Joined: 04/06/2009
Messages: 6
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Here is the cutdown.
How much mail are you hosting for your organisation?
Are you using webbased mail ( outlook webaccess)
Are you users using .pst files ( aarg..)
Do you need to comply to certain standards? (sox, Hippaa)
Have you or are ya planning archiving, and whats the management stand on go on the following issues:
retention, restore, and confidential information and dont forget downtimedowntime.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/google-app-engine-goes-down-and-stays-down/
Also keep in mind this , when you outsource your mail when there are problems it wil be a lot of fingerpointing. And most important no connection is no mail also not internal mail..
Thats the achilles heel of "cloud"computing. So my two cents is use both , keep the exchange and combine it with google apps .
http://frem.wordpress.com/2007/04/08/read-your-exchange-emails-with-gmail/
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18/06/2009 07:56:20
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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Hi EbroIN
Exchange and the server is just giving us too many problems, (Like last week SysAid was cut from access in receiving mail for 2 days, because of it, and apparently without reason)
We wanted to connect some other departments of our company, who don't use exchange of today. And we need to buy new licenses and the old exchange server is old and too small for this and we only have Exchange 2003. So alot of upgrading is coming up, and therefor we are just considering what other solutions we have.
Reguarding features I was thinking of shared phonebook, when setting up meetings you can see the others available times etc.
But thank you for your imput, I must say I had the same scary thought of sending these data's for a 3rd part company, but today all emails in our system are passing an 3rd part offside spamfilter anyway, so I don't think their is the big differences with this now.
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18/06/2009 08:14:52
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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costuneurox wrote:Here is the cutdown.
How much mail are you hosting for your organisation?
Are you using webbased mail ( outlook webaccess)
Are you users using .pst files ( aarg..)
Do you need to comply to certain standards? (sox, Hippaa)
Have you or are ya planning archiving, and whats the management stand on go on the following issues:
retention, restore, and confidential information and dont forget downtimedowntime.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/google-app-engine-goes-down-and-stays-down/
Also keep in mind this , when you outsource your mail when there are problems it wil be a lot of fingerpointing. And most important no connection is no mail also not internal mail..
Thats the achilles heel of "cloud"computing. So my two cents is use both , keep the exchange and combine it with google apps .
http://frem.wordpress.com/2007/04/08/read-your-exchange-emails-with-gmail/
Hi costuneurox
Interesting points...
As of today we have around 70 gb, WITHOUT pst files yes.
Outlook webmail is for us at least crap, its slow, buggy and badly done. And year we use Connection to Exchange by HTTP.
Archiving was also a feature we would like.
Year downtime is also a very important thing to consider.
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18/06/2009 08:38:13
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costuneurox
SysAider
Joined: 04/06/2009
Messages: 6
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Have you looked at sbs 2008?
I have to say it comes with a prefab installation and if ya take it from hp your hardware needs are covered.
Also document mangement is better equiped so the branch office users can join internal workspaces over the web event though you are geographically dispersed
I think its more stable then 2003 . The 64 bit version is scalable .
We run it ourselves and it got mobile support too .
Also look into virtualisation, where if ya do have a problem ya can revert to last known good state and put the delta data back and voila no rocketscience( depends on the load of your server) how many concurrent users and branchoffices do ya need to support and do they all have broadband or also crappy connections?
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18/06/2009 08:49:12
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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Yes we look at that, but was told it was too little progress compared to Exchange 2003 (But will have to upgrade to server 2008 anyway with or without google soon)
Will need (in the futrue) to support around 200 users in 3 countries at 4 locations. (Today our server only manage around 60 users in 2 locations)
What about the web access part did it get an makeover ?
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19/06/2009 03:32:29
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EbroIN
Elite SysAider
Joined: 25/03/2009
Messages: 244
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DK_Sysaider wrote:What about the web access part did it get an makeover ?
As for OWA, well it got a little optical makeover so that it looks more like OL2007. For me both, OWA2003 and OWA2007, are working quite good.
200 Users are possible with SBS but I think a distributed installation might be more sensible here, especially speaking about SBS and SQL Server. You can greatly improve performance if these roles are distributed among some servers (and YES, virtualization is a great point here) but on the other hand I suppose that this will raise your licensing costs. Speaking about a single point of failure, providing only one SBS Server would be a classical no go. I think it would be best if you consider VMware or Citrix (maybe Microsoft HyperV) to improve availability and handle failover scenarios.
I don't know your situation but speaking from 1 headquarter and 3 branch offices this points out a clear structure for me. How fast and reliable are the branches connected? What technique are you using to interconnect the offices?
Maybe you can handle files by using DFS instead of SBS (this would save licensing costs) and maybe you can distribute Exchange mailboxes among the branches (this would indeed make it quite difficult to backup). As costuneurox mentioned before this is more difficult if you need to comply certain standards like sox or gdpdu (in Germany). I'd plan to handle this by forwarding all mail to a mail archive (inbound and outbound). I've seen some quite interesting products (Reddoxx, Symantec, Tivoli) which are specialized in mail archiving.
If you really need access from the internet inside your company you really need to think about a quite secure VPN technique (I prefer tokens for the users) and a stable CA among your domain.
best regards,
EbroIN
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19/06/2009 04:19:28
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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EbroIN wrote:
DK_Sysaider wrote:What about the web access part did it get an makeover ?
As for OWA, well it got a little optical makeover so that it looks more like OL2007. For me both, OWA2003 and OWA2007, are working quite good.
200 Users are possible with SBS but I think a distributed installation might be more sensible here, especially speaking about SBS and SQL Server. You can greatly improve performance if these roles are distributed among some servers (and YES, virtualization is a great point here) but on the other hand I suppose that this will raise your licensing costs. Speaking about a single point of failure, providing only one SBS Server would be a classical no go. I think it would be best if you consider VMware or Citrix (maybe Microsoft HyperV) to improve availability and handle failover scenarios.
I don't know your situation but speaking from 1 headquarter and 3 branch offices this points out a clear structure for me. How fast and reliable are the branches connected? What technique are you using to interconnect the offices?
Maybe you can handle files by using DFS instead of SBS (this would save licensing costs) and maybe you can distribute Exchange mailboxes among the branches (this would indeed make it quite difficult to backup). As costuneurox mentioned before this is more difficult if you need to comply certain standards like sox or gdpdu (in Germany). I'd plan to handle this by forwarding all mail to a mail archive (inbound and outbound). I've seen some quite interesting products (Reddoxx, Symantec, Tivoli) which are specialized in mail archiving.
If you really need access from the internet inside your company you really need to think about a quite secure VPN technique (I prefer tokens for the users) and a stable CA among your domain.
best regards,
EbroIN
Thank you for all the imputs EbroIN.
Year virtualization is to consider, but as today we don't have any virtual servers at all, maybe its a bit overkill for only the mail system, but something we should consider with our entire server farm.
We have VPN to 2 of them, the last is still a little and new place, where we soon should get this (I hope they will its not in my hands to do so)
I have also been looking at some of these services, but again will have to get a lot of disk space in a raid setup, and backup of this again, because this should be our security for mails. This could cost a lot, and our users do sent a lot of data, not that they are extremly big mails, but there are just many of them. My point is that this will take a lot of disk space, which space does not cost a lot, but at servers it's still a price will have to considering compared to fx. Google.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 19/06/2009 04:23:24
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19/06/2009 04:46:45
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costuneurox
SysAider
Joined: 04/06/2009
Messages: 6
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Valid points , and yes DFS is an option. The network and connectivity issues ( and those can be heavy as i read from former posts ) are something that you need to take into concern
And why we were at , uptime and softwareerrors...
Supose you were happy and rolled out with outlook and synchronisation towards google mail.
You woudl be in the trenches since "some" functionality didnt work. As this article expalins ( came out yesterday)
it google came out with the following:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/06/whats-different-with-google-apps-sync.html
This would mean an uninstall at your laptops across the companie and branch office.  according to google..
If you would like to continue to use these plug-ins, uninstall Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and the uninstaller will re-enable the plug-ins.
Press the Windows Key + R on your keyboard, and type “REGEDIT”. This will open the Windows Registry Editor.
2) Browse to the following: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search"
3) You will manually have to reset the value of “PreventIndexingOutlook” to “0” (without the quotes). To do this, right click on the “PreventIndexingOutlook” key, select “Modify…”, then change the value data to “0”.
4) Close the registry editor.
Now this is the man in the middle ( and thats you ) problem if ya depend on outside companies and cross use their solutions. And what will happen with the next security patch?
So now you are warned , go for a solid solution. The owa solution is fine (2003/200 where 2008 is more robust.
And DFS is one way to share files , but you still will have to synchronize the full files. So my idea is to look at workspaces , so that the documents are shared across geographical offices, solutions like sharepoint services (free with win2003/200 ( or open source variants) to give them workspaces that ya can open with browser or documents without having to use your mail enverionment except of sending a link.
Greetings
Costuneurox
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 19/06/2009 04:48:38
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30/06/2009 17:58:10
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reynolwi
SysAider
Joined: 23/06/2009
Messages: 1
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Being it as you said you have 60 users and your going to need to support 200 here soon SBS will not work for you as its cutoff is 75 users. You would either need to look at EBS (essential business server) or if you think you are going to go past 300 users which is the cutoff for EBS you would have to stick with standard or enterprise versions of microsoft windows 2008. EBS is the next step up from SBS as it supports upto 300 users/devices and includes exchange 2007, sharepoint, forefront messaging, etc. Its basically SBS but spread across 3 if not 4 servers and is made for mid-size companies. EBS and SBS do allow the RWW feature (Remote Web Access) and its a great feature.
http://www.microsoft.com/ebs/en/us/default.aspx is the website for EBS. Another solution you can also look at is Microsoft new feature which is hosted exchange, sharepoint, and office communicator solutions by Microsoft Online Services and if i remember right it can sync with your current active directory setup. http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx
I tried out Google Apps as a replacement for our exchange server and was not pleased with performance or its sync capabilities. We had so many problems keeping it sync'd up with our other files. With exchange users were able to sync with sharepoint calendars and files, calendar collaboration was easier between users. Secretaries could get to Managers mailboxes and calendars easier. It was pointless to even consider trying to replace our exisiting exchange and sharepoint systems with google apps.
I recommend google apps if you are a small company trying to set something up for the first time and do not want to spend a fortune buying hardware or if you do not already have a solution like exchange and sharepoint in place.
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01/07/2009 03:23:00
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DK_Sysaider
Super SysAider
Joined: 07/05/2009
Messages: 85
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As for now I have a secondary domain, I set up in Google for now to test it out. With outlook sync its actually not so bad right now. And performance I think is quite even.
BUT it was a lot easier to setup Exchange accounts on different devices that Gmail...
But I think your right, its going to be more hard to move, compared to the savings made...
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