The Great Migration
I'm looking to move my email & web services from in house to a the cloud. What is the best service to use. I need services like antispam services for email.
Any ideas?
Posted Jul 30, 2012, 9:32 PM UTC
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As far as hosted Exchange goes, I've had good success with Intermedia. They're the biggest provider who's been doing it the longest; I actually preferred them over Office 365 when moving some small businesses to them for some friends and family. The maturity in their platform shows, right from square one and migration (tons more migration options than O365). You would think Microsoft would do hosted Exchange the best, but IMO they dont (but O365 is still capable and reasonable). Their control panels sucks balls (just a slightly modified version of the stock ECP).
Google Apps is great, but you need a user base that is ready and willing to have their whole world webified. Generally, if you have outlook stalwarts, it's not going to be for you. Or at least you need to do a lot of training and familiarization.
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I use AppRiver for SPAM, they're pretty good.
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I used to be able to say AppRiver was good. Then we migrated to Exchange 2010 (from 2003) and its been a nightmare ever since.
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We just use them for SPAM filtering and host our own mail. What's the deal with their hosted Exchange, just crappy support?
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Crappy implementation really. Odd issues cropping up all over the place with users (example: Free/Busy taking 10 minutes to download, phantom bookings against resources, MailTips not working -- which other shared providers do have working w/o issue). Support is also all over the map, sometimes ranging from excellent to less than desirable.
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Brutal. We had some issues in the past with support until my CIO made a big stink about it now we have a dedicated support team.
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I'll admit that I'm drunk on the Google Apps Koolaid so my first recomendation would be google apps, but its definitely not for everyone. The spam filtering is descent and if you need more the whats baked in, I cant recommend postini enough no matter what email solution you go with. I've also migrated people to other solutions. Tell us a little about your current setup and outline what you're looking for out of the new solutions. I'm not so up on web hosting so I'll let someone else take that one.
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My one issue with Google Apps is that the Outlook plugin simply sucks. I've found that people don't want to give up Outlook, though.
It's so bad that I've gotten to the point where I won't migrate a client to Google Apps if they insist on wanting to use Outlook - it just makes more headaches for everyone.
The clients I have that have agreed to use the web interface love it.
Also, Postini is fantastic, whether on Google Apps or not.
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I'm in the middle of an office365 migration for a client mostly for their reliance on outlook. It's more work to migrate to in my opinion (maybe it's the koolaid talking) but it sure beats the hell out of managing an SBS server for , and more importantly getting them to pay for the support contract to go with it.
I'm a huge fan of postini, especially their archiving/ message discovery.
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been using office365 E1 with mimecast for a year now and very happy with it. For the actually migration, migrationwiz.com saved me hours.
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Thanks for the replies. I'll look into O386 and Intermedia.
I moving from a CentOS setup that I built over ten years ago.
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I was hoping for a story about how you have this old Windows 98 application that you're trying to move to Server 2008R2 and the only supported path is to go through each version - but then you realize that each subsequent version only runs on a single version of windows, so you find yourself moving from one version of windows to the next, upgrading the application along the way each time.
By some miracle, the database associated with this god forsaken thing still starts all of those versions later with all of data intact. But then, you get a frantic call: "IT's NOT WORKING!!!!!". Turns out that while everything works great as far as the application is concerned, the custom report that someone slapped together in 1995 no longer works and people start demanding to go back to the old system.
Now what?
//For an answer to the actual question, I've had fantastic service from Rackspace.
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Seconded.
Ahh yes, sounds like something I would have had to deal with if I hadn't simply forced them to dump an old BTrieve system.