The following question was posted on LinkedIn in the Apple Professionals group:
Microsoft Exchange Online in a Mac-centric Environment?
Hi all,
My consulting firm has traditionally recommended Google Apps for clients that want to use a hosted email/calendar/contact solution instead of running their own servers. However, the current inability to delete Google calendar events in iCal is driving some clients crazy, and the weirdness that is Google contact syncing in Address Book has been an ongoing pain.
With the very strong Exchange support in iOS and OS X Lion (and to a slightly lesser extent Snow Leopard), we're considering recommending hosted Exchange solutions instead. I was wondering if anyone here has experience with Microsoft's hosted Exchange offering (Exchange Online), good, bad, or ugly. Tales of joy and/or woe are all accepted!
I recently setup a small office with about 10 users on Office365 (Microsoft's own hosted Exchange/SharePoint platform) and it's been stellar. The users are mostly Windows desktops/laptops and all iPhones/iPads and it's as good or better than running your own Exchange server. Mail quota is 25GB per user and it's priced at $6/per user per month, which is quite reasonable and competitive with the commercial version of Google Apps. I've connected Apple Mail, iPhones, Outlook for Windows (2007 & 2010) & Mac (2011) to it with no issues and the web mail interface is very robust including the ability for users to remotely wipe lost phones.
If you or your users are used to having Exchange-level functionality, it makes a strong case. The others are fine products but the pricing Microsoft introduced with Office365 makes it extremely competitive and not to sound like a Microsoft pundit but it's the real thing.
Based on my experience, which includes administering Exchange versions through the current, it gives you the full functionality you'd expect of running Exchange yourself with much lower maintenance and cost.
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