Exchange E-Mail hosting recommendation needed

[40hz]

Hi all.

I have a few small clients (legal firms with less than 5 people each) that need a hosted e-mail solution that uses MS Exchange as its backend. They're heavily vested in MS Outlook for a variety of reasons not worth going into. Suffice to say, they want to start using some of the group features (calendar sharing etc.) - but can't justify the expenditure of supporting their own email/Exchange servers.

Is anybody using or recommending a service that provides this. The people I normally refer my clients to for this sort of service don't support customers this small.

Anybody know a provider who is really good for this?

(P.S. Direct experience recommendations only please? I can read the web reviews too. I'm looking for personal recommendations. I trust my fellow DoCo members more than I do most web sources. Thx! )

[techidave]

Our school switched this past summer to Office 365 for Education, which the basic Exchange Online is free for them.  25 gb storage for each mailbox.  it was a pain to get the mailboxes copied over but we have been satisfied since then.  I didn't do the setup on it but was there watching the other guy do it.

We had a 12 year old Dell server that had one bad hard drive and one bad power supply in it.  Glad it waited until we were done with the switch before they went. 

It has good junk mail detection, webmail is good and we can also use Outlook with it. 

[40hz]

@techiD - Hey! Sorry! I didn't even see your response earlier and had given the question up for lost.

Looking at MSoft's Exchange in the cloud service, I think this is exactly what they're looking for.

Don't know why it hadn't occurred to me since Redmond has been pushing this is the partner channel for the last year - and we're supposed to be at least suggesting it to our clients.  Unfortunately my "cloud guy" decided to hang out his own shingle a while back and that initiative was being neglected on our part.

Time to get reacquainted and caught up with that.

Thanks for the wake-up call.

[Stoic Joker]

We've got 2 clients lined up to go the MS hosted Exchange route.

$4 per user per month for basic package (just exchange...but all of it), and the minimum order size (for that rate) is 1.

[40hz]

^Yup. Very compelling. And for $8/per you get all that plus compliance archiving, unlimited archive storage space (with 25Gb in primary inbox), and hosted voicemail. No contract either. Pay as you go. And with a company big enough they'll be around for the foreseeable. Yup. Very compelling.
 

Still have to find out how easy it is to set up - plus sync the huge PSTs they currently have up to the cloud.

I understand how to do it. But I've never done it personally - and hands on is everything when it comes to this sort of thing.

[Stoic Joker]

I understand how to do it. But I've never done it personally - and hands on is everything when it comes to this sort of thing.

-40hz (December 04, 2012, 07:08 PM)

+1 - So it's a race then.

[Ehtyar]

Gmail will do calendars in Outlook. A business account is $50/yr/pp.

Ehtyar.