My Review Rackspace Hosted Exchange

[Chrisxs5]

Here is review of Rackspace Hosted Exchange. Originally posted on my blog (Link in the Signature), but figured I would share here as well.

I had heard of Rackspace for years before running across a reason to try them out. So when the chance came I went for it and here's my story.

One day while sitting in a meeting with the “big guys”, I was pitching the idea of moving the entire companies email to a hosted Cloud environment. Our 2003 in-house Exchange system crashed. This crash wasn’t really uncommon just very convenient since it happened while I was telling everyone how bad it was. I inherited the system from my predecessors and it was bad from the beginning. The database corrupted itself once a week. The backup system wouldn’t complete which caused the logs not to clear. In return that would fill up the storage. This was a constant pain. So needless to say by the end of the day, my project idea was approved.

So I set out on the very tedious task of filtering through the plethora of Cloud based hosted Exchange solutions. I looked into about 50 of them and over about a month narrowed my choices to 5 finalist. The finalist were Office 365, PacHosting, Kerio, 1and1 and of course Rackspace. I know; I make it sound like a competition. Actually it was. You see for me to put my reputation on it I would need to be 100% confident. I looked into cost, reputation, features and of course storage. Rackspace won me over and signed up.

So I started the migration and Rackspace was great about it. They assigned a transition team to handle the migration for me. This was at no additional charge and they took care of almost everything. Now the migration took forever to do once it was started. Now I only tell you this in the effort of being completely honest. The reason it took forever was due to our poor database and the horrible T-1 connections we had at the time. Rackspace did a great job of watching the migration which started on Friday and lasted through the weekend. After a few forgotten password resets by noon on Monday morning the project was done.

Our service has some really cool features as well.

Outlook Web Access: Complete online email access. I love web mail access! It has all the same features as Outlook including tasks, calendar, reminders and shared features.
Office Outlook: Desktop access for some users is a must. Which isn’t a problem because Office Outlook 2010 is available at no extra charge to the users. Each user can login and download it along with a utility to setup their account for them.
Spam Filtering: Spam filtering is done using three layers filtration. Its like drinking water that is 99.999% percent clean, accept your reading email. (Yes I made up that stat.)
Hybrid Option: If you don’t need full Exchange email accounts, then you can use a cross between Exchange and Rackspace’s cloud based email system. An design option we actually use. We use the Rackspace emails (which are cheaper) for a few system email accounts, copier email accounts and for employees who don’t actually need an email account for company use, but need one to see their paycheck stubs. This option actually saves us a good amount of money on our monthly bill.
Directory Sync: Password synchronization to keep the company’s on-premise Active Directory synchronized with Rackspace Hosted Exchange.
Mobile Access: Allows users mobile device access to their emails on the go. What I like about this service is the control I have. Not just any user has mobile access,  but only the users I give permission to.
Control Panel: The control panel for the entire system is very easy to use and I can set my staff at different admin levels for management.
This does not include every feature they offer, just a few that I love. I didn’t even get into the archiving feature which is awesome. I highly recommend Rackspace for Hosted Exchange! We also use SharePoint and Cloud Server products.

To checkout Rackspace yourself go to http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/hosted-exchange/

NOTE: I am just a customer of Rackspace, I get no compensation for this review.  Of course if you work for Rackspace and want to send me a check or some SWAG for my review I will be happy to accept it.

Side note. After I posted this review, Rackspace found it and showered me with S.W.A.G.
I am still just a customer, but a complete sucker for free t-shirts! They never did send me a check tho!

[DaveLembke]

Cool that this worked out for you. I was trying to sell this idea to  the big wigs when I was in IT at my prior job. Their concern was data security, and even though its secure, they wanted to keep the exchange server local to have control on sensitive data so that there is no thought in the back of their mind that any leaks would happen.

Good to see that you were able to sell them on it. We had problems with exchange, especially back in the Exchange 5.5 days which I dont miss at all. When I left this position in 2009 they were running on Exchange 2003, and it was around then that I was trying to sell them on this idea of offsite servers for our Mail Exchange since they did not want to allocate proper funds for the IT budget.

When it came to IT, they said they wanted this and wanted that, and then oh by the way we dont want to spend money to make this happen, so other than software licensing that they were not able to weasel their way around and would painfully sign approval for purchase of, generally I was having to take normal off the shelf cheap computers that were not intended for critical server applications and make them into the needed server or even worse, take Bob's old Pentium III 850Mhz workstation with 512MB RAM that he use to use for making the store flyers with Photoshop etc, and use that for the server instead because we cant approve $700 for at the time a Core 2 Duo tower to make a better home computer grade, non-server hardware class server. And you have to use the prior Server 2000 OS from the prior server instead of Server 2003 because we need to keep costs down, yet they had sales of over 23 million and were in the black by about $700,000 above operating costs.

Then when the server crashes or lags they blame IT and not their poor choices to not get the right equipment and up to date software/OS.... I got tired of this issue and inadequate pay and found a far better job. But I am sure others out there are still stuck in jobs/careers in IT or as the role of IT in other duties as assigned to their normal title, where the businesses find the cost of IT as an inconvenience and trying to get the money to run it as it should be run is like pulling teeth and your not getting paid as good as a dentist.

[Chrisxs5]

I got tired of this issue and inadequate pay and found a far better job. But I am sure others out there are still stuck in jobs/careers in IT or as the role of IT in other duties as assigned to their normal title, where the businesses find the cost of IT as an inconvenience and trying to get the money to run it as it should be run is like pulling teeth and your not getting paid as good as a dentist.

That would be my last job before this company. Server 2000 with no money to upgrade. Just bandaiding all the time. My current company is great. For the most part if I ask for the money they approve it. Just finished up a complete VMware virtualization of all of our servers including a week long Fast track course and they sent me to VMworld 2013. I just tell everyone now, if your job sucks; quit! There are some great companies out there.