We now offer Microsoft Outlook / Exchange as a hosted service, from just £9 + VAT per mailbox per month.
The advantages of this Exchange hosting service include:-
As well as professional email, hosted Exchange gives you shared calendars, task lists, contacts and files, with no management from yourself – we set it up and manage it for you.
To learn more about getting full-featured professional email for a low monthly fee, with no start-up costs, please call us at 0845 450 1254
Most individuals that use their Blackberry in a small businesses environment would not buy Blackberry Enterprise Server for Exchange as it is simply too expensive and quite pointless for one or two users. Here is one method to bypass this and use the (UK) mobile phone providers Blackberry infrastructure and run it in conjunction with your Exchange system.
Since this article was written, IMAP and Outlook Web Access (OWA) have been made available via the Blackberry web gateway for a lot of providers. However mileage with these services vary and so there are sometimes reasons for reproducing the setup below. I'll also mention here that runPCrun can provide managed Microsoft Exchange hosting with full over the air Blackberry synchronisation from £12 p/mailbox with, call us if you are interested in this.
It's main advantages over just setting up standard POP3 collection are immediate (push) delivery of messages (rather that waiting for the Blackberry service to poll the POP3 provider) and also items sent via your Blackberry are kept in your Sent Items in Outlook/Exchange. This is attained with a little bit of tweaking and performs very well, although (obviously) the calendar,notes and tasks are not synchronised over the Internet as with the full blown server. In a small company this is not an issue and the synchronisation can occur easily using the cradle.
What this method does in a nutshell is when an email is received, it is forwarded immediately to the blackberry address. When a new mail or reply is sent from the Blackberry, it is sent masquerading as the Exchange email, and a copy is BCC'ed to the Exchange email address. This email is the sorted into the Sent Items folder using a server side rule.
The steps to attain this are thus:-
Our company supports a number of Exchange servers for our clients and up until recently one of the bug bears we had was the hard encoded 16Gb database limit.
This meant that as soon as the combined total of the users email hit 16Gb, Exchange would shut itself down. There is a way to temporary increase this limit to 17Gb to allow you to delete emails and run the defrag utility to free up dead space but as soon as the server has been rebooted it's not long until it hits 16Gb and the problem returned.
Since these days 16Gb is not a massive amount of data, users send and work with large attachments in some of the industries we deal with and it started to become an issue. However, Microsoft in a rare moment of actually listening to its customers decided to increase this limit to something with a little more headroom.
Hence, from Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can set the limit to up to 75Gb. Microsoft decided that having a simple tab in Exchange System Manager to set this limit would be too easy, you have to set it via a registry hack.
Once you install Service Pack 2, the limit is set at 18Gb and you have to choose a new limit depending on storage space you have.
The Keys that need to be changed are for the Private mailboxes:-
Sending email to AOL customers can be a tricky business. Especially if you are say running your own mail server on an ISP connection like a lot of small businesses do, typically with Exchange on Windows 2003 Small Business Server.
AOL have given one minor tool to help you avoid the bouncebacks, (typically by changing your configuration so your email is sent through another SMTP 'smarthost' like an ISP's SMTP server)
Once you've made changes that you think are needed, you can test the outgoing IP by emailing to the AOL IP Confirmation email ipconfirm@mailtest.mx.aol.com
Exchange Hosting is a service that offer to our customers if they want to oursource their Exchange infrastructure.
This gives you the mailbox & support of a large organisation, but at a fraction of the price of setting up the equivalent mail server and the maintenance involved in keeping it working on a small scale for your own business.
Quarterly newsletter for UK businesses and runPCrun customers
