Well, that’s slightly ironic. I’ve just read on NineMSN, an Australian news site that’s 50% owned by Microsoft, that corporate workers are ditching their Exchange mailboxes in favor of auto-forwarding work emails to Gmail. The article notes that this trend could eventually make Exchange Server expendable.
Microsoft is responding by urging IT managers to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, and give employees 2GB or larger mailboxes. (Google offers 2.7 GB.) Exchange 2007 features a 5,000 user capacity and 35x faster mailbox indexing than Exchange 2003. Also importantly, the not-yet-released Windows Mobile 6.0 will allow users to search Outlook folders on the server via mobile phones.
It looks like Intermedia.NET already offers Exchange 2007. The company says it will upgrade current Exchange 2003 customers at no cost. Its standard plans come with 1GB mailboxes though.
There’s no Exchange 2007 info on groupSPARK‘s website just yet. The company offers 70 GB to 280 GB storage space for packages with 100 to 500 included licenses, which makes the average mailbox quite a bit smaller than Microsoft’s recommended size.
SWSoft’s PEM package is also Exchange 2003-only for now. While Intermedia.NET and groupSPARK offer 100% outsourced solutions, PEM lets you set up 12+ server (5000+ licenses) Exchange deployments on your own hardware.
I have to say, though, I’m not excited about the idea of web hosting providers reselling Exchange licenses while having to compete with Office Live for domain registration and web hosting customers.
PS – Jeff Nolan from Teqlo is planning to use Gmail as his company’s corporate mail service: “We looked at each other and I asked everyone else in the room if they could think of a good reason why we should not just use Gmail for our mail server, and start using the Google Calendar as well, eyes darted around and nobody raised any objections or issues…” Jeff points out that SocialText is doing the same thing.
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