>Hello all
>
>We are looking to replace our internal (Groupwise) email server with a managed exchange server account. I am interested in reccomendations for providers as well as info on how well it works for your org as well as problems/gotcha's

I looked into this for a client a little over a year ago. One useful FAQ I found at one provider:

http://www.intermedia.net/it-professionals/hosted-exchange/faqs/hosted-vs-inhouse.asp

The above is by an Exchange host so it's slanted a bit in favour of hosted.

The client for which I was doing the analysis is small, about 15 people. At the time the choice was between hosted Exchange, and purchasing Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 R2 and using the Exchange that comes with that.

One thing you should look at before evaluating hosting options is the size of your users' current data stores (.PST files if they're using Outlook), and the approximate number of contacts for each user. Things may have changed now, but at that time I found that hosts were offering "plans" like:

- Intermedia: 15 mailboxes, 11 GB total space shared amongst those 15 mailboxes, maximum 100 contacts in Global Address List

- MailStreet: 15 mailboxes, 1.5 GB total space shared amongst those 15 mailboxes (extra space available for $49.95/month/GB [!!]), unknown GAL limits

Again, I don't know if things have changed but be wary of hard storage limits and/or limits that can be expanded only at an exorbitant cost, and hard limits on your GAL and/or with expensive expansion as well.

When we looked at my client's current (never mind future) needs, some hosts just couldn't cut it - the client needs way more than 100 contacts in their GAL so Intermedia got dropped right there. Their space requirements were over the plan limits, and to expand them, the hosts we checked were ferociously expensive. As you probably know, SBS is a very good value for those organizations that can make use of it; in our case the cost advantage was so great we decided to go in-house.

As an aside, before R2, Exchange on SBS 2003 was limited to 18GB total store size. This was expanded in R2 to 75GB, making it usable for a lot more organizations.

In the above I've been talking only about Exchange 2003. Exchange 2007 has been out since basically the beginning of the year and can be bought standalone but I don't know if it has yet been integrated into any version of SBS. You might want to check if a given host is offering you Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007.

In-house Exchange does require more setup than hosted, but you have all the same remote access capabilities that you get with hosted e.g. Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook over HTTP etc.

The big concerns with hosted Exchange (or with any hosted service) are:

- Privacy: some companies are just not comfortable with the possibility that admins at the host can access their mail

- Availability: if the internet connection goes down at your end or theirs, you lose all service. If the company fails financially (often with no warning whatsoever) you may lose everything permanently. Any host you consider should be very up-front and proud to offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) - closely check how many 9's they guarantee in their uptime and how many minutes per year of downtime that translates to.