Exchange Server In house vs Virtual Exchange hosted at ISP

Hi all,

Thanks very much for anyones time on this. My question is basically stated
in the subject line. We have a firm of 80 users running a windows 2003 active
directory network. We have been running office xp and poping mail through our
ISP until recently the ISP suggested an upgrade to Virtually hosted Exchange.
Unsure of what to do we decided to try it. The ISP said we needed to upgrade
our Outlook application in the office xp suite to Outlook 2007. Not sure that
was a good idea. Either way we did it.(now outlook is much slower)

We started to role out virtual exchange when data transfer started to slow
drastically, to the point nothing was working. Therefore we reversed
everything back to pop/smtp.

Can anyone backup virtually hosted exchange for a firm this size? Should we
just go with inhouse exchange being we are in an active directory environment
with 80 users?

I assume it got very slow during implementation due to importing of pst
files / transferring the .pst files over to the exchange.?

Over all Im just looking for pros/cons to going virtual or going inhouse
exchange being that we already have an active directory setup and having the
exchange on our local lan just makes more sense to me but...?

Thanks for any pros/cons


--
Burnabyryan
Thanks

Oliver
Fri Mar 14 06:06:58 CDT 2008

I did a partial blog Dedicated versus Hosted on this at www.exchange2007.com

Bare in mind I cannot tell you if the Supplier you have chosen has implented
a solution for you correctly or not.

How much bandwidth do you have connecting your office to the Internet?

80 users using Cached Exchange mode should be fine on a 5/10/mbit
connection.

Obviously importing any psts files into your Exchange accounts will have
saturated the link - however your provider should be able to offer to do
this on your behalf.

Just to put your company size into perspective, we have companies that we
host 2-3500 mailboxes for.

Oliver