Exchange Hosting by Mailstreet »
After a couple of furious days of planning and scrambling to get everyone somewhat organized, we've made the move, and the move was to Mailstreet. To be frank, the start was rocky. But in the end, we are very happy with our choice of Mailstreet as a hosted Exchange provider. Well, we aren't quite done, but the end is rapidly approaching.
There were times when something seemed to not be working quite right and I couldn't get anyone to respond via their chat system. Plus, the email response is pretty slow unless you're talking to sales. The phone support is good, I just hate talking on the phone as it means that I have to stop what I'm doing and concentrate on that. I'm not very good at multitasking while I'm on the phone. And I hate waiting too.
But the problems were really minor and the service is great. About the only real "gotcha" that we had was when we set up a split domain system so as to move people over a little at a time, instead of having to move everyone at once. First, this is great. Second, you have to do a bit of pre-planning to make it happen.
If you're taking the split domain route, do not set up all your new mailboxes first. The problem is that those mailboxes on the system that are not yet in use will receive mail sent from the other mailboxes on the system that are in use - meaning the people who haven't moved yet won't get their mail from those who have (at least not on their server). Not a good thing.
This can be overcome by the simple step of not creating those mailboxes. Without them there, the service looks to the existing MX server to fulfill the request and it goes through great. However, if you take this approach in the middle of the process, you may have an offline address book problem with those users that were there before the mailboxes were removed. If this is the case with you, make sure everyone downloads a new copy of the offline address book after the mailboxes have been deleted.
The only other problems we had were just with setup, and they weren't even problems, really. Just making sure we had all the right server names and such. The setup wizards provided by Mailstreet do a fine job. The only one that caught me was that in setting up IMAP, the signon is the user name at the domain name, which may not be the same thing as the email address.
If you need to forward your email from Exchange, you'll find this tip to be helpful in doing so. I created contacts for all the new forwarding addresses in one fell swoop, then simply activated them as needed during the process.
