Monday 29 October 2012

Stormy Cloud Number 2: ExchangeDefender Australia and an Apology

Karl and Manuel Palachuk called me to task on the previous blog post especially over our qualification mentioning ExchangeDefender Exchange Hosting (xD) not being the vendor of record that killed folk’s mailboxes.

While we had seen bits and pieces about a problem with OWN’s hosted Exchange in Australia we were so busy that there was not enough time to actually let the news settle in:

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So, Karl and Manuel, my apologies. I should have been aware of the impact that the OWN catastrophic failure had on the folks of Australia before posting the previous entry.

With the apparent abandonment of the folks that were on the hosted Exchange 2007 platform in Australia that begs the question: What does this mean for folks that have their organization’s mailboxes on Exchange 2007 here in North America? Or, any other geographical area that OWN services with Exchange 2007?

By abandonment we mean leaving the entire Exchange 2007 platform behind. We are not entirely sure where the mailbox recovery stands at this point? Vlad?

One of our clients has their hosted Exchange 2007 with SherWeb based here in Canada. We’ve been discussing the various Cloud vendors available to them including Office 365 and OWN’s hosted Exchange 2010 services. And now, possibly hosted Exchange 2013.

The one place SherWeb has both O365 and OWN beat is in the migration story. Karl mentions documentation in his first comment on the above blog post. SherWeb has a clearly documented migration story among other aspects of their hosting business.

With O365 and OWN that migration story must be handled by the IT Solution Provider or Cloud Support Specialist. :)

In the end, just as the hardware and software story are constantly changing for our on-premises IT Solutions so too must we be evaluating our Cloud Vendor’s wares on an ongoing basis.

Most certainly the situation in Australia is a real Cause For Pause when it comes to OWN’s hosted Exchange.

For us, it means looking further into SherWeb as a possible hosted Exchange and SharePoint vendor partner.

Cloud or On-Premises: A _full_ backup of all data hosted outside of a client’s walls is absolutely mandatory.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Windows Live Writer

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