I’ve spent sometime lately advising IT companies on their options in regards to offering Cloud Services to their client base lately. That conversation usually begins discussing one of the most popular Cloud services – Hosted Microsoft Exchange, and in particular, the Business Productivity On-Line Suite (BPOS).

Thanks to the massive Microsoft marketing machine, a lot of clients are actively approaching their IT provider and asking about BPOS – thus forcing the whole Cloud services conversation where in many cases, the IT supplier is reluctant to begin talking about the Cloud.

With the release of Microsoft Office 365, those types of conversations are going to becoming more and more common.

For most IT companies I’ve spoken with, one of the concerns they have with Hosted Exchange services is that they will “lose control”. Whilst they accept that no longer having to monitor and maintain Exchange Servers is something they won’t miss, they are concerned about how to react if something goes wrong.

The advice I give to clients around Hosted Exchange outages is that they need to set their clients expectations early on in the conversation. Whilst it’s likely that as time goes by services like Microsoft BPOS will benefit from greater uptime as Microsoft learn and adapt, outages are happening – and IT companies shouldn’t gloss over this fact with their clients.

So the next question that comes up is typically “What can we do when a Hosted Exchange service does go down?”

The answer is to prepare for that situation well in advance by using an e-mail continuity solution. Such a solution will mean that in the event of your “main” Exchange Server (in this case, BPOS) going off-line – you can still manage live e-mail through your continuity server, which is located somewhere else in the Cloud.

In effect, the Cloud backing up the Cloud.

While testing BPOS myself I was intrigued to see how this type of solution worked with BPOS. For years my own MSP used e-mail continuity solutions such as Exchange Defender and Reflexion, which basically re-direct your clients MX record to the e-mail continuity solution, which in turn (and after filtering the e-mail for Spam and viruses) delivers the e-mail to your clients mail server. If your clients mail server is not available, the e-mail is held until your clients mail server is back on-line and the e-mail can be delivered. No e-mail is bounced. In the meantime, your client can access these e-mails through a web interface – enabling them to stay connected.

I’ve been testing the GFI Max Mail Protection (formerly known as Katharion) product recently so I set about seeing if I could add e-mail continuity to BPOS with Max Mail. The answer is, I could, and both Microsoft and GFI made this easy to achieve.
Configuring BPOS and GFI Max Mail Protection to co-exist

After setting up a partner account with Max Mail (you can watch the setup guide video here) and configuring the appropriate domain names and users through the Max Mail Control Panel Web-Site, I set Max Mail’s primary Destination Mail server to BPOS’s Mail.Global.FrontBridge.com on SMTP Port 25.

Through my domain hosting company (in my case, TGS-Host) I then re-directed my domain’s MX records to those provider by Max Mail within their Control Panel on the domain settings tab. These settings differ for each domain you’re configuring, but in my case I set a Primary MX record of bcs-blog.com.pri-mx.uk0109.smtproutes.com with a Priority of 10 and a Secondary MX record of bcs-blog.cocom.bak-mx.uk0109.smtpbak.com with a Priority of 90.

I then waited for the MX record to be fully updated within DNS, typically this takes 24 hours – during which time some e-mail is delivered directly to Microsoft BPOS, whilst other e-mail is filtered through GFI Max Mail Protection before being sent to BPOS.

The good news is – everything worked, and without having to change any client side settings at all!

Whilst Microsoft BPOS already has e-mail filtering built-in thanks to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) – in my experience, GFI Max Mail Protection is much more effective – letting less spam through to end-users and creating fewer false positives.

Additionally, BPOS does not allow access to their e-mail quarantine directly, whilst Max Mail allows users to login and view their quarantine, releasing messages that they want to read.

BPOS also sends out an e-mail quarantine report every 3 days, and as I understand it from the BPOS Technical Support team, this setting can’t be changed. GFI Max Mail allows up to 3 quarantine reports to be scheduled *per day* – allowing the very paranoid to constantly track their quarantine.

Screenshot of FOPE Quarantine E-MailOne note on the GFI Max Mail Protection quarantine e-mails. FOPE within Microsoft BPOS captures these as possible spam – so make sure to add the domain @reporting.smtproutes.com to your BPOS Whitelist to allow these messages through FOPE.

So I’ve now got two levels of e-mail filtering, a stronger quarantine system in Max Mail Protection than BPOS, and the next time a BPOS outage occurs, I’m able to continue working with my e-mail through the Max Mail web-page.

There’s also the potential to add Outbound e-mail Filtering through Max Mail in conjunction with BPOS for a belt’n’braces approach and for auditing purposes. Additionally, there’s also the opportunity to use the GFI Max Mail Archive product for full archiving of inbound and outbound e-mails too.

Conclusion

When a client has an on-site e-mail server, it is going to experience downtime. Be that because of hardware failure, broadband outage or any number of other issues.

For IT companies who who are moving clients to Hosted Exchange services such as BPOS, the same is true.

IT Companies still need to be asking clients the question “How important is e-mail to you?”.

For most small businesses nowadays, e-mail is very important – so adding continuity is a no-brainer, and will save a lot of gnashing of teeth when the inevitable downtime does occur.

Enterprise Anti-Virus Packages progress just as often as Home Anti-Virus packages but which one is the best out their? Well the best way to find out is to look at the reviews on the following sites:

• http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/corporate-reviews
• http://www.avtest.org
• http://www.virusbtn.com/index

After looking at these you can normally work out which is the best. I’ve got to admit when I do this they tend not to be the ones I expect as the big name companies aren’t always the best.

Although these sites show which are the best they don’t give you costs of the products they are testing which is a factor in most Enterprise situations. You do need to weigh out the costs as sometimes the more expensive products aren’t necessarily the best and the cheapest aren’t necessarily the worst either.

Personally after supporting Anti-Virus systems for other 40 different companies of different sizes I have come up with my own preferences which I shall mention now.

I would personally for a large organisation get McAfee as I believe it has the best Management Console out their. If they improve their Anti-Malware software then they could be unstoppable. If you buy the full McAfee sweet and configure it properly you won’t have to worry about its malware detection capabilities as it will block it from getting on the machine in the first place but it is expensive. F-Secure I believe has the best Anti-Virus/Spyware software on the market but its management console isn’t the best but it has been improved a lot over years and does it’s job adequately. Symantec has a nice all round package but it is a little resource intensive. ESET is probably the best for SMB’s as it does what it is meant to without much monitoring and is cheap.

As prices and software changes constantly I haven’t listed which is the best or worst product but hopefully you have found the above useful and it will help you in deciding your next Anti-Virus package. Please feel free to post your opinions on this as I’m sure we will all have different experiances and opinions on this matter.

Hello all,

Welcome to my first post. I hope you find it useful.

If your thinking of becoming a Reseller of Hosted Exchange then having a 1 server install of Exchange is just not a good practice. People that are willing to pay for “Exchange” and all those bells and whistles expect a high performing and available system.
If you are trying to reduce the cost of Hosting Exchange, or you don’t have the customer base to support the investment, you should look into being a reseller for one of the companies,  who do the solution “right.”
Here are some questions you should ask a provider if you are going to resell their product:

1. What version of Exchange are you running?     (2010 should be the answer)

2. Are you running SP1 for Exchange 2010?     (Yes should be the answer)

3. Are their Multiple CAS Servers? How are they Load Balanced?     (There should be multiple CAS Servers and they should be load balanced, Windows Load balancing works but hardware balancers are better)

4. Are the shared Exchange boxes stored on a clustered Mailbox Server? What flavor of clustering do you use?     (Yes, in a DAG; no clustering should not be an acceptable response)

5. How many HUB Servers are in the environment?     (There should be multiple)

6. Is this setup spreadover more then one data centre for redundancy?     (If yes then this is better as it gives you better redundancy)

7. Is the solution designed a white label?     (The idea here is to find out if anything has been rebranded so you can investigate it thoroughly and re-brand it to use your own company logo’s)

8. Will I have the ability to have certificates with my brand name on them?     (Yes is better this best option here)

9. Is SharePoint an available option to enable / Bill for?     (A lot of clients will want SharePoint as it replaces the Public Folders in Outlook and it makes a good Intranet. It also gives you the natural expansion of the services you can offer your clients)

10. What Control Panel do you use?     (This will help you determine if this is compatible with the billing system you want to use or already use)

11. Do you have an API?     (If yes it will give you the ability to add features you want and customise the customer experience )

12. What anti-spam do you use? Is it on premise or in the cloud? (The idea is to find out what they use and how it is provided to you as they have different benefits so having both an On-premise and Cloud solution is the best but could cost a lot more)

There are a bunch of  other questions you should ask before reselling Exchange from someone elses environment but I feel these are the most important. Some of the questions above they will not answer, but you should understand how the provider built their network.