So all you do is run MS Update a few times a year? You don't
add/remove users, or monitor the health of the database, or check the
free space, or do "oops" restores for people, or manage user mail
quotas, ... ? This kind of stuff adds up fast. It may not be 1/2 a
person, but 10 hours a year seems low.
We pro-actively monitor the health and stability of our servers. We
review logs and performance statistics, test the backups (and the
recovery procedures), and do the recommended maintenance at the
recommended intervals. Exchange requires administration, but there is
also the maintenance of Windows and the hardware, reviewing of the
spam logs and the spam filtering appliance, and monitoring of the mail
archiving system.
Adding/Remove users is not a dedicated Exchange task here. When a user is
added to Active Directory, they are automatically given an Exchange account
as part of the process. The time is spent regardless of whether you have
Exchange or not, so should not be counted as part of the Exchange
Administration cost.
Operations monitoring of Exchange and almost all other server software is
done via alerts. I don't have the staff to pour over logs every day. This is
a job well suited to software, and I find it works very well.
Exchange restores, on the very rare occasion that they're required (I think
maybe 2 that I can remember), are performed through our backup software,
which takes a brick-level backup every night. I can package and submit a
restore job in BrightStor in about 60 seconds. The reason that we don't run
across the need very often is that we provide a liberal quota and retention
period. If someone needs to retrieve something that they deleted 2 weeks
ago, it will still be in their deleted items folder.
Testing of backups, again, is part of the standard network administration
procedures. Exchange is just another node in our backup set. It takes extra
machine time when including Exchange as part of a restore test, but it
doesn't take more than a mouse click for the network admin.
Management of spam is, again, not exclusive to Exchange, or in-house
hosting. Ultimately, what constitutes spam is up to the user to determine.
Even with a hosted solution, the company and the individual users have spam
management to contend with.
I could go on, but I hope you see what I'm trying to get across. The real
question here is how much actual _extra_ work will hosting an Exchange
Server in house amount to. In our case, I can absolutely say that it has
only added a handful of hours per year, at most. We had outsourced mail for
many years, and routinely dealt with technical issues that we were always
powerless to do anything about. Since moving our mail hosting in-house, we
haven't had a single outage, and the users are super happy. More
importantly, when we do encounter a problem, it will get our immediate
attention; we will not be waiting for a call-back from someone in Bangladesh
that has a queue of a hundred customers in his call log, all wondering why
their mail isn't working again. Hosting our own server was the best thing we
ever did for our email.
You may not agree with our methods, but we're pretty proud of the fact that
in the past 20 years, we have zero minutes (yes, that's zero) of unscheduled
downtime on our servers. Moreover, there is no full-time network admin on
staff. Administration is automated wherever/whenever possible.
Regards,
John Taylor
midrange.com
