Shared Outlook, but not Exchange

[CathodeRay]

Probably exposing my ignorance here, but....

We have a client that is currently using Outlook on each desktop, and not using Exchange. They want to start sharing address lists and doing some calendaring and accessing their Outlook from the web (OWA?).

At the outset, using Exchange with OWA sounds like the right solution...

Here's the catch: They have several outside "employees" that like to use Yahoo, Excite, Gmail, etc for their email.

Right now, everybody's email domain is "usercompany.com." At the ISP, those outside employees' emails are being forwarded to their respective email hosts (Yahoo, etc.), and that's working fine... and they want to keep it that way.

We understand that with Exchange we could do the same thing: we could forward all their emails to them at Yahoo, etc.

Now here's the REAL catch: this is a small client, doesn't have tons of disk space, doesn't really want to be responsible for keeping the Exchange server up and running ALL the time (you know, email's down, the phone starts ringing...), doesn't want to use that much backup media, etc. etc. all the stuff that goes with running Exchange.

Therefore, the question: is there a way to, at the ISP, have emails sent to (for example) Joe@mycompany.com be sent to the Exchange server, and Sue@mycompany.com be still sent to Yahoo, Excite, whatever?

Asked another way: Is there a way to KEEP THE SAME DOMAIN NAME, but have the internal users use Exhchange, and the external users still use the ISP?

 

[nsantin]

[RANT]

It's called outsouring your mail. If you're client isn't willing to take on the responsibility associated with hosting their own mission critical business system, i.e mail system (re: Uptime, backups, diskspace etc) then they should not be running exchange server internally. The best solution is to outsource to a provider that will have the
necessary redundancy and forwarding tools.

[/RANT]

 

[58sniper]

Yeah - what he said.

Although using a "free" email service like GMail, Yahoo, etc is a sure sign of business instability. Sure hope they aren't concerned about legal issues.....

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[CathodeRay]

Thanks, friends, for your replies.

Aside from the "good sense" issues, how could one achieve this goal, technically?... Keeping in mind that there's a big difference between remote employee/owners having a (temporary) outage of email and 5 employees in-house knowing that the Exchange server just needed to be re-booted due to installation of a service pack...

Can outsourced emails be simply forwarded to an internal Exchange server? I got it: Mail sent to joe@mycompany.com goes through the hosted email, then is fowarded to joe@whocareswhatname.com on the internal Exchange server... but then what about outgoing email? Could that outgoing email be SMTP'd back through the mycompany.com domainname?

Thanks for your indulgence in this topic. Looking forward to technical configuration feedback.

 

[nsantin]

The only way to achieve this would be have you mail outsourced to another provider and then POP it locally.

The problem you have with incoming mail is your MX record will point to your local server, so if it's down your done.

On outgoing, if your contacts do not have mailboxes (mail enabled contacts) then you might be able to use a smarthost to send to another SMTP server (assuming 1. Your exchange server isn't down and 2. you have another server to forward to). But again, if your mail server is down then you can't send mail regardless how you have it setup.

 

[TomLet]

I'm with everyone else, go with a Exchange hosting company such as

http://www.liveoffice.com

(not an endorsement just an example).

Given your catch of:

"this is a small client, doesn't have tons of disk space, doesn't really want to be responsible for keeping the Exchange server up and running ALL the time (you know, email's down, the phone starts ringing...), doesn't want to use that much backup media, etc. etc. all the stuff that goes with running Exchange."

I wouldn't recommend that they do Exchange inhouse at all.

That's just my opinion though.

 

[lhuegele]

Yes, just find an email hosting company that will host Exchange for the company. If it's only 5 employees, that's the right course of action.

Good luck

 

[CathodeRay]

Thanks all... yes, an Exchange hosting company may be the answer.