We have just migrated from our own Exchange Server to an externally hosted solution, and it has solved so many issues I’m wondering why we didn’t do it much earlier!
But…there is one issue in the ‘user experience’ which is annoying a fair few people and I wonder if anyone can offer any ideas.
Previously, we had 12 client computers running Outlook connected to our Exchange Server (SBS2003) via 100Mb/s LAN. When sending email, the users connected to Exchange at high speed. Mail goes from Outbox to Sent Items in a matter of seconds even with large attachments. Of course, our server was then connected to the Internet using DSL with 768kbps upload speed, so all mail was leaving the server down a very thin pipe.
Now with hosted exchange, everyone is using a chunk of the 768kbps to send mail via the remote server so as far as the user is concerned, mail is simply working 100 times slower! No matter how I explain that the same anount of mail gets to the same recipients in the same amount of time, it’s what the Outlook users ‘perceive’ as a bottleneck that matters to them and then I get the hassles and moans.
Is there a method of ‘buffering’ data in some way so that the end user experience is similar to what it was with a local server? That is, when they send items, their mail ‘appears’ to send immediately, but in fact has just transferred out of their Outlook at 100Mb/s and then onward-fed to the hosted server at 768kb/s?
Is there some way I can modify our old Exchange setup to act as a ‘buffer’….without having to have individual mailboxes at this end?