For the OCA IT Pros.....
 

So I'm just gonna use this thread to dump all my IT questions that I have for work.

First I want us to have company e-mail. The problem is that exchange server isn't cost effective for just 18 employees. What I would really want is email that goes like this for example chuchnit@companyname.com and use it with microsoft outlook.

What is the best method to do this?

I would look into your internet provided and see what type of solutions they provide. There are also many of POP3/SMTP hosts out there. Finding one I dunno as I only use Cox for personal and business as well as the OCA email.

Well we have one email acct for each office through them, but instead of the company name for the extension, it is the ISP name. like @comcast.com

Whats going on is they are way behind the times in technology and the IT guys around here are retards. So slowly I need to start changing things while learning some things myself. They desperately need two new servers in a bad way. Like still running P3 based servers.

Ok, I gotcha now. Sorry for the reatardness.

How much does exchange cost? Does your work have a domain name and is it required for exchange? I am new in this area too.

No we don't have a website, but I was wondering if purchasing a domain name and going that route would be the cheapest route. Exchange server would cost around $1500/yr for us to have it. That just cost way too much imho.

WOW!!! I didn't know it would be that much. I would have to say purchasing the domain name would be the cheapest route. It would just be a matter of shopping for one and seeing what the price is for your business domain name.

You can look around for open source stuff to use on you're office server but letting someone else handle you're mail is prolly easier and more peace of mind.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/courier/

I also got some questions coming up about servers and storage solutions, but I got to talk to the software makers about requirements first. That's what I'm excited about :)

Redundancy redundancy redundancy.

Thats the most important thing

I am guessing that it is a small company, if so and you are not handling government secrets ;) you can contact gmail about email with your own domain.

Alternatively Office Live has some nice cheap plans as well and has the added benefit of being, well, office live :) Document sharing and all that stuff to go along with it.

Once you get larger you can look at running an email server yourself, for a small company it is not really worth the cost of self hosting IMHO. The risk of losing all your email or having it down is too great. The best method of preventing that is shadowed servers at 2 separate locations. And that is just a little out of my ken.

These are some great ideas. Especially the Office Live idea. I didn't realize mS catored their services to businessz as well.