Until recent years, most small and medium-sized businesses had their own Exchange Server. However, most don’t have the money for a redundant server out-of-state. Further, Exchange Service Packs and other required maintenance is rarely performed. Finally, the average system administrator cringes at the time and complexity of restoring mailboxes.

Even with RAID and backup, you can have equipment failure or corrupt files that can render backups irrelevant or too dated. So the unexpected happens and Exchange services won’t start with e-mail down for all users. You can’t restore from backup if the Exchange Services won’t start. The utilities to identify and fix the corruption take 15 minutes per gigabyte for each integrity, soft recovery, and hard repair.

If you’re then lucky enough to get Exchange Services started, there is another 15 minutes per gigabyte to restore. Even small organizations can be without e-mail for 24-72 hours. Larger organizations with bigger databases can have restoration pushing one week or more during major disasters.

If the Exchange Services won’t start after all the latest technology and your best efforts, you’re in big trouble. Who wants to tell management that you’ve got to go out of the box and spend even more time building another mail server, with limited possibility of restoring old mailboxes? Can your company survive after 3 or more days without e-mail? How long will it take to build back trust with employees and customers?

Fortunately, there is a better way:

1. Start an Office 365 Free Trial. Setup mailboxes and have mail flowing in minutes. Share the Office Important URLs and Office 365 Mobile Setup to get users productive quickly.
2. EDB to PST. Directly export each mailbox from the Exchange database and then import into Office 365.
3. Uninstall Exchange. Remove from Active Directory and escape e-mail maintenance, upgrades, vulnerabilities, and disaster recovery going forward.

Matrixforce has supported Microsoft Exchange since 1994 and is currently a top 50 Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner.

Contact us if you don’t want to go it alone.

Published by Kevin Fream

Many people don't understand their current situation and become frustrated in business and life, so I created the Delta Method and wrote the #1 Best-Seller "Change Your Game" - as featured at Harvard and NASDAQ as well as national TV news. Streamline your technology for competitive advantage using vetted IT support and take a divergent approach to personal growth. View all posts by Kevin Fream