Outlook or Excahnge for Shared Contacts/Calendar in a WAN environment

[hals_left]

Hi

We have 50 Outlook users located at 4 regional offices. We all use
either Outlook 2002 & Outlook XP Clients.

Incoming mail is POP3 & handled by aan "officemail" server via an ISP.
We are not able to administer the server at all and the only services
provided are account creation/deletion, which we request to the ISP.
Outgoing mail is sent via SMTP using the relevant ISP at each regional
office.

The main reason for wanting to change this setup is that the out of
office assistant, shared contacts and calendar/group schedule isnt
possible - or we dont know how to set it up.

Can these problems be solved to any degree on the Outlook clients or do
we need an exchange server that we can Administer ourselves ?

Thanks
hals_left

 

[Noel All]

You would need either an Exchange server for all of the functionality, or
you could go third party to achieve some of your required functionality,
this doesn't mean that YOU would need to get an Exchange box though as there
are plenty of Exchange hosting sites available.

 

[hals_left]

Thanks.
Do you know of any web based 3rd party solution that would give us
these functions ?

 

[Noel All]

Couple of clients are using this http://www.mailtraq.com/, they seem quite
happy