Please Help Me Understand Exchange Hosting

[junkmail]

I have been a long time user of Outlook. The company I work for uses
Lotus Notes but Notes in no way can compare to Outlook so that is what
I use at home. I currently have a Treo 650 but will soon be getting a
Moto Q with MS Mobile 5.0. Currently I use POP3 email and tried IMAP
but I wasn't really happy with the way it worked. My goal was to be
able to read email on my phone and have it in sync with my computer
when I got home which didn't always work. So I am now thinking about
using an Exchange mailbox by way of Exchange Hosting but I do have a
few questions and concerns. First of all anyone who has used Outlook
for a while knows how important that file called "outlook.pst" is. I
back mine up every night and did once have a crash but quickly and
easily recovered thanks to my backup and therefore I am nervous about
giving up control of Outlook. Here are the questions that I have:

1. Will my computer still maintain a local copy of the .pst file so
that I can still always have a local backup?

2. Currently I have three domains and three email addresses. All are
important becasue they all deal with different things. One is small
business I run, one is a Foundation I run, and one is my personal
email. If I forward all of these (or alias) to my Exchange box will
this work? The only problem that there may be is that it appears that
all replies will come from my Exchange box. Is there anyway around
this?

3. If I run in hosted mode for 2 months and change my mind how hard
is it to go back to what I have been doing for years?

Mike

 

[Roady [MVP]]

1) Yes, the cache will be an ost-file but consider a hosted Exchange
solution that makes backups for you. Note that a hosted solution can be
assumed to be ran on a redundant server.

2) You can still configure additional accounts and them in such a way that
they are send only. This way you can still choose the account you are
sending from.

3) Not at all. Just keep your original Outlook mail profile and create a new
one especially for your hosted Exchange solution.

Note that the answers also depends on what the hosting provider offers. Its
best that you also go through these questions with the hosting provider of
your choice.

 

[junkmail]

Roady,

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. I did setup an Hosted
Exchange account and messed around a little bit and now I think I have
a better idea of what is going to happen. Here are a few followup
questions that I have.

1. In my experiment I used the tool provided by my hosting service to
set up my Outlook profile and then imported my outlook.pst file into
this profile. From this profile I then exported to a backup.pst file
and was able to open that and see everything I had in Outlook so I am
assuming that this is the path I would take if I ever want to switch
from Hosted Exchange back to a local machine senario, does this all
sound correct?

2. I did notice that when I did the import I lost all of the color
coding that I had in my calender (colors by catagory) which wouldn't
be a big deal as I could set them up again. I didn't see anything
else that didn't import correctly but I may have missed something,
would I lose anything else with a pst import into my new profile?

Mike

1) Yes, the cache will be an ost-file but consider a hosted Exchange
solution that makes backups for you. Note that a hosted solution can be
assumed to be ran on a redundant server.

2) You can still configure additional accounts and them in such a way that
they are send only. This way you can still choose the account you are
sending from.

3) Not at all. Just keep your original Outlook mail profile and create a new
one especially for your hosted Exchange solution.

Note that the answers also depends on what the hosting provider offers. Its
best that you also go through these questions with the hosting provider of
your choice.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003http://www.howto-outlook.com/
Outlook FAQ, HowTo, Downloads, Add-Ins and more

I have been a long time user of Outlook. The company I work for uses
Lotus Notes but Notes in no way can compare to Outlook so that is what
I use at home. I currently have a Treo 650 but will soon be getting a
Moto Q with MS Mobile 5.0. Currently I use POP3 email and tried IMAP
but I wasn't really happy with the way it worked. My goal was to be
able to read email on my phone and have it in sync with my computer
when I got home which didn't always work. So I am now thinking about
using an Exchange mailbox by way of Exchange Hosting but I do have a
few questions and concerns. First of all anyone who has used Outlook
for a while knows how important that file called "outlook.pst" is. I
back mine up every night and did once have a crash but quickly and
easily recovered thanks to my backup and therefore I am nervous about
giving up control of Outlook. Here are the questions that I have:

1. Will my computer still maintain a local copy of the .pst file so
that I can still always have a local backup?

2. Currently I have three domains and three email addresses. All are
important becasue they all deal with different things. One is small
business I run, one is a Foundation I run, and one is my personal
email. If I forward all of these (or alias) to my Exchange box will
this work? The only problem that there may be is that it appears that
all replies will come from my Exchange box. Is there anyway around
this?

3. If I run in hosted mode for 2 months and change my mind how hard
is it to go back to what I have been doing for years?

Mike- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -