Hosted exchange & IT support for a small office

[Mr JJC]

Hi all,

How much should I expect to pay for such a service?

There a 3 people working in a small office.

Apologies if a silly question - not completely up to speed with such things.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Hi

The costs can vary depending on exactly what you are looking for, but for hosted exchange you will be looking at about £3.50 upwards per mailbox per month. The service we provide costs just below that for 25GB of storage.

For IT support, this can really vary depending on if you want pro-active management (although if you are using hosting services you probably don't need this), on-site support, or simply adhoc telephone & remote support.

Do you think it would be more adhoc or contract you would be looking for?

Hope this helps.

 

[Mr JJC]

Hi

The costs can vary depending on exactly what you are looking for, but for hosted exchange you will be looking at about £3.50 upwards per mailbox per month. The service we provide costs just below that for 25GB of storage.

For IT support, this can really vary depending on if you want pro-active management (although if you are using hosting services you probably don't need this), on-site support, or simply adhoc telephone & remote support.

Do you think it would be more adhoc or contract you would be looking for?

Hope this helps.

It does help, thank you, but it worries me that I have been quoted almost £200 pcm!

We have all the hardware installed and simply need everything backed up with adhoc telephone & remote support.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

£200 does sound a little high for 3 users. Can I ask what hardware/software you have?

Are you running Windows server? I'm guessing your not running exchange hence the reason to want to buy a hosted service?

If you have a server to manage it may be worth paying a monthly fee, so that someone will keep an eye on it and make sure everything is working, and then obviously be there when needed. Unless you have a particularly complicated setup you should be able to get quality support for quite a bit less than £200 pcm.

 

[Posilan]

Hi all,

How much should I expect to pay for such a service?

There a 3 people working in a small office.

Apologies if a silly question - not completely up to speed with such things.

Hi,

Which area are you in?

Our standard charges for our proactive bsuiness support would be £190+vat per month for three PC's, your network and includes up to one server or NAS device. It does offer quite a lot more than your usual "fix it when it's broken" service and also includes unlimited helpdesk support via phone, email ticket and on-site at no extra charge for the business owners and members of staff.

More details and an online instant quotation here: http://www.posilan.com/services/business/

Steve

 

[RemoteTechs]

It does depend on what you want but around £3-5 per exchange account, and no more than £100 PCM for only 3 computers.

We would be happy to speak with you, as we specialize in Remote and telephone support.

Feel free to give us a shout

 

[Mr JJC]

£200 does sound a little high for 3 users. Can I ask what hardware/software you have?

Are you running Windows server? I'm guessing your not running exchange hence the reason to want to buy a hosted service?

If you have a server to manage it may be worth paying a monthly fee, so that someone will keep an eye on it and make sure everything is working, and then obviously be there when needed. Unless you have a particularly complicated setup you should be able to get quality support for quite a bit less than £200 pcm.

Hi,

Which area are you in?

Our standard charges for our proactive bsuiness support would be £190+vat per month for three PC's, your network and includes up to one server or NAS device. It does offer quite a lot more than your usual "fix it when it's broken" service and also includes unlimited helpdesk support via phone, email ticket and on-site at no extra charge for the business owners and members of staff.


Steve

We are in East Anglia, and running a Windows server. And your correct in assuming we are not running exchange.

It just seems a lot as I guess most of the time it will be running with no problems at all.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Without wanting to jump on the "we can do it cheaper" band wagon, but our pro-active support is based on £40 per server & £15 per machine, so this would work out at £85 per month. Which would cover all remote & phone support as well as pro-active monitoring to keep everything working well.

We do offer a pay as you go service, but to be honest you will probably get much better value from the pro-active support.

I hope this helps give you an idea, if you would like to go through things in a bit more details feel free to contact me and I will be happy to help.

 

[Posilan]

It just seems a lot as I guess most of the time it will be running with no problems at all.

Unfortunately it's out of our catchment area anyway, so we wouldn't be able to provide the a sufficient level of service to you - we can do ad-hoc remote support, but nor proactive contract support.

Out of interest, can I ask what line of business you are in?

Steve

 

[chrishankinson]

Hi all,

How much should I expect to pay for such a service?

There a 3 people working in a small office.

Apologies if a silly question - not completely up to speed with such things.

Hi There!

Thought I would let you know about our managed fully hosted cloud solutions.

We provide fully supported, managed cloud solutions on a per user per month basis. This includes software licencing for Microsoft Products, Exchange, Office, and as I said it's all fully supported.

For three people, you would be looking at £104.85PCM; this would include support, licencing and all of the other things you would expect from a small business network. All you would need to do is add on some file storage, which we price at between 20 and 40 pence per gigabyte.

If you would like some more information, please feel free to drop me a message.

Chris

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Have a look at office365, MS cloud offering, which includes Exchange Online - £4 pu/pm!

Or depending on the features you need, Google Apps free offering works well - I use in 4 businesses!

 

[Mr JJC]

Thanks everyone.

I am not as clued up on this as you all are but we have a server, one PC and two laptops which are predominantly used externally. It's vital we keep our data securely stored.

And Steve, we run a sales office.

 

[TitanWebsites]

Hi,

The guys we work with would do it for less than £100 pcm, BUT things never run completely smoothly with IT, so I would recommend getting someone the is at least near by. Remote support has it's limits, and I know they don't do support out of their area (they are in Glasgow).

Thanks

Stephen

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Stephen,

£100 for 3 email users with a bit of added functionality!

Wow, there are a lot of busiensses out there wih more money than sense!

 

[Posilan]

Wow, there are a lot of busiensses out there wih more money than sense!

It's all relative.

£100 per month is just £3.33 per day. A lot of people spend more than that on their lunch. Now, if the businesses server went down for half a day or a key PC was broken, how much money would the business lose in:

a) Employing staff to sit there doing nothing whilst you phone around for an emergency engineer
2) Pay for an emergency engineer on an hourly basis
3) Loss of trade.

£3.33 a day now looks rather cheap considering the IT support company could potentially be there for a couple of days per month to fix issues.

The argument "they rarely go wrong"? They shouldn't if the IT support company is doing their job behind the scenes pro-actively monitoring and applying patches etc. If you are not technically minded, you normally only know they have gone wrong after the event and they have already caused disruption and possibly loss of income to your business.

IT support for a business should never be seen as an unnecessary expense and instead the cost should be factored into the business model.

Steve

 

[TitanWebsites]

Stephen,

£100 for 3 email users with a bit of added functionality!

Wow, there are a lot of busiensses out there wih more money than sense!

I assume by "a bit of added functionality" you would be classing remote server/pc support as "a bit of added functionality". Hmmm, so you would let just anyone try and fix your business critical IT equipment would you?

When 4 hours of PC/server down time could mean the loss of £1,000 for some small businesses, IT spport iscertainly not "a bit of added functionality".

I have a fiend who works for a business with say 80 pcs (yes quite a bit more than 3), when their network goes down they lose of £100,000 revenue per hour, that they can't get back.

As a web developer, how much work do you think I can do with no computer? I will give you a clue, it is less than not a lot...

I would have possibly said the email was "a bit of added functionality" to an IT support contract, but not the other way around.

 

[TonyHarbon]

Hi all,

How much should I expect to pay for such a service?

There a 3 people working in a small office.

Apologies if a silly question - not completely up to speed with such things.

I know that I bang the Google Apps drum a lot around here, but Google Apps for Business is £33 per user per annum. It gives you Email, calendar, online collaboration and other useful stuff and you can set it up to synchronise your calendars and email with Microsoft Outlook. The only thing that it won't give you is Public Folders, but if you don't use them, I would certainly also consider Google Apps as an alternative. You can also get a free 10 user version, although you can't synchronise calendar and mail with Outlook in the free version.

I hope this helps


Tony Harbon



Tony Harbon

 

[Posilan]

I know that I bang the Google Apps drum a lot around here, but Google Apps for Business is £33 per user per annum. It gives you Email, calendar, online collaboration and other useful stuff and you can set it up to synchronise your calendars and email with Microsoft Outlook.

But what about the support for the on site server, PC and two laptops the OP needs?

Steve

 

[TonyHarbon]

But what about the support for the on site server, PC and two laptops the OP needs?

Steve

Quite right Steve, I missed that! .. I am not however making a suggestion on support ... just helpful suggestions on email. I quite agree that support is best done by a local company.

Tony

 

[Mr JJC]

This appears to have turned in to an interesting debate.

The main thing I see coming from all of this is to try and have some good local support, and the perceived high cost is not that high if something goes wrong, and much cheaper than calling in an engineer when it does.

Thank you all for your input!

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

My bad - missed OP's IT support requirement and was commenting on email/exchange.

£100 a month for IT support is not that bad, but it does depend on the specifics.

 

[chip_y2kuk]

£200 for the lot isn't really that bad.

if you factor in the hosted exchange e-mail boxes, remote support software cots, pro-active monitoring (assuming there doing this), regular onsite visits for visual checkups and man time when things do go pete tong.

as opposed to an engineer charging £35+ per hour onsite and you being without a pc for a day or two (costing money)

joe

 

[shugied]

Recent experience inclines me to believe hosted Exchange isn't quite the same as the full fat product running on a local server. It seems some applications written to connect to and use Exchange don't get on well with the hosted version.
Not been able, yet, to work out why, but if you use an applications with an Outlook connector intended for Exchange use, I'd suggest doing some testing first before signing up for a minimum year contract.

I'm intrigued by the proliferation of monthly up front payments for support contracts, with the suggestion that this can be cheaper. Presumably the "unused" part of a month roles forward, so that time accumulates to offset greater need in one month following a few quite months.

Personally I prefer to pay for something on a per hour basis, with the belief that is cheaper, but the monthly contract seems popular, but if nothing happens it seems expensive. Am I missing something here?

 

[andygambles]

It is like insurance. It is expensive unless you make a claim.

Businesses like the fixed cost aspect of knowing they are covered.

Cloud hosting though can make the need for fast onside support almost redundant because you can log In from any computer you can just have a 'hot spare'.

 

[KM-Tiger]

Personally I prefer to pay for something on a per hour basis, with the belief that is cheaper, but the monthly contract seems popular, but if nothing happens it seems expensive. Am I missing something here?

Yes, you are, which is the nature of proactive support that was mentioned by Posilan further up this thread.

One rather crude way of doing IT support is to fix things only when they are broken. A better way is to offer proactive support which involves monitoring systems so that the support company knows of problems often before the client is aware and dealing with them, applying software updates as they arise etc. That method is going to do more to ensure IT reliability, which may or may not be mission-critical for the client.

It really depends on teh nature of the client's business. As others have said, a few hundred per month is nothing against losses of 000's per hour.

 

[shugied]

Yes, you are, which is the nature of proactive support that was mentioned by Posilan further up this thread.

One rather crude way of doing IT support is to fix things only when they are broken. A better way is to offer proactive support which involves monitoring systems so that the support company knows of problems often before the client is aware and dealing with them, applying software updates as they arise etc. That method is going to do more to ensure IT reliability, which may or may not be mission-critical for the client.

It really depends on teh nature of the client's business. As others have said, a few hundred per month is nothing against losses of 000's per hour.

I would expect a business generating 000's per hour to have substantial in house IT resources, the sort of businesses I generally work for have one or two people for who IT is a part role. Or even no IT resource at all.

I can see the sense of the business model of preventative maintenance for critical equipment, such as vehicle servicing, but I've always been slightly sceptical about such arrangements for more routine items. My experience is that IT problems don't generally manifest themselves much in advance, the exceptions perhaps being hard disks getting very full, or even having degrading surfaces with increasing errors. Problem fixing seems more re-active than pro-active.

I think a lot depends on whether you have an established relationship with a service provider who can, quickly, fix problems when they occur. It might be crude as a business method, but it does have the virtues of low cost and simplicity, and in a recession both these have their attractions.

But, like I said, I'm sceptical about such things, and many peope aren't as witness the success of organisations such as HomeServe. I'm quite open to being persuaded as to the error of my ways.

 

[BlucomSolutions]

Hi Mr JJC,
If you are still looking for these services please do get in contact with me..
We are a managed IT provider based in Victoria Square, Birmingham. We can provide Hosted Email and Remote Desktop Support for less than you may think £50-£75pm or less depending on requirements. There are other alternatives to exchange too for a small office, if you are interested please contact me at..

lee.sandel (at) blucom.co.uk
Direct dial: 0121 374 2620
Mobile: 07515008285

You might find that we are able to assist you in many other ways also, we'll only be one call away for all of your IT requirements!

Regards, Lee.

 

[astutiumRob]

How much should I expect to pay for such a service?

If you do it in-house, expect ~40k/year for the IT department and ~10k/year on servers and licences.

For Hosted Exchange (which since the 2010 version has been less than pointless) expect ~ £50/month for 3 people

For IT support - really depends on where you are, what you need etc - anything from £50 to £5000 per month - interviewing the prospective suppliers and having a list of what you need looked after will help

 

[ukbf0001]

Thanks everyone.
It's vital we keep our data securely stored.

Can I ask what do you class as secure ? as in just password protected on a disk in your server ? - or encrypted etc.

Google cloud storage / apps comply with FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) I would guess that most SMEs never even get close to that level of security

 

[BlucomSolutions]

I would recommend Google Apps to absolutely anybody. They invest so much money in security that you would pay such a huge price to implement that level of security on your own servers. I've saw Schools and Universities running on Google Apps, and have since deployed Google Apps to Schools myself.
Our company runs Google Apps, I have my mailbox synchronizing with Microsoft Exchange on Windows and Mac, also my iOS devices as it also keeps my notes and Calendars in sync for when I'm on the road!
If you would like any help with deploying Google Apps to your company just drop me a quick email at:

lee.sandel (at) blucom . co . uk

We can also help you with remote backups, managed hosting and Networking aswell as our extremely competitive VoIP service.
We also offer a Remote Service Desk service to help look after your computers for you.. Starting from £25 per month depending on requirements.

Send me an email letting me know what you're interested in and I'll be sure to ensure you receive a UKBF discount to further compliment our truy personal service.

Regards,
Lee Sandel
Blucom Solutions