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I've had a windows domain for my small business for over 3 years now and have finally got around to installing and configuring Exchange 2003 on my network. I was procrastinating mostly due to my perception of how difficult it would be to setup and configure, but as it turns out, it was rather painless. Half the battle is just making sure Active Directory, DNS, and other network services are configured properly and running smoothly, since Exchange is deeply integrated with the domain. Luckily, all I had to do was prep the server by installing Application Server (iis, smtp, nntp), certificate services (for issuing my own ssl certs), and RPC over HTTP (for secure remote connections)...That may sound like a lot but it was really very easy (with the help of a few online tutorials of course ;). Once installed, it just took a little more time to configure the various connectors and services, which was a little difficult just because of how different the interface is compared to other email servers....but now I'm good to go and have been up and running for almost 24 hours.
The experience so far has been impressive. For the first time ever, I can now manage all of my personal mail from both my workstation, laptop, and via any web browser...and most importantly, have all of my email, searchable, wherever I go. You just cant have that type of flexibility with pop mail. The speed has also been very impressive, both on the local network and via rpc over http on my laptop...though, if you have a large mailbox, definitely enable caching on the client. it will take a while the first time, but after that, syncing will happen faster than a pop3 download.
I can't see exchange being the easiest solution if your hosting a lot of email domains for others, which is why I'm keeping Kerio for all of my other domains, but for small (or large) business networks like mine, it seems to be the best out there. The only thing left to compare is too see how it holds up on the spam and security front. Kerio is very solid in that area with their use of spam assassin, blacklists, attachment filtering, sender id, and virus scanning, so I'll just have to wait and see how exchange stacks up. Supposedly the exchange anti-spam engine is very good, and from the configuration I've seen thus far, has all the security features necessary to keep the crap out an prevent me from being pwned ;) wouldn't be the first time...
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