[Unwiseevove]

I'm having major problems with our company's managed exchange solution. I am used to having Rackspace run this system at my previous job and at this place it's being run by a company I won't name (as they might be telling the truth) who are appalling. When I first started my workload was very light as I was brought in to manage projects that are starting now so I agreed to migrate everyone to the exchange solution in the meantime. Among the biggest problem has been their insistance that they don't have the ability to log into our system with a global admin account and fix problems (such as the fact that we couldn't mass drag and drop folders into public folders) and could only advise us over the phone what to do. So far this problem is not resolved and is making me look a bit of a prune. I've had to give up 4 hours of my weekend for free to try and fix problems that I feel should be covered by the SLA of hosted exchange. If we wanted these headaches we would install our own exchange server. It costs £10 per month per mailbox and we have 25 mailboxes. I expect better from a company that has 24/7 UK based telephone and online application support as one of its selling points.

Please only offer advice if you have experience of administering microsoft exchange as I don't want to be unfairly harsh with them but IMO it's time to move providers.

[Immampdah]

Sorry, the problem is the part you put in brackets? Or you are wanting to migrate accounts from somewhere?

[Unwiseevove]

Some accounts had to be imported from an mdaemon system (running off POP3). For this we copied what they were using as public folders into a mailbox (as advised by our exchange providers). I then wanted to drag and drop this folder from mailbox to public folders but couldn't as I didn't have enough permissions. I had to drag and drop every single sub-folder one by one. According to our provider, they don't have an exchange login that would have sufficient permissions to achieve this. I find this fantastically hard to believe. Now I find that after dragging all the folders the permissions are wrong and I have to change them all, one by one, over a SSL connection. Again, they apparently don't have the facility to bulk change the permissions on exchange. Something else I find fantastically hard to believe.

[Immampdah]

Some accounts had to be imported from an mdaemon system (running off POP3). For this we copied what they were using as public folders into a mailbox (as advised by our exchange providers). I then wanted to drag and drop this folder from mailbox to public folders but couldn't as I didn't have enough permissions. I had to drag and drop every single sub-folder one by one. According to our provider, they don't have an exchange login that would have sufficient permissions to achieve this. I find this fantastically hard to believe. Now I find that after dragging all the folders the permissions are wrong and I have to change them all, one by one, over a SSL connection. Again, they apparently don't have the facility to bulk change the permissions on exchange. Something else I find fantastically hard to believe.

I have to admit I don't know anything about managed exchange servers. The places I've worked we always hosted our own servers in house but this sounds a little suspicious to me. They don't have Global admin rights they can't give you proper admin rights. It makes me think they are using a third party to host the exchange servers then they are leasing them to you guys. Like I said though it's just a hunch.

[Unwiseevove]

I have to admit I don't know anything about managed exchange servers. The places I've worked we always hosted our own servers in house but this sounds a little suspicious to me. They don't have Global admin rights they can't give you proper admin rights. It makes me think they are using a third party to host the exchange servers then they are leasing them to you guys. Like I said though it's just a hunch.

I suspect you may be right as I know full well that a proper exchange admin can do bulk permissions changes.

Here is the tracert (or sort of) on the domain. It looks like messagelabs are the providing service and they are leasing?

http://www.robtex.com/dns/hostedservice2.net.html

Thanks for the advice. It makes sense.

[TyncTyncSah]

I thought MessageLabs just did spam and virus protection and not hosting?

[Unwiseevove]

I thought MessageLabs just did spam and virus protection and not hosting?

That's what I thought too, but the MX records on the domain are pointing to messagelabs. Either way, we're not getting the professional service we expect at this level.

[Smalmslobby]

I suspect you may be right as I know full well that a proper exchange admin can do bulk permissions changes.

Here is the tracert (or sort of) on the domain. It looks like messagelabs are the providing service and they are leasing?

http://www.robtex.com/dns/hostedservice2.net.html

Thanks for the advice. It makes sense.

You've not been dealing with a guy called Jon MacRae by any chance have you?

[zlopikanikanzax]

This does sound odd. I have done a groupwise to exchange migration and didnt run into these issues putting things in one at a time. IT sounds like they dont know what they are doing.

[Unwiseevove]

I'm going to move us to Rackspace and be done with the problems. Not sure how to get out of our 12 month contract though. Personally I don't think they are keeping to their SLA but I might be wrong.

The whole point of outsourcing mail hosting is to save ourselves the hassle and expense of employing someone to do it internally. If I have to give up part of my weekend chasing problems I should be able to feed back to them then it's a waste of money.