Matt Ayres on 6 Nov 2007 23:56:32 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] Re: MS and SaaS (was Hello!)


JP Vossen wrote:

> One area where Microsoft really has an edge is in the SaaS > (Software-as-a-Service) industry -- services such as hosted exchange > and hosted sharepoint are some of the earliest and most prominent SaaS > offerings.

Is that perhaps because managing the dense opacity of MS products, beyond a trivial level, is beyond all but the larger shops with specialist staffs? Or am I just being bitter now? :-) But what I mean is, have you ever had to deal with the utter insanity required to usefully back up Exchange? Personally, I have not, but I've heard a lot of horror stories (many in more-or-less pro-MS magazines like Redmond).


You're not very far off with your bitterness. It makes more sense to outsource the office Exchange server to a hosting provider who will store it in a secure/controlled datacenter, perform upgrades/management, and take care of the backups rather than hosting it under a desk connected to the office DSL/T1 being backed up to zip disk. Of course a large part of this is both the management (support) and the backups. I don't have any first hand experience with the Exchange part of the whole thing, everyone around here only deals with Linux :) It it were me I'd probably virtualize the Exchange server (providing a separate instance to each customer) and then backup the entire virtualized environment.

Also, since this is the first time most people are hearing of SaaS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_Service

Regards,
Matt
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