17 Questions for hosted MS Exchange Providers

17 Questions To Ask When Evaluating Hosted Microsoft (MS) Exchange Providers

by Paul Rudo on 01/12/10 at 7:06 am

Internal Questions

Is email management an essential part of your core business? If not, outsourcing might be beneficial.
When you need to migrate to the next version of MS Exchange, what costs will you have to incur?
Do you already have the hardware and trained personnel to handle th e unique backup and restore requirements for Microsoft Exchange? How much downtime can you tolerate?
Are e-discovery and email information compliance major concerns for your organization?
Does your in-house IT staff have the necessary training to manage their own Exchange servers?
How fast can you rebuild your Exchange server and get it back online in the event of a major system failure? How much data can you afford to lose?

Questions For Vendors

What is the company’s reputation? How long has it been in business, and can it provide references?
Do they offer a wide range of IT services, or do they specialize in MS Exchange server hosting?
What kind of support do they offer? Are they 9to5 or 24/7, and how well-trained are their staff?
When needed, will support be offered via email, live chat or by phone? And are senior technicians available 24/7, or only during certain hours?
What kind of certifications do they have? Also, ask about their employee training and technical capabilities.
What are their spam and virus filtering capabilities like?
Does the provider offer rapid search capability or ediscvery services?
Where are their servers geographically hosted, and do they own their own servers? This may be important for security, accountability, liability and compliance reasons.
What is the minimum or maximum number of users that can be supported under their service, and what is the maximum amount of email volume and data storage that you can realistically host through them? (Per user, and company-wide)
What is their average customer size, and how many customers do they have? This will give you an idea of how you’ll be treated.
What’s included in their Service Level Agreement? Are their SLAs negotiable?