Microsoft Exchange vs. Mimecast Cloud Archive

For our clients, the switch to an entirely independent (parallel processing) Microsoft Exchange Server was a lifesaver because previous software versions frequently crashed. The clever viva add-on informs me of any things that are still uncompleted in my large email to-do lists. Migrating to Office 365 has never been easier because to the meticulous preparation that has gone into it. Web applications will load more quickly.

Incentivized

Given all the threats that are out there and the fact many come in via email, I think Mimecast is a great solution for any business of any size. If your business is heavily regulated then you have even more reason to use Mimecast. You might be able to do a lot of these things yourself but why would you? Mimecast employees are experts, the best in the industry, at knowing how email works and how to protect it.

Incentivized

• An in-built calendar to manage your daily work schedule. Let's you create events, invite a particular group of people, accept invitations, and remind you of your upcoming meetings and tasks.
• I also like the daily emails we get from Exchange that ask you to set aside time for yourself or your other hobbies to take a short break from monotonous work.
• The email categorization feature is pretty good, especially the sort/search filtering option to navigate through your emails, which can also go through your deleted emails.
• It has an excellent spam-filtering feature which greatly reduces the chance of malware and spam. I have hardly seen spam emails get through their filter. On the other hand, it also recognizes emails from external organizations that may be spam, but are important work emails.

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• It archives every email into and out of your enterprise including mail between internal users. This provides a legally acceptable archive that we can access at any point to find emails whether we need just one from a year ago or a lot to enter into a court case.
• Since we have our MX record pointing to them first, they host all of our email in the cloud so users can access it even in the event our local email repository is down. We used this feature quite well during this past years Hurricane season.
• Mimecast has a feature that allows me to sandbox all links, in emails, before users are redirected to them. This has saved us several times in that users clicked on links they should not have but Mimecast intercepted the request and stopped the user from going to the site.

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• The two main factors for the better reliability & Uptime of internally hosted Exchange Server depends on Exchange Server configuration and the level of investment the organization is willing to provide for hosting the Exchange Server On-Premise Environment. As the data is stored in the organization’s hardware, any disaster may lead to the loss of email and servers.
• Losing data might affect business continuity and rebuilding it can be costly.
• Security remains a major concern.
• Security of data loss is main concern. To ensure that, organization needs to configure networks, systems and Exchange platform against possible threats.
• Hardware and license costs are high.

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• Provide the option to select the home screen/page
• Provide the ability to search only using a time range in the case where no keyword or sender can be remembered (can limit search period to 3-6months)
• Allow the user to be able to reset their own password themselves

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Email and calendars in a business setting are requirements. And Microsoft continues to be the standard of business applications. Microsoft 365 makes Microsoft Exchange easy to use. Everything is in the cloud. Let Microsoft take care of the hardware, the software, and the security. You just enable your business users with the functionality they need.

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The system does what we require of it and the support is good. No need to replace it at the moment.

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Microsoft Exchange has come a long way over the years and has nowhere near the technical overhead required for support as it did back in 2003/2007 and prior. The integrations with Teams, Defender, Sharepoint, Copilot and many other products make it a solid and well-rounded tool used for many day-to-day tasks.

Incentivized

The archive is easy to use and the searching is highly customizable. You can easily search based on timeframe, sender, recipient, words, phrases, and attachments. The ability to search keywords within attachments, body, and subject line is incredibly helpful. We're able to quickly and easily find what we're looking for.

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Exchange is setup with multiple servers behind load balancers to provide high availability.

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There is never an issue. Everytime I have needed to access my own personal search archive or globally search across the whole business it works each time. I cannot recall a time where the service was down when needed to be used and all our staff use it daily.

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I would say it's the best email product I've experienced.

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The stability of the tool is the biggest factor, it has a fantastic uptime and the loading speed is exceptional. Long gone are the days of waiting for Outlook to open up a traditional PST archive, I can simply click, find what I need and go, usually, before outlook has opened the archive. It is an exceptionally efficient tool.

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We have a good enterprise agreement with Microsoft which affords us quick phone support. I have found the support staff knowledgeable and prompt with a solution when required. At times it may be difficult to schedule a call back, this is mainly due to our need for calls early in the morning which happens to be during a shift change at Microsoft support.

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It does a good job. The support team of the product was good and responsive and was also able to fix the issues I was experiencing at the time. It isn't perfect and takes some time to set up properly in the environment but once set up the product does what it is supposed to do which is what you are paying for.

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Implementation/conversion can be quite complex and, unless you have certified Exchange administrators in-house, you should strongly consider a 3rd party consultant for this implementation.

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We used Mimecast professional services for the implementation and it was flawless as we were migrating from a competitor's product. The only downside was the amount of time required to ingest all the data as this was coming from a few different sources and in some cases it took months to migrate and index all the content. Apart from that the process was very well guided, with plenty of communication all throughout and without any major issues or downtime.

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Microsoft Exchange Product The best cloud-based enterprise-grade archiving platform with a host of features that enable files to be securely archived and retrieved with advanced search options. This tool is very easy to use and has a User-friendly interface. It is a highly reliable platform that allows all employees to automatically store their data without any limitations. It offers a cost-effective solution with customized policy management. We are happy that the customer support team is always fast and concerned, and the product's uninterrupted service experience. It is very good that it stores data in real-time without losing it, even in the event of a disaster. The cost-effective solution and integration with other tools are seamless.

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Mimecast gave us some extra features that we believed were beneficial to our business. Removing the archive from the Microsoft hardware was also good to allow separation. Plus, adding the optional exchange backup made Mimecast a clear choice.

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The only time Exchange has failed us is when we did something to cause the failure.

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• After testing I found Exchange very good at removing/quarantining malware.
• The Global Address List is great for finding the correct person within the organization to deal with.
• The Clutter feature is terrible. Sometimes putting important emails into that folder for no discernible reason.

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• Before we enabled our Mimecast archive, we had multiple cases of users who had 10k+ emails "disappear" and could not find them. Trying to figure this out with Microsoft is near impossible. IT spent 5-10 hours on each situation trying to find, recover, and move the emails back into the user's mailbox.
• A couple term cases happened as well where the user deleted everything in their mailbox and recoverable area had be cleared automatically by the time we found out. One of them would have been 28k emails and would take days to recover.
• Since having Mimecast, it is a matter of going to the mailbox in the Sync and Recover and clicking a few things and restoring all the data. Super easy and restoring the data takes less time than manually doing it with a Microsoft Content Search export.
• We are talking a few minutes vs 5-10+ hours.

Incentivized