Interesting to see that BPOS is offering 25gb mailboxes with their latest offering of Online Exchange. Having been in the Hosted Email business for 9 years we have a pretty good understanding of the market and many of our customers are getting more and more concerned with the important company data that is stored in the silos that are the employee's mailboxes. This is why we have a strong uptake for our email archiving services that take a copy of every mail and store it in a separate location that is, controlled, searchable (with strict access permissions) giving the company at least some power over their data. So why would you give your people 5 or 10 times the space to make the problem 5 or 10 times worse. Many of our customers use the mailbox restrictions as a blunt instrument to control this and this is often a drive to go hosted. At Cobweb we have a saying for the technology we use "right tool for the right job", i.e. should you use Excel, word or InfoPath to capture data? Should you use Word or PowerPoint to share data, and more importantly should you use Outlook or SharePoint to store and share company data? - In my view Outlook (with Exchange) is the best business grade communications tool around, but is not a data management tool, searching in Outlook? – I will say no more.
And now for the technology – 25gb Mailboxes on Exchange 2007? – Microsoft's own admission is NO! You want a 25GB mailbox on BPOS then you will have to use OWA. Outlook 2007 has a 100,000 item limit. It will NOT work with a 25gb mailbox. That's why ALL Hosted Exchange providers limit mailbox sizes, it's not because we are to mean to buy more disks for additional storage it's because the user experience degrades as the mailbox sizes increases. Exchange 2010? Let's wait a see...
So a marketing gimmick? Until 2010 for sure, to compete with Google, so sure, giving their customers what they need, absolutely not. Cobweb shall carry on providing our customers with the best support around, a range of SaaS services both Microsoft and perhaps ever more importantly non Microsoft and connect and engage deeply with our customers to provide a overall service level that Google and Microsoft don't even understand, let alone dream of delivering
Mark
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