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Small Business Email systems – beware the user

When I joined a company as IT manager a couple of years ago, they had a mail server on the premises. It was a Microsoft Small Business Server with MS Exchange built in. It fetched mail from a global account at the ISP and distributed it throughout the company. This happened every 15 minutes and it was usually quite stable.  The business owners told me that they wanted to overcome some limitations of owning the server and I understood the problems to be thus:

1. The problem of on-premises e-mail server.
   •  The company had reached the limit of user licences for the server
   •  A number of staff worked from home or on-site at clients’ premises. These workers could not access e-mail away from the office. The owners also wanted their office mail forwarded to their private mail at home so that they could work from home when required. Effecting this was clumsy.
   •  Microsoft licensing costs were not prohibitive, but were nevertheless irritating, especially as the licences cannot be resold if the company wants to replace or upgrade at a later date.  (read the Microsoft EULA carefully – you do not own the software!)
   •  There were difficulties taking over mail addresses when staff left the company. The business owners wanted the addresses to stay “live” – where would the mail go? How would others retrieve this mail?

   I moved everyone’s e-mail off-site. This should have solved all the above issues, but I replaced them with far more problems and made much more work for myself. By having each user connect to their mail directly at the ISP I thought I had taken care of business. Wow! I was wrong.

2. The problems of off-site e-mail.
   • Staff like to send each other files by email:
     •  They can then “prove” they sent the mail (covering one’s rear is so much safer than using a shared folder to transfer files);
     •  They can use their e-mail client (Outlook) to search and track their correspondence – no need to have an ordered repository of documents;
     •  This bloats their e-mail client, often with multiple copies of the same document;
     •  Backups cannot be centralised – good luck recovering from hard disk crashes on user PCs, which are often the cheapest computers money can buy!
   •  This traffic has to leave the building and come back again, often between people who sit within metres of each other. Time delays tend to be unreasonable to those waiting for the files.
   •  Internet bandwidth is sucked up by mail transfers.
     •  This detracts from the “browsing experience” – trying to do internet banking on 1/5^th of the available bandwidth while “party photos” go from junior staff to other junior staff is very silly !
     •  Staff these days have no concept of the cost of bandwidth – whose fault is that ? Bandwidth is not just the ISP cost, it is also the cost of the chairman waiting for the salaries to authorise at the bank. The company pays him or her many times more than the staff member who is sending cute puppy videos to a colleague. How did that happen? (Beware – staff often feel “entitled” to their internet experience – watch them moan if you  try to nail them for this !)
     •  Prioritising management traffic is more difficult than it should be, unless you are prepared to pay for a decent router and the technician time to effect it.
     •  Remember this may have to be done every time there is a change in your network.
     •  Some ISPs limit the number of concurrent connections for outgoing mail. One big name here in South Africa only allows 4 concurrent sessions. This means that if 4 people are sending mails with big attachments then no-one else can send mail ! Users start to get error messages – they then phone you, Mr IT manager. Pointing out that they paid for a cheap internet connection will not go well for you! It will somehow become your fault even if you raised this objection at the budget meeting. (“Just solve it, but don’t ask for more money!”)

I have come to believe that small businesses in South Africa are not ready for “the cloud”. Overseas bandwidth can be had for so much less that having your server facility offsite makes sense. BUT in RSA a company of 40 people makes do with an ADSL line up512/down4Mb/s. Modern software assumes you have 1^st world connectivity so cameras are not afraid of 2 Mb images, scanners easily generate 10MB colour files, and the list goes on.  Many of these devices can send their files by e-mail !  Often users complain that their mail is slower than 10 years ago, despite the broadband revolution. Now we know why!

For a geekish article with more about this read this article.

In my next article I will discuss my recent experiences installing two small business servers -  one MS SBS2011 and one Linux based SME.