23
Aug
The 10 best Exchange alternatives for Windows
Towards the tail end of last year, Microsoft announced a somewhat controversial decision to call time on the hugely popular Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 - the last OEM copies of which will be exhausted by the end of 2013.
SBS has now been replaced by two flavours of Windows Server 2012 (Essentials and Standard), but unlike their predecessor, neither of which include an email server component - highlighting Microsoft's intention to 'guide' customers towards their cloud/ hosted services.
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MDaemon
If you're a user of the MDaemon email server, and own either an iPhone, Android device or Windows mobile, it's quite likely at some point you'll want to synchronise your calendar, contacts and tasks etc.
While the set-up steps for configuring MDaemon and the devices themselves are very straightforward, because MDaemon needs to be visible to the outside world, there are some networking considerations to be aware of.
We have seen two instances recently where BackupAssist has been used to run an image job on HP Proliant servers but the job fails 98% through the image of the C: drive with the error 'Drive Cannot Find the Sector Requested'.
This would usually point to physical drive sector issues and a possible dying disk, but after some further investigation it would appear that this is actually a specific issue to do with the pre-installed status of System partitions on HP Proliant range of Server platforms.
An early heads up for you in video form this morning about a great new addition to BackupAssist's Exchange Granular Restore functionality.
Pencilled in for release in the next couple of weeks, v7.3 of BackupAssist will provide you with the ability to quickly find items in your Exchange database backup, and directly restore them to another Exchange server.
See below for the 2 minute preview video...
You may recall a little over a month ago us announcing the brand new major release of BackupAssist version 7.1.That included an impressive range of new features such as a beta of the new Exchange Granular Restore (EGR) add-on, support for Exchange 2013, enhanced support for Server 2012 and history for imaging backups on NAS and RDX drives.
Well, following up the great work on 7.1, Australian developer Cortex have completed the EGR add-on beta phase and have released the feature in full in this latest iteration of our favourite backup software for small businesses.
One of the big selling points for MDaemon is its very clear message flow visibility and detailed logging. However as powerful as it is often we find that some of the most useful features can be overlooked, so to help out here are my top 5 useful MDaemon logging hints and tips...
One of the key advantages of using MailStore to archive users mailboxes from your mail server is the ability to delete old email once it has been successfully archived. Typically customers choose to delete messages from users mailboxes that are older than a year, But what if you want to treat some mail folders differently to others? 
With the recent release of MDaemon 13.5 Alt-N have upgraded the built in ActiveSync server which now includes support for the latest ActiveSync protocol used by Outlook 2013. This update adds additional ActiveSync policy support but also it allows MDaemon to provide native ActiveSync support for Outlook 2013 as well as the built in Windows 8 Mail App. 
A couple of minor updates for you this morning - there are new versions available of both