Exchange Defender (“ED”) delivers not only good mail hygiene but more importantly, good business continuity. If you have a customer still running Exchange on-premise, don’t even think about an on-premise mail filtering solution. Filtering your mail with ED not only effectively removes spam and malicious files but also provides a reliable and sometimes need archiving solution that can also double as a fail-over for users (via web-mail) when their Exchange server is unavailable ensuring that the mail keeps flowing.
So here is the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of ED:
The Good - I used Exchange Defender for years and have found its overall reliability to be better that that of the average SBS Exchange server. The feature set continues to grow and is only missing the dynamic alias feature that one of its competitors has used to claim fame. The ability to private label everything from the web interface to the message footers is available and management of multiple customers into the hundreds is fairly easy. For the price, it is beyond a value – it’s like printing money with the ability to fairly markup 100% or more.
The Bad - Support is, well, you get what you pay for. Bottom line is that the product works as it should and odds are that if you are having an issue, it is probably caused by something you did wrong or something with the user or Exchange server so don’t get your feelings hurt when the unapologetically tell you that it is your problem and close the ticket without any further guidance. In all fairness, if the issue is on their end then you can expect them to work hard and through the night to fix it. What I’m saying is that this solution is not for the wanna-be, earn while you learn Exchange 101 students. If you don’t know how to manage Exchange and/or won’t take to the time to review ED’s help files then don’t be surprised when they offer to send you to their competitors because you ask too many stupid questions of their support team.
The Ugly – Well here is my chance to take a cheap shot at Vlad, the owner of ED. ;-) But, I won’t. If you don’t have thick skin then you probably don’t want to read his blog. Either way, the product rock sfor the price and will add $ directly to your bottom line along with thanks from your customers.