A couple years ago I became the IS Admin for a 40 person non-profit with a single AD domain controller running Windows Server 2003 Standard and Exchange 2007. Originally the staff was using pop accounts to get their mail which then synced through Outlook back to the Exchange server. I ended up switching them over to using only Exchange from Outlook and using a POP connector to pull their pop mail to the server. This gave them a lot more versatility as well as effective use for mobile and OWA. Now I'm looking at removing the POP connector from the equation so my users don't have a delay on receiving emails from outside the organization.
What I'm trying to figure out first is if I can reasonably use this single server as an edge server or if I absolutely need to use another system for that purpose. I have a couple other Windows servers on the network, but I'm not very familiar with exchange licensing/version compatibility and I don't know what kind of server load the edge transport role or other edge solutions use (the other servers host SQL databases that were bogging down when sharing time with the Exchange store before we had multiple machines). I also don't know if we do or don't already have an edge transport role license on the existing server and if that license would be useable on another server without a second exchange server license.
Secondly, what are some other good options besides the Exchange Edge Transport role? Being a smallish non-profit, our budget is generally pretty limited and servers and MS software can get expensive quickly. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
What I'm trying to figure out first is if I can reasonably use this single server as an edge server or if I absolutely need to use another system for that purpose. I have a couple other Windows servers on the network, but I'm not very familiar with exchange licensing/version compatibility and I don't know what kind of server load the edge transport role or other edge solutions use (the other servers host SQL databases that were bogging down when sharing time with the Exchange store before we had multiple machines). I also don't know if we do or don't already have an edge transport role license on the existing server and if that license would be useable on another server without a second exchange server license.
Secondly, what are some other good options besides the Exchange Edge Transport role? Being a smallish non-profit, our budget is generally pretty limited and servers and MS software can get expensive quickly. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
