Super Geek and SBS MVP Leaves

Super Geek and SBS MVP Leaves Exchange for Kerio Connect

Taken from GeekSpeak Issue 5-9 of the SMB PC Advisory newsletter written by "Harry Brelsford, CEO, SMB Nation"

Long-time SMB community member and Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) MVP Eriq Neale startled the community this past weekend. He announced he was forsaking Microsoft Exchange Server for Kerio Connect. This occurred during his "alternatives" speech at the SMB Nation Spring conference. He also blogged about his decision to switch HERE(http://msmvps.com/blogs/onq/). I interviewed Eriq in a video session HERE(http://www.smbnation.tv/videos/104/eriq-neale-leaves-microsoft-exchange-for-kerio-connect) and SBS MVP Susan Bradley comments on this matter HERE(http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2010/04/30/eriq-neale-on-kerio-alternative-smb-solutions.aspx).

About 24 hours after his announcement, I met with Eriq for about 30 minutes to get an update. Here are my notes from that conversation. Eriq reported that feedback and inquiries could be grouped into two categories:

1.What is this product Kerio Connect? What does it do – give me technical bits. Eriq reports many community members have simply not heard about Kerio Connect before.
2.Is this really viable? "If I didn’t think it was viable – I wouldn’t make the move. I’m a firm believer in dog fooding what we do for our customers. One month in since I installed Kerio, that belief about the Kerio Connect product still holds," Eriq shared. "I have had the time to let any warts come up and assess what business impact the move has had. In terms of day-to-day ops – not any worse off – perhaps better."
3.I asked if he had heard from Microsoft Redmond as of Sunday afternoon –and he had not. He anticipates having a conversation with them, which doesn’t surprise me given his role as an SBS MVP.
So what drove his decision to try and use Kerio Connect over Exchange? Eriq said it was the growth in the Exchange application footprint in the last year. The size of the Exchange product is not getting smaller and it takes a bigger and bigger box to run. "If Microsoft had an Exchange Lite in an SBS release, it’d have more viability in the space," Eriq added. "While Kerio Connect isn’t Exchange Lite from Microsoft, it serves the same function – Kerio Connect is a lighter footprint product."

And what about the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)? Why didn’t Eriq just go cloud instead of Kerio Connect? "I looked at BPOS and other hosted exchange providers and would have been very easy to move port my e-mail service to one of those services. And while in our business model, we are offering offsite Exchange for real world customers, we still wanted to look at what an on-premises non-Exchange solution might look like. It looked like Kerio Connect," Eriq said.

I asked about the response from the community? Eriq shared that including MVPs, the response has been relatively quiet in terms of negative reactions. But there has been a lot of inquisition. Making the announcement at SMB Nation achieved my goal of getting people to think about alternatives like Kerio Connect. Well that was the topic of his speech, so I’d say job well done!

So what’s next from Eriq? "In the short term, we’re going to build internal documentation for Kerio Connect customer rollouts. I will publish best practices and deployment guides. I’ve already received questions such as ‘How would you integrate Kerio with a Terminal Services (TS) gateway because the both use port 443?’ I will pursue this and other topics," Eriq added. "I’m constantly researching and looking around."

Spoken like a true Geek!