As you might know, I partner with a company who is a Microsoft Gold Partner. As such, they made the decision to use Microsoft Online's hosted Exchange service for all company e-mail. In the industry, this is known as "dog-fooding" it, and in this case, it truly tastes like dog food. There are several significant problems I have run into so far that have the potential to make my life bloody miserable:
- There is no POP3 access to mail. I pay for my own Exchange account for my business e-mail address. In the past, I've simply used POP3 to retrieve all my customer e-mail addresses at once and then I put them into my own Exchange folders. The BPOS documentation repeatedly says [condescendingly] that I might need two Outlook profiles for "work" and for "home"... as if some of us don't need multiple work e-mail addresses functioning all at once inside Outlook. It is completely unreasonable to think it's not going to be a royal pain in the you-know-what for me to have to maintain multiple e-mail accounts, and calendars. Furthermore, what does this mean for my Windows Mobile phone? I flat out cannot have more than one Exchange profile on it. So how am I supposed to get my mail there for more than one account if I can't use an alternate access method like POP3?
- I tried setting up a rule to automatically forward my e-mails to my personal e-mail address, and it seems to not allow that either.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/onlineservicesexchange/thread/c849faef-955e-43ee-8ed4-c43e2edc42f7/
I am Microsoft's biggest fan and have always been to the first to stick up for them, but in this case, they have made one of the most piss-poor decisions I have ever seen.
Update as of 4/26/2010: Someone submitted a request to Microsoft to have a forwarding rule set up for me, so now my e-mails from the BPOS account get forwarded on to my private account. I still find it annoying that my Outlook Web Access UI provides a place for me to enter a rule so that, foolish me, I think there's a rule in place, but it simply wouldn't work (until this other rule was enacted behind the scenes.)