123Together BlackBerry Exchange Hosting
Editorial Rating
Overview:123Together is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and has over 9 years experience providing Microsoft Exchange Hosting to small and medium businesses. They offer shared and dedicated Exchange.Pros: With both shared and dedicated Exchange, 123Together is able to cater to more than just smaller businesses; in fact, with their dedicated Platinum plan, they can host companies of up to 500 people. The prices for their plans aren’t bad, either – about the middle range for most hosting companies. They offer tiered plans so that users can personalize their service. Users get free ActiveSync for their Windows PocketPC or Smartphone, a 30 day trial, immediate set-up, shared calendars, daily backups, and more. The Website asserts that they are rated #1 in Exchange hosting. You also get free VPN access. As well, 123Together is a Tier 4 datacenter. Storage is cheaper than some other companies – you pay $4.99 per 100 MB. Cons: You have to pay a small fee for anti-spam filtering beyond what’s included in Outlook. For the bigger plans, there is a maximum number of mailboxes that you can have. Detailed Provider Information:Version of BES: 123Together uses Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007.Plans and Pricing: 123Together has plans to fit companies of all sizes. Their shared Exchange plans for smaller businesses with one to nine users have three different service tiers. The 1GB plan costs $9.99 per month per mailbox, the 2GB plan costs $10.99, and the 4GB plan costs $13.99. 123Together will waive the setup fee for new customers. The 10 to 200 user shared level has five different tiers, all of which contain 5GB of disk space per mailbox, with additional storage at $4.99 per GB. The plans range from 10 users per month for $124.99 per month to 200 users for $2,349.99. Setup fees are also waived for new users. Additional mailboxes for all plans cost $10.99 per month and include 2GB of storage. A six-month agreement is required for all plans covering more than 50 users. BES costs an extra $9.99 per month, plus a one-time $39.99 setup fee. Dedicating hosting comes in four tiers: Silver, Gold, Diamond, and Platinum, all of which run Exchange 2007. The Silver plan includes 25 user licenses and 50GB of storage, and costs $699 per month. The maximum number of mailboxes is 150. The Gold plan includes 100 user licenses and 200GB of storage, and costs $1,399 per month. The maximum number of mailboxes is 500. The Diamond plan includes 200 user licenses and 400GB of storage, and costs $2,599 per month. The maximum number of mailboxes is 750. The Platinum plan includes 500 user licenses and 1,000GB of storage, and costs $5,999 per month. The maximum number of mailboxes is 1,500. Additional user licenses are 7 dollars each with all plans. BES plans cost an $9.99 per month, plus a one-time $39.99 setup fee. Firewall Protection: 123Together is a Microsoft Gold Partner with all the network tools that the certification entails. As well, they provide links to secure software on their Website so that you can protect yourself even more. Anti-Spam and Virus Protection: 123Together offers a few free third-party anti-virus and spyware tools on their Website. These include Trend Micro and several spyware programs. However, they do offer anti-spam with their plans and you can choose to get more protection optionally added to your plan for $1.99 a month. Set-up Fee: For 1-9 users using shared Exchange, the setup fee is the same as the price per mailbox per month. For 10-200 users, the setup fee is the same as the monthly fee. 123Together normally waives this fee for new users. On the dedicated side, the Silver plan has a $749 setup fee, the Gold plan is $1,999, the Diamond is $2,599, and the Platinum is $5,999. There is also a $39.99 BES setup fee. Other Devices Supported: 123Together supports BlackBerry, Treo, Pocket PC, Windows mobile handhelds and Smartphones, and all Good Messaging devices. Customer Service: 123Together provides 24/7 U.S.-based phone and email support for all their plans. Backup History Storage: 123Together gives you daily, weekly and monthly backups. They hold daily backups for 7 days; weekly backups for one month, and monthly backups for one year. This is all included in the plans. Uptime Guarantee: 123Together offers 99.9% uptime guarantee. Additional Services: The company offers email archiving and SharePoint services. Fee to Change BlackBerry for Current Customers: There is no charge for this service. |
123together has offered unreliable service during the six months during which they have hosted our email. Their servers are down for days on end, preventing us from accessing our email. Uptime guarantee applies only if you keep precise accounting of downtime and prove it to their satisfaction. 123together is a poor service provider.
We have been with 123 Together for 1 month now and have had no less than 5 days without email. They are blaming this on a "new network infrastructure" as if that is a valid excuse. I would suggest you stay away from 123Together and Groupspark (their private label brand) entirely until they have proven they have the management and strategy to host mission critical services such as email.
I needed "Mission Critical" email, something very reliable, so I signed up with 123together on Jan4. Everything looked good, so I initiated several domain transfers, new hosting, reissue SSL cert, etc. From Jan5 to Jan7 they claimed to have "intermittant" connection problems. In reality, everything was down for two days, stretching a simple 3 hour job into a 3 day job. Tech support gave false deadlines, manager did too. Customer service gave me the runaround. No one sounded like they cared. Not even billing this morning when I called to cancel. Sherweb got my business, and their support and service has been the opposite of 123together - that is, excellent.
I'm not an expert in the email arena so I went to hosted exchange with some fear and anxiety. I'm a one-person office, so no big requirements here. I found 123together to be extremely easy to set up and transition to from my old POP3 mail. But over time there have been quite a few periods of downtime. When there have been downtimes, I've been assured that no email would be lost blah blah blah, but I KNOW I have missed some. What is scary are the ones I don't know about--how many of those have there been? Yesterday things were down again and an email I really needed to receive took me about 10 extra hours to get to me. I don't expect perfection but I do need a higher level of reliability than I've been getting.
Occasional outages. Non responsive billing department. Begrudgingly allowed a long term customer to get advertised rates on site after reductions but tried to get us to pay old fees even though there is no contract. Extra fees for simple administration. Overall pretty shady and not awesome. We are looking around.
Much better service lately after couple outages at the end of a year.
We were not down for over 5 months now...
I'll update this post if anything changes.
Ron.
Hello to everyone in the BlackBerry hosted Exchange community. My name is Bill Flynn and I am the 123Together.com general manager. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the issues and concerns expressed by some of the posters to this page and inform you of some of the steps we have taken to ensure that these issues do not happen again.
It is true, a number of our hosted email customers did experience service related issues earlier this year.
First, I would like to apologize for the inconvenience and business impact this interruption in email service caused. We are acutely aware of the level of importance placed on email and its significant role in business productivity and success. We understand that expectations are very high when it comes to email availability and want to assure you that we do not take any interruption in email delivery lightly.
Second, since the beginning of the year, with the full financial and human support of our parent company, mindSHIFT Technologies, we have made significant and continued investments in our infrastructure and systems, including:
• Installation of enterprise-class routing, switching and firewall devices which will enable us to better serve our growing customer base for years to come
• Move to a better controlled physical environment
• Implementation of mindSHIFT’s long-standing CRM system and world-class customer support model to improve our customer care and satisfaction with increased responsiveness and faster resolution of issues.
These changes have already had a positive impact on email availability and uptime and we will continue to address any other residual issues. Again, I apologize for the impact that these interruptions caused.
We thank our customers for their continued relationship and look forward to providing excellent service well into the future.
I would be happy to chat with anyone regarding this post. I can be reached at William.Flynn@123together.com
There have been a few glitches in the service in the past but tech support phone service is 2nd to none! Keep up the great work and the perfect customer service!!
User of: 123Together.com Hosted Exchange, Postini SPAM filtering and Hosted Email for BlackBerry.
We are a small public relations and marketing communications firm specializing in home fashions, home furnishings and lifestyle clients. We have only 2 employees and fiveaffiliates (independent contractors) working for us. For our small company, I happen to be the one in charge of IT, which is scary, because my background is not in IT at all.
Our affiliates are located in different parts of the country, and we all travel a lot, so sharing information was a challenge until recently. We needed the ability to quickly and easily share visual information with our affiliates without having to duplicate all files on everyone’s PC and using up all the space on everyone’s hard drive. We needed a solution that wouldn’t require IT knowledge and would meet our storage and pricing requirements.
We started using 123Together.com’s hosted Windows SharePoint Services. It is a perfect solution for us, as it allows us to easily share files online. And while we began using it simply to share images we began to find other uses.
Each month we assemble a report of all activities undertaken on behalf of our clients. It is a collaborative document we used to manually assemble from each individual’s report. That report was then “bicycled” around for final approval - - a lengthy and needlessly complex procedure. SharePoint has greatly simplified the process. The report is now posted on line and each affiliate can add to it as the month progresses. No need to wait for someone to finish their work before the next person can begin. The check-in and check-out functionality helps us avoid version conflicts; and the SharePoint version control functionality assures us everyone is looking at the same information.
We are continually finding more way to take advantage of all the features of SharePoint. For example, we started creating workspaces for events and special projects we create for our clients.
123Together.com’s SharePoint application helped us resolve our file sharing and collaboration challenges, and our experience with the service has been very positive – especially for a guy with no IT training but all the IT responsibility.
AMMC, Inc.
Public Relations Industry
I switched to 123together.com almost a year ago. The upgrade process was a little to my disliking as it required PST exports. However, for the most part their service has been up and running during our primary business hours and if down at night my clients have not noticed. Their BES service is about 98% up-time, but with 3 carriers it is hard to tell if errors come from the host or from our carrier. 123together is a very easy way to run an Exchange environment.
123together has not been able to have blackberry enterprise service work correctly for us in over 60 days. We have multiple calls into their tech support without resolution. Their service is easy to use but be careful if you have a problem. It appears they don't have the higher end technical capacity to work through problems outside of click this box or reset your blackberry. I have had a multitude of occasions where we were told that a "admin" would be contacting us without any contact whatsoever. All in all, IF their service is working it is good but when its not don't hold your breath for a resolution.