The Message Center BlackBerry Exchange Hosting

Editorial Rating

Overview:

The Message Center is a company that provides Microsoft Exchange Hosting to companies. They are solely a hosting company and provide not only Exchange, but SharePoint and BlackBerry Enterprise Service as well.

Pros: The Message Center has options for all levels of users, including those who don't require wireless devices. Their BES price is about a dollar cheaper per month than the competition.

Cons: There is only one storage level for the Full Access plan, 3GB, which might be more than many users require.

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Detailed Provider Information:

Version of BES: (Microsoft, IBM Lotus Domino, Novell Group Wise) The Message Center uses Microsoft Exchange 2007.

Plans and Pricing: The Message Center provides three tiers of service. The POP Access plan provides 50MB mailboxes for $1.95 per user per month. Additional storage costs $3.95 per 100MB.

The Web Access plan provides 500MB mailboxes for $4.95 per user per month. This includes Outlook Web access, IMAP, and POP3.

The Full Access plan provides 3GB mailboxes for $9.95 per user per month. This includes everything from the Web Access plan, plus free licenses for Outlook 2007 and Entourage 2008. It also includes ActiveSync and free SharePoint v3 with 500MB of public folder storage. This is the only plan which allows wireless device access. BES costs an additional $8.95 per user per month.

Firewall Protection: The Message Center provides 24/7 network monitoring and with the full and web plans, you get a 128 SSL certificate that will encrypt messages going out.

Anti-Spam and Virus Protection: All plans include Postini anti-virus and anti-spam protection as part of the service, for no extra charge.

Set-up Fee: None, not even for BlackBerry and GoodLink service.

Other Devices Supported: BlackBerry, Treo, and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices.

Customer Service: 24/7 support is provided at no extra cost for users of the web and full mailbox plans. However, the P0P3 plan does not provide this service for free, and the support that you do get is limited. They do have a support tab on their webpage and a number you can call for emergencies.

Backup History Storage: Regular backups are performed to make sure your data remains safe, but not if you have the P0P3 plan.

Uptime Guarantee: 99.999%, according to their website and SLA.

Additional Services: The Message Center, like its name, focuses solely on messaging and email solutions for their customers. However, you can get email archiving if you have the full or web plans, secure messaging, and SharePoint plans.

Fee for Changing BlackBerry for Current Customers: No charge for this service.

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1 EllieXx. July 24th, 2011 at 18:47 pm: i cant get a photo for my bbm photo and i cant see any body Else's, how could i see them ? its a Blackberry Storm 9530/.
2 EllsXx. July 24th, 2011 at 18:42 pm: i cant get a photo for my bbm photo and i cant see any body Else's, how could i see them ? its a Blackberry Storm 9530/.
3 BillM April 22nd, 2010 at 8:32 am: Never had a problem. No setup fees which is good as I change phones often. Blackberry to iphone to blackberry, ect
4 angie April 19th, 2010 at 17:14 pm: I have had much better support for my money at www.infinitelyvirtual.com. They have excellent customer service and speak nicely. The price is great as well.
5 Rob March 24th, 2010 at 20:54 pm: We are a longstanding customer and have not had problems. Customer service is decent, in my experience not too bad, and we have not had any outages in three or more years. Occasionally getting blackberries set up is quirky.
6 Greg March 5th, 2010 at 13:35 pm: 1 1/2 years and we have barely had to use customer support, it just works. We only have 6 users and no IT department so it has been an easy cheap email solution. The only draw back we have noticed is that the sync when you get more than 2G of data can be very slow but I think this is true of most moderately priced exchange hosting companies.
7 gary January 11th, 2010 at 22:30 pm: I switched to www. infinitelyvirtual.com too because I wanted better customer service. Someone who explained everything and was nice about it.
8 angie August 4th, 2009 at 18:58 pm: I switched to www.infinitelyvirtual.com. Customer service is extremely important.
9 BR April 7th, 2009 at 20:09 pm: I agree that they the service they provide works well, but the customer service is the worst in the business. Not one person on staff (3 people total) is helpful. This will be the companies downfall.
10 JB January 22nd, 2009 at 22:17 pm: I couldn't agree with The first post "John" any more. The sales guy "Tony F" happens to be the sales guy, support guy, Etc. because he is the owner (CEO). I found this out after I cancelled the service. He spoke very condescending and was extremely confrontational/defensive. It was as if he wanted to show me how great and smart he was, yet all I wanted was an answer to my problem. Some of the other folks that I spoke to at the company actually seemed quite helpful. Too bad "TF" is the demise of his own company.
11 Chris Benavidez November 29th, 2008 at 2:16 am: I cannot attest to John's comment about their support as I have had great luck with The Message Center. I have been there for almost a year and no complaints yet!
12 Lou Diamond September 7th, 2008 at 11:51 am: I have to say they are pretty good. I especially love the fact that if you ever want to change devices, you can sign on to the control panel and do it yourself. They give you a great hosted solution for a great price. The only problem I had was on my domain not pointing to the correct email server and the website has step by step instructions to solve most common issues.
13 John July 9th, 2008 at 1:00 am: While TheMessageCenter cost is very reasonable, remember the adage "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys". TheMessageCenter have absolutely the worst customer support ever. I never dealt with a vendor that has an extremely poor customer service. They belittle you and thinks that you don't know anything about Exchange/Outlook/emails in general. Their sales guy (TF) answers support calls. And it's never their fault (they are very defensive and brags a lot) and they always blame the customer or the backbone provider or the cat. Everyone else is always at fault, but never them. We had an outage once where at first they blamed it on people on the internet switching over to IPv6 (yeah - I was wondering about that up to this day too) then they changed their story, blaming it on people returning to work from a long weekend and everyone check their emails at the same time on Monday (d'uh, shouldn't the infrastructure of a shared Exchange hosting be able to handle that???). I would definitely stay away from them. If there is a negative star, I would definitely give -100 stars to TheMessageCenter.