Backup exchange calendar automatically?

[evilsatan]

Has anyone done this? I had a support call come through today and a critical exchange calendar had lost almost all of its appointments, just under 500 of them. After a lot of pissing about I have managed to recover them (they weren't in deleted items or the 'recover deleted items' areas) by going into the exchange control panel, setting up a search to find all meetings for the mailbox in question, exporting the 24,000 meetings (250MB of meetings!), loading them into Outlook then moving them to an exchange calendar.

In the future I would like to keep a backup of two calendars as the whole company relies on them. I know you can export the calendar to a PST manually but I am looking for a scheduled method with retention so an empty calendar doesn't overwrite a full calendar. Has anyone done this before? I found a couple of bits of software but am not sure if they will be any good. Happy to pay for software if it is worth it.

Found this for example, might trial it tomorrow:
http://www.safepstbackup.com/

Cheers

[MartinC]

These calendars, are they shared in a public folder or do you have them sitting in a mailbox? which version of exchange you running?

[evilsatan]

It's hosted exchange with Microsoft so will be exchange 2013. They are in a mailbox and shared from there atm.

[MartinC]

Something like O365 then or similar, ah I am not that familiar with hosted solutions, we run our own Exchange servers in all our offices. We use Mimecast but that is not the same thing so I don't think I can help you that much.

We are thinking of moving our exchange servers into the cloud at some point and might look at O365, but not quite there yet.

[evilsatan]

Yeah there are about 100 mailboxes on Microsoft hosted exchange and as new users come on board they get an office 365 licence too and when the volume licence contract expires the rest will move to 365.

I actually prefer Rackspace for hosted exchange as the support is better and the admin panel has a much nicer layout but the Microsoft pricing is insanely cheap so the difference in price for this many mailboxes was huge.

[MartinC]

How long you been using it, as we will need to investigate some options soon, and its always best to get advice from people who actually use it?

Did you look into various options before choosing this?

We have a small issue with licensing as we have our own Citrix farm and I have yet to find any reseller or Microsoft to confirm that Office 365 licensing works with Office on a Citrix farm like our existing Volume license for office does.

[evilsatan]

You may be in luck, we have at least one member here who works for Microsoft and is very knowledgeable when it comes to licensing.

I have used Rackspace for years, they have a team who are available 24/7/365 and they really know their stuff which makes a nice change. The admin control panel is easy to navigate and there is a chat facility if you ever get stuck with anything, a ticket facility for more involved issues and you can get them on the phone too in UK or US call centres. They cost more than Microsoft but they have discounts when buying in volume so a good idea to contact them to see what they can do for you and their hosted exchange mailboxes include an Outlook licence whereas the Microsoft mailboxes don't.

The Microsoft admin panel is pretty messy, I suspect it offers far more functionality than the Rackspace panel (although I would imagine you can access the same features on Rackspace if you contact them) but this makes it quite hard to navigate. The service itself seems to work fine though, I have only looked after this client since November though so may run into problems at some point. It is worth noting that I have never looked after an onsite Exchange server, I have always used hosted solutions as I imagine keeping an onsite server up is a bit of a headache and I don't manage large businesses who can afford the infrastructure and onsite team. I do have a new client wanting to come onboard who have an onsite Exchange server but part of my proposal to them was to move to a hosted solution as soon as they have a fibre connection, partly for the uptime and partly to use the server resources for their SQL databases.

[hoponbaby]

On a similar vein whats the best way for a shared calendar to be used among say 5 people? We've been using the sharepoint default on but something has crashed on it and haven't had chance to investigate what.

[evilsatan]

5 people collaborating on a calendar? You can login to the Outlook web app, select calendar, in the top right corner is a share button, click that, select the user to share with and select editor (or whichever level of access you want them to use). Then in their Outlook they can open the calendar by searching for the calendar owners email address.

I believe you may be able to also right click the calendar in Outlook and select share.