Why pay for a Cert? 1

[TheMitelGuy]

Hello,

We use Exchange for a few things, in a few ways:
1) It's our e-mail server (of course)
2) It's our voicemail server (we use SIP trunks to E12 from our Mitel system)
3) We use it with webmail (OWA) less then 1% of the time
4) We use it with Outlook primarily (99% of the time)
5) We have a RIM BES server connected with no issues - everything works fine.

Thats it.

What are the benefits of paying hundreds of dollars to a company for a cert? When our year is up with our self generated certificate I can just generate another one for free.

We do have two issues, the Red Bar in IE7/8 when using OWA and if we want to do Outlook with RPC I do get an error saying the Proxy Server has a certificate from an untrusted source and won't allow us to continue.

For us, I really couldn't care less what colour IE turns (I know it's safe and our employees will always listen to me when I tell them to bypass that warning for our own sites). And with RPC, we use VPN and have no problem. RPC would be nice, but in a year that we are all penny-pinching regular or SSL VPN will work 99% of the time just fine.

So without trying to sound like a royal jerk, why do I want/need a cert? What piece of the pie am I missing? Why should I pay for this?

Thanks!

 

[58sniper]

Hundreds of dollars? Godaddy certs are $20.

Outlook Anywhere works better
Exchange Active Sync is easier
OWA results in no prompts for external machines
TLS works much better/easier

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[58sniper]

I'll also add that autodiscovery works better.

And $20 is much better, IMHO, to pay once a year than maintaining an internal CA. Can't recall the last time any of our clients had internal CA.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[TheMitelGuy]

I appreach your comments 58Snipper.

I have read in Microsoft's E12 docs that with External Certs and CAs "you get what you pay for." I did go to GoDaddy and saw their pricing, however I go to other CA (including the ones Microsoft suggested) and they are between $100 and $500/yr.

Any issues from what you've seen with GoDaddy?

Thanks so much.

 

[58sniper]

All depends on what you're looking for. You won't get a Subject Alternative Name certificate for $20, but you can get single name certs for that. If you need a SAN cert, then you'd want something from Digicert.

It all depends on how you're approaching doing the certs for the various web URLs in Exchange 2007.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[TheMitelGuy]

Where would be a good place to start and learn about the different CERT requirements? I'm not sure what SANs would be used for - we don't need anything high end. Just for basic OWA, RCP and UM.

 

[Zelandakh]

The definitive place for certificates is fellow MVP Simon Butler -

http://www.sembee.co.uk/archive/2008/05/30/78.aspx

is the link you need.

Please note that like me, he is from the UK so the spelling will be correct