Susan Bradley wrote: > As a newsgrouper/listserver person who gets massive amounts > of OOO...can > I respectfully say that has to be the stupidest reason for network > design in my personal opinion.
And Gil Kirkpatrick wrote: > Someone needs to do a cost-benefit analysis. I would guess that 2 > forests = 1.6x the operations costs more or less. I agree with both of you. You're preaching to the choir here! And, since I'm in the Church biz, I've heard that homily many times, too. I'm a tech, so even though my opinion is respected in our IT department, and my bosses agree wholeheartedly with me, over the years we have had to become almost entirely customer-driven or have all our services outsourced elsewhere. It has already happened with two of our six organizations, and it's about to happen with a third one. This particular org is one of the three that remain. So, I do what I'm told so tomorrow won't see me being walked out the door like so many of my colleagues in the past few years. Our goal here is obviously to show this particular organization how incredibly expensive it will be for them to be in their own forest just so they can have their OoO going to the internet. But, with all the other autonomy they want, it may happen, anyway. Now, to complicate matters, many years ago when I first installed Exchange 5.5 for 5 of our organizations (one had left by then), this organization got their very own Exchange 5.5 server, too. And, I enabled OoO to the internet, mostly because back then, 95% of email was good and only 5% was bad. But, this particular org had only climbed on board with their Exchange server because it was the end of the fiscal year, they had a few grand to spend or lose it, so they got Exchange. Except, they didn't have enough money or microcomputer resources to switch to Exchange, so that server gathered dust for years. Just last June they decided they wanted Exchange, so I convinced them to just format the Exchange 5.5 server and go directly to Exchange 2003. Out of Office was not going to the Internet, because when I upgraded everybody to Exchange 2003, I decided in this day and age of spam and viruses that it was a very bad idea. Management agreed with me. Now, we have two remaining Exchange 5.5 servers, for two of the other orgs. These folks will lose their OoO to the internet, and some of them will raise such a stink that we'll be forced to turn it back on, anyway, thus negating all the work of taking this other org to their own forest. Whew. This is way too long, so everybody have a nice cup of coffee on me - I'll ftp 'em to you! (At least I'll have job security for a really long time, with all this thrashing about.) -- Larry Wahlers Concordia Technologies The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] direct office line: (314) 996-1876 List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
