No questions really, just wanted to share our experience, and comment from the perspective of a former unix sysad/non-Windows user on the sentiment that Exchange is not a good solution and management doesn’t get it. Based on our current experience with Exchange, I’d say there is pretty much zero chance of switching anytime soon, however I have a personal interest in following Zimbra and the competitors to Exchange.
I certainly am not saying Exchange is perfect - one of my problems with Microsoft is that their tech support has some serious weak spots. We had trouble during the weekend of our cutover with one of the Microsoft supplied migration tools, and when our CIO tried to get through to Support and escalate the issue, he was told the Exchange Migration team doesn’t work weekends, and is unreachable at at price. I thought he was going to punch a hole in the sheetrock, he was so furious. Needless to say, we figured out the problem ourselves, but that is completely unacceptable from a company of Microsoft’s size, and for a product with such a gigantic install base. Exchange is also a giant pile of code, and like most giant piles of code has challenges with change management/patching/etc – but at least they aren’t as bad as Oracle in terms of selling alpha code as they do with OCS. I too would be very interested to hear what you found, if you’re willing to share. - Gregg On 3/5/09 9:00 AM, "Edward Ned Harvey" <[email protected]> wrote: Was there a question anywhere in there? Are you looking at options or availability of what’s out there now? Just wanted to express your thoughts? If wanted, I’ve done a lot of recent work on Exchange vs Google Apps vs Kerio vs Zimbra. I’d be happy to offer. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gregg TeHennepe Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 11:32 AM To: LOPSA Discuss List Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Exchange vs anything else (was iSCSI in practice) We’re not a large shop (~1700 users, but ~1 TB of mail), but we’ve been through the rounds with email and calendar. I originally supported a sendmail/pop/imap implementation for email with Synchronize for calendar for a number of years, and it worked reasonably well and was inexpensive, though folks didn’t like Synchronize. Demands for better cross-platform calendaring, better web email interface, support for mobile devices, etc drove us to look at the options. The first time around (about five years ago) we ended up on Oracle Collaboration Suite, which ended up making Exchange look easy, low cost, and reliable. After reaching a point with OCS last year where Oracle, after three attempts, couldn’t upgrade us to a supported release, we bailed and did a second review of the options. We concluded there wasn’t much else beyond Exchange or Zimbra that had both the features and good x-platform support (our research faculty mostly run Macs). Zimbra’s financial situation wasn’t the most reassuring, and their support for mobile devices (BlackBerry and iPhone) was limited. Exchange was selected, which was a hard nut to swallow for many folks. We cutover to Exchange 2007 over a single very long weekend last Sept, we are supporting Outlook, Entourage and T-Bird, we provide full BlackBerry and iPhone support. Things have gone very smoothly since then... I’m a Mac/iPhone user, and can say this solution is the best we’ve had in my 15 years here. It may not be the least expensive, but MS Edu pricing makes it reasonable. It’s got its quirks – there are things I miss about T-Bird, but I’d trade them in a heartbeat for the integrated email/calendar in Entourage, and for good iPhone support. I think the communications disconnect runs both ways – there isn’t a clear understanding of the cost on the management side, but there doesn’t always appear to be an understanding of the functional requirements on the technical side. A well-integrated calendar and email system brings a lot of efficiencies to a mid-to-large sized organization – I know the change saved hours per week for me personally, just in people and room scheduling. And support for mobile devices is close to being required, not optional, these days. - Gregg
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