NOTE: This is reposted from my Response to Don in the Syaadmin forum, however since he posted here as well I thought it best to repost for all involved.
Don, thanks for the message, let’s address each of your points. 1. I find it interesting that you make a statement about "real" Exchange admins. Care to clarify that statement a bit more? a. You are certainly entitled to your opinion; however, making such a swaggering statement of differentiation regarding “real” vs. what “wannabe” Exchange admins is pretty brazen and insulting don’t you think? b. I would agree that Exchange admins have a varying degree of knowledge, however, that doesn’t give anyone with “supposedly” more knowledge the right to disregard or label everyone else as a non-real Exchange Admin. 2. Exchange is coming up on its 12th birthday this coming April 2008 and from your statement it sounds like you have been working with it since its introduction. a. Being that you have been in that game this long, I am sure that you have a good grasp of Exchange. i. I do find it interesting that you’ve had little need to utilize the MS utilities in all that time, but hey I will take you at your word, you were there I was not. ii. Although, if one has had little need to use any item, be that a product, process or utility (in this case the MS utilities) how can one say they have a deep understanding of the item in question? 3. I’ll agree that your statements are extremely broad, care to clarify these broad statements? a. You say “I know enough about your product” Really? Enlighten us with your knowledge of the product Don. While you’re at it, tell me, how did you come by this knowledge of GOexchange? b. What do you mean exactly when you say “your product increases the risk of making things worse...” Get specific please, let’s see what you are basing your statement on here. 4. You as the question of “where would I find value in your product” Well lets start by saying that GOexchange is a PROACTIVE maintenance and optimization tool, vs. a reactive solution, tool or process. a. As I am sure you know being Proactive is taking steps to avoid or minimize a negative action and being Reactive is dealing with the problem after its taken place. b. While we agree that being able to react to a negative action, i.e. restoring from backup or repairing a corrupted data base is invaluable, I would hope that we can all agree the act of avoiding or minimizing the negative action altogether is more desirable, regardless of the issue at hand i.e. i. Most people go to the Dr. or Dentist for a checkup every so often as part of their personal preventative maintenance. While this takes precious time out of their valuable day, however, it’s the right and mart thing to do when you consider the alternative of going in on an emergency basis only which is much more costly. ii. The same scenario hold true for car owners, i.e. sheesh what a pain to have your car go in for maintenance, I mean I am busy. Sure you can ignore it, maybe you will get lucky, then again maybe you will be stranded on the side of the road when the engine completely seizes, brakes, electrical or some other part goes south. The end result is it ends up costing you more time; energy, aggravation and resources then it would have if you would have taken care. iii. Look at the New Orleans/Katrina disaster. Much if not all of the damage and suffering could have been avoided had the government officials been proactive in many ways. The levees were known to be insufficient for decades. Everyone talked about shoring them up but it was deemed unnecessary or too costly a project. In hindsight the cost to shore up the levees and protest the people of New Orleans would have been a fraction of the post disaster cleanup cost and that doesn’t measure the human suffering. c. Ok so now back to Exchange… As stated before much has changed with Exchange since its first release and its underlying database structure has evolved into an incredibly resilient and much more reliable system. Microsoft has built mechanisms to protect the JET database from many types of corruption, but certain conditions can still cause the ESE engine and databases to fail. That being said…. i. The majority of organizations know innately that the e-mail system is business-critical. In a content-driven business ecosystem, it is their primary means of employee and business communications. Yet, few organizations can quantify the cost of lost business and productivity caused by Unplanned E-Mail Server Downtime. ii. When it comes to your messaging systems, an ounce of prevention, or in this case implementing a preventative maintenance solution, is worth a pound of cure (aka Disaster Recovery)—which of course means, unplanned downtime, angry users and executives, cancelled plans, the possibility of data loss and more stress than anyone needs and late nights spent in the server room putting humpty dumpty back together again. iii. The key words here are “unnecessary downtime” of course. The problem is Microsoft doesn’t really give anyone a way to know if action against a database is actually necessary or not until you start seeing performance problems, experience errors getting mail, or your store will not mount (worst case scenario), and in reality diagnosis isn’t productive when problems have gone too far. iv. In essence MS has had so many people misuse the utilities that it’s safer to run blind then risk improper usage. v. GOexchange eliminates the issues that Microsoft is worried about in so far as improper usage and lets you plan preventative maintenance downtime in order to avoid unplanned/necessary downtime. 5. To summarize, the technical and business reasons to use our GOexchange are; a. Database health is often overlooked in most Exchange environments and many administrators mistakenly conclude that the database stores will take care of themselves as part of Exchange’s nightly online maintenance process. In reality, this process is important but is only a precursor to complete database maintenance. Ignoring the importance of preventative maintenance can be catastrophic and the fallout cuts across all departments of an organization. b. One reason we built GOexchange is because people were using the utilities incorrectly, this became so prevalent that Microsoft now recommends not using the utilities unless absolutely necessary and that you have a very high level of expertise or are being guided by PSS. They don’t say they have no value, or what necessary actually means, they have just determined that for the average IT person this is too risky unless you are currently experiencing problems. c. To be clear we don’t claim that we can do “more” than Microsoft could, we claim we do much more than they provide; in essence we automate this process so it is flawless. Expert knowledge has been built into the product to do away with the need for the manual, error prone processes, and the meticulous attention required to perform what we believe should be routine maintenance. 6. I suppose you could also scoff at what some of the leading analyst firms have to say about us http://www.lucid8.com/press/analyst_coverage.asp , however, we didnt pay these firms to make these statements so why would they? 7. Bottom line our customers say it all. i.e. a. Look at the product testimonials http://www.lucid8.com/product/products_tests.asp b. Read the case studies http://www.lucid8.com/resource/success_stories.asp done with REAL clients that had REAL issues RESOLVED by using GOexchange. 8. If after reading this post you still think you are right, i.e. that GOexchange is a farce, The Lucid8 guys don’t know what they are talking about I guess that’s your prerogative, proof of real-world statements from leading analyst and results from paying customers around the world be damned. 9. BTW, just as a validation point, what depth of knowledge do you think it would take to create a product that can; a. Open a native backup copy of an Exchange Database (EDB, STM, LOG files) on as little as an XP desktop? ( No Exchange Server Necessary) b. Then search, restore and extract mailboxes, folders, or individual items from that raw database to your heart’s content? c. This is the depth of knowledge our organization has in the Exchange Database, i.e. as we said prior,we know the Exchange db intimately. Check out http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp DC ------ Response from Don Ely on 2008-02-29 16:01:00 ------------------ Your product is useless to "real" Exchange admins. Your product offers no intrinsic value and at best your product increases the risk of making things worse... Bottom line, your product holds no value. I know enough about your product to make such a broad statement. Given that, maybe you can explain where I am wrong in my assumption about your product. Having managed Exchange environments since the Exchange 4.0 days I'm pretty sure I have a strong handle on the Jet Database, Eseutil, and Isinteg. I also have a keen handle on when to use these utilities and when I shouldn't. I can also say that in all of my years of managing Exchange and we're going on 13 years, I have never run Eseutil or Isinteg on servers I had to manage. I can count on both hands the number of times I have to use either utility as a consultant. All of that said, where would I find value in your product. Seriously, I would really like to know the answer to this question and without use case scenario's, etc... I would like clear, technical reasons to implement such a product. On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Dane Cue <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: WL, I read your post and; 1. Your snide comments really hold no value. Q: I have to ask myself and so should others why anyone would make such a silly suggestion for an Anti-Product that they in fact know nothing about? A: If you don’t have an answer, make an off color comment, wave your arms and jump up and down. Ooh look at me everyone, the world is flat i tell you flat.... 2. Regarding your statement about Microsoft’s, you seem to be arguing against yourself, i.e. no one from MS would ever say this and if they did its a rogue party with an MS email? So even if I were at liberty to quote MS sources you would more then likely call the person an idiot or something else degrading. Also you fail to miss the major point of our rather detailed answer: Here is the orginal text: A final note. We have heard from Microsoft themselves which have stated on various occasions (to us and other customers) � "With 2K7 you don't need GOexchange anymore like you did with 2K3" � Rather humorously we also previously heard "With 2K3 you don't need GOexchange anymore like you did with 2K" in other words with every generation of Exchange it's admitted we provided a valuable service for the older product but we were no longer "Needed" for the newest product, that is until the next generation is released that solves all the problems that didn't exist. END.. Now MS is a great company that makes some incredible products, but anyone that has been in the industry for any length of time knows the score here and it’s not just about Exchange i.e. Buy Version 1.x its awesome and has no issues Buy Version 2.x its awesome and solves issues that 1.x had and is solid as a rock, requires no xxx or yyy like 1.x Buy version 3.x its awesome, solves issues with 2.x and is solid as a rock, requires no xxx or yyy or zzz like 2.x So the latest version is always great and solves real problems that the old version had and therefore you no longer need to do whatever you used to do, until the new version comes out and then the process is repeated. In relation to GOexchange, MS and others made these statements when Exchange 2000 came out, then 2003 and now 2007 and each and every time its been false, i.e. GOexchange continues to add value to clients around the world. Bottom line here is that until MS move's away from JET, GOexchange will continue to provide benefit to all that utilize it. I hope this helps and I am happy to converse with you openly on this forum as long as you can behave like a professional and deliver thoughtful and informed responses. DC ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~