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When Is Exchange Inappropriate For The Enterprise?
malice95 asks "At my company (approx 1000 users) we currently run Dual Sun Ultra 2's (Solaris) in an HA configuration for our mail system. It runs Sendmail with pop, imap, web-based e-mail, web-based e-mail archives, and approximatly 150 Majordomo mailing lists. The system has been working great for months. Our users use a mix of Netscape, Outlook, and Pine to read their e-mail. Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop. I have seen many exchange setups crash and burn at other companies, and become management nightmares. Can you help me come up with opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks as an enterprise e-mail solution versus a nice solid Unix solution to present to management?" There are times when standardizing on Outlook and Exchange may be desirable for a company and times when it is not. Is this one of those times, considering that it looks like this company has a perfectly working mail system already in place? Why or why not?
Exchange servers and outlook are excellent choices for business organizations for their internal mail needs
Could you, perhaps, tell me then, how to make sure Outlook NEVER attaches the stupid ms-tnef attachment to every message? I've been receving those from some of my correspondents, and they all say "I don't know how to disable it" -- especially annoying, when it comes through a mailing list -- the stupid thing is a couple of Kb, times the number of subscribers...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sorry about that - I wasn't clear in what I meant. Our addressbook (by default) contains the names of all the Employees as well as several distribution lists for various projects. Outlook (previous to 2000 I guess) would just roll over and die with that much data. I don't think it liked the Public Folders either - there are so many of them that I don't even bother looking. Its borderline ridiculous.
-- toolie
You might want to give a try to HP OpenView.
:)
Run on UNIX (HP-UX, Linux), easier to maintain, doesn't have database f*ckups like Exchange, easier to restore/backup mailboxes, 'simulates' Exchange and works fine with Outlook (calendaring functions as well).
And yes - it's cheaper as well
Doh! OpenMail, not OpenView... I should really get some sleep...
... Is geordi an MSCE?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Migrating to those technologies from (relatively) stable, secure Unix-based solutions seems silly. I know that if I wre a LAN manager, I would be more likely to ban all use of Outlook Express than to make everyone standardize to it. Of course, next time Melissa comes to town, your job will become a whole lot more interesting...
That being said, unless you're experiencing major problems, why change at all? (on the other hand, if you are migrating to win2k-based solutions, I'd be more than willing to take those ultra 2's off your hands) just reply to this and we will work something out.
----------------------------------------------
Most of the people I see ripping on Exchange are talking about 4.0, 5.0, etc. Even 5.5 is better than these, but I haven't seen any mention of Exchange 2000. I know the community here is pretty *nix centric, and the knee jerk reaction is usually 'Microsoft bad!' but Exchange 5.5 is solid, and 2000 is much better. Sure there's outlook security problems, but if you block VBS files attachments and run a decent virus scanner you shouldn't have much trouble with these. The only problems I see with viruses on my 3500+ user exchange organization are in the hour or two between the time the virus hits and when there's new definitions available. I think the features Exchange brings the the table (calendar, task management, contact sharing, 3rd party and inhouse groupware) more than make up for this small point. As for hardware requirements, it sounds to me like people here just aren't configuring their boxes right. Exchange really likes to have the logs and database on seperate drive arrays, things like that. You can't expect to just install the software and have it work, but if you take the time to tune it, it can really scream. Probably not as fast as a *nix system, but it'll give you some nice features that you can't easily get on other systems. Also, there's the fact that a good deal of people we hire are already familiar with Outlook/Exchange. There's something to be said for that too.
"Can you help me come up with opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks as an enterprise e-mail solution versus a nice solid Unix solution to present to management?"
Because we can't keep the fuckers up and running here at Microsoft more than a fucking day. Sorry. Got some strong feelings on that subject.
The party's over
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Did you read my post? At the end I said if he just needs email stay put. I guess you couldn't wait to show me your extensive command of the english language. As to the secure, scalable, stable question Win2000 is more than capable if you take the time to lock it down and don't put it on hardware that is not compatible. Those rules apply to any OS. Is linux stable if you put it on hardware that has crap drivers? NO! Same with the BSDs. You also have to take the time to lock down *nix boxes as well. In reality you should roll your own kernal if you really want to secure Linux. I suppose you just use the default RedHat,Debian,TurboLinux install right? Doubtful. If you are a good admin you take the time to secure your box. In addition any admin who rejects a solution out of hand without actually evaluating the product should be banished to the HD. Also, why is it that most posts that use foul language or attack others come from Anonymous Cowards? No balls I guess.
Unix systems crash. Don't try and make Unix sound like a product created by [insert your god here]. Kernels are supposed to panic when they don't know what to do, to maintain the integrity of data. If you haven't seen a Unix box crash, you're not doing anything really interesting on your box. Give it to charity.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Then they switched to Lotus Notes. What a P.O.S. (and I don't mean point-of-sale).
Here is a good HOWTO on how to provide exchange "features" to an open system using Sendmail/Cyrus .co m/old/docs/exchange-replacement-howto/
http://www.moongroup
And here is a different example, even including scheduling
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/11031.html& lt;/A>
I must agree. I attempted to support a two-person network using Outlook 98 and NetFolders. The two people had _very_ loaded calendars, but I still thought it was ridiculous that those two would manage to kill NetFolders every two months.
At the company I work for, Outlook has had a number of one to two day outages - usually once every two weeks or so due to virus attacks.
If you standardize on Outlook, your mail server (and admins) will be spending a lot of time scanning for viruses.
What outlook does do well is scheduling - perhaps if you could find some good option for scheduling the outlook people would quiet down (as that's what alomst everyone really wants when they push for an outlook server - otherwise why not just use Outlook to read your mail?).
I'm unfortunatley not aware of a good standalone scheduler.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's great that Slashdot moderators have been trained to reflexively associate "IT Consultants" with "Trolls", but a closer reading of my post might reveal no suggestions to market Linux in a handcrafted wooden box, or to integrate XML or DirectX into the kernel.
You see, Mr Moderator, what I was doing was not "trolling", it's called "karma whoring". Note my suggestion that Microsoft is marketing their products through illegal activities. Note my conspiratorial slight against the colleagues in Marketing. Should not that inspire the fires of hatred in your heart? Or are you One of Them, a Microsoft mole in the heart of the beast, suppressing slander against your masters? Or, more likely, someone who couldn't find a good post in this 700 comment thread and decided to poop his pants on little old me...
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
i will start off by saying that i am *very* heavily sold on the unix platform. the past two IT shops i have worked at have run exchange mail servers, and i have noticed minimal problems during this time. i would go as far as to say that exchange is a good enterprise email system, better than sendmail without question. standardizing on outlook seems a bit silly, as it is not ported to any free operating systems, but exchange is not limited to that protocol. it talks imap and pop just fine.
if i were running mail on unix servers, my choice would definately be qmail over sendmail. i'm not fond of sendmail at all.
[]
FYI, we have 25K+ employee's all running on Outlook98 and connecting to Exchange. NT 4.0 workstations connecting to NT 4.0 Servers.
It used to crash frequently every week or two. We have more than 10 Exchange servers and at least one or two would go down every week or so.
Microsoft Engineers were called in several times at great cost to fix the problem. Additional Exchange servers were necessary (to reduce the workload on each server) and the version of Exhange server was upgraded as well as an NT Server service pack update and hotfixes.
A reboot cycle was designed to reboot the Exchange servers about once a month.
They rarely go down now, however the following is very true.
1. We are paying extreme amounts of money in licensing (every email user has 1 license).
2. We are required to run more hardware in the form of additional NT Servers to handle the workload.
3. We have to frequently reboot the NT Exchange Servers to maintain reliability.
I believe that the SUN SENDMAIL, etc. Solution is a better solution than Exchange. Users can still utilize Outlook clients without changing the servers. HP Open Mail supports Outlook functionality so this is a possible UNIX solution on the server backend that will add the same functionality as Exchange servers with greater reliability.
Using the default installation method, the setup of the 32-bits client does the following things:
I have never had a problem with the above installation; none whatsoever. In fact there are no technical reasons why the install would be able to do *ANY* damage at all! to W9x (unless, say, installation of OL98+IE4!)
--[rosso bright]--
I would absolutely shoot my self in the head if I had to try and come up with a *NIX solution as feature rich, easy to implement and maintain as Exchange.
HP OpenMail. More details at:
http://www.openmail.com/cyc/om/00/i nde x.html
V7 is in beta now (for Linux).
And no, I don't work for HP. I just like this product (extremely scalable - it's unreal how much it can handle).
You're right about the single client part, but you've missed the bigger point: Outlook (for better or worse) is a hell of a lot more than just an email client. It's that proverbial 'other stuff' the PHB's want, and outlook is they only way they know to do it.
I think I need a new sig here.
This is a terrible performance for a mailserver. A high performance mailserver should be able to handle 50K-100K accounts on ONE box. Take a look at CommuniGate Pro (www.stalker.com) from Stalker Software if you don't believe me. This fine server is available on almost any platform you can think of and makes Exchange look like a Mikey Mouse server in comparison.
In reply to your comment about Microsoft having a decent solution in MS-SQL. Are you aware of where MS-SQL came from? It was originally the old Sybase code. With 6.5 and 7.0 Microsoft has moved away from the original codebase some but it is still at it's heart the Sybase code.
Were talking about a Sparc 10 with no service agreement. Original cost ~12k.
> You sir are clueless.. any GOOD administrator
> will change the default of VBS files
> from "OPEN" to "EDIT".. this can be done
> through a software distribution, or even simple
> instructions to the end user. PROBLEM OF VBS
> FILES IS SOLVED FOREVER. Perhaps unix/nt admins
> should stop blaming the users and the os and
> learn what the os can actually do for you.
Did you read the parent message of my reply? I said virus scanners at the entry point is a mere band-aid for a screwed up email client that blindly executes things. Yes, fixing the root of the problem at the client is exactly what a good administrator should do...
Actually, software can be "a philosophy" as well as a tool. Unfortunately, most people in business think that business decisions are exempt from ethics.
We run an Exchange Server where i work, it's been up for 2 months on Win2k. Granted, it runs on it's own server. But it's very easy to maintain
From a technical point of view, there is no reason to move to Exchange. Your existing setup works, and can be admined. Yet as we all know, techs rarely call the shots.
Management want integrated address lists, scheduling, MAPI, etc. The fact that Exchange would make your job harder is irrelevant.
Mention the cost of licenses, the "cost" of downtime (e.g. lack of good remote admin tools for NT), the cost of retraining users, the cost of hiring extra techs to handle the same number of users.
Mention the damage that the next M$ compatible virus will cause. Exchange can't be configured to drop attachments / block emails based on rules a la sendmail recipies. Anything fancy needs third party software. More tech support costs and licenses.
Finally point out tht if it ain't broke, they shouldn't be calling on you to fix it!
I'm sorry, I did get the two mixed up. However, the place that runs thousands of clients, has Exchange as their mail server.
Have you read my journal today?
Exchange prefers MAPI for serving mail. MAPI is an RPC protocol, so it hits a low port and migrates to a high port, usually random. Unless you know what you're doing, the high port is random. Firewalls don't cope well with things like that.
If you do know what you're doing, the high port can be locked down to a single port. But then you've put an cap on the number of sessions the server can handle. So now you need a high port *range*, which also sucks from a network perimeter protection point of view.
Exchange calendars, global address list, and public folders *only* work over RPC protocols, which suffer the same problems as MAPI. All these RPC protocols are cleartext, or trivially obfuscated, so are subject to all the passive attacks you can conceive.
So if the boss wants email from home, he's either got to have a VPN, with all the risks that involves (i.e., hijack the exposed remote client and ride the tunnel inside), or he's got to give up some of Exchange's features.
Exchange can do IMAP, and even IMAP/SSL-- but if you're going to do that, why bother with Exchange at all? If you're reading Exchange over IMAP, you lose the calendar, GAL, and public folders. Outlook can handle LDAP (and LDAP/SSL) directories and Exchange can provide the GAL over LDAP, but you *will* lose the calendar any time you use any kind of securable protocol.
Of course, if you decide to go with Exchange providing IMAP/SSL and LDAP/SSL, why bother with Exchange at all? Both are easily served by other means, with better security-- for instance, Exchange does IMAP/SSL, but will *not* do a client certificate check (nor will Outlook respond to one). So if your organization is deploying any kind of PKI, you can't take advantage of it. iPlanet Messaging Server, Critical Path's IMAP server, and Netscape Messanger, on the other hand, do both. And they support SSL authentication (a.k.a. X.509 certificate authentication a.k.a. PKI authentication)-- no passwords!
There's always Outlook Web Access for remote email, but OWA (or any web-based email system) cannot deal with encrypted messaging, so S/MIME is right out, should you have any plans in that regard. Further, OWA runs only on IIS, and *must* have extensive domain rights (to get at all those mail stores). Feel free to read the log of IIS holes big enough to fly a starship through on your own for why this is a Bad Idea(tm).
Further, any Exchange system has a built-in inefficiency. Each and every message that transits the system must be converted from RFC822 format to "Exchange format", and possibly back again (such as when serving it over IMAP). Other systems, particularly UNIX based systems, do not; the message remains in RFC822 format. This has implications for sizing large mail sites appropriately, particularly with high-volume mailing lists.
Speaking of mailing lists, if you want to establish an Exchange list with members *not* in your Exchange domain you must add them as custom contacts, which rapidly gets to be a bear to administrate. Many sites I know run Exchange for SMTP mail and a parallel UNIX server to handle mailing lists for this reason alone.
But is always comes down to that damn calendar. It's the groupware functions that seem to drive the Exchange migrations I've seen. Find them another way that will make them happy, and you might get to keep a more capable and flexible back end. I recommend a good web-based calendar (iPlanet's new version looks good, if they managed to release it, though it still needs the SSL and SSL authentication support) and shared workspace (a la BSCW).
But selling it when you're up against all those MCS guys with the fat expense accounts is always a problem.
-- Cerebus
-- Cerebus
Common MS Practice
Not many people know this but when MS upgrades/comes out with a new version of a program they BUY back as many copies of the program as they can from resellers etc
So this means you either upgrade if you want SQL 2000 or you scrounge for SQL 7 its HARD to find (okay not HARD) but it is very scarce and it becomes more scarce EVERY day
And woe to you if you need older stuff.. heh anyways
Jeremy
--Clay
My company uses exchange. We're a small compny. We hate it.
Oh sure, you can use a nice pre-made web interface, and of course you can share your calenders and stuff. The problem is, its kind of hard to do that when the server crashes weekly, and sometimes is down for hours. The directory and data store constantly are corrupted, and of course, there's all the fun little security holes(Don't get me started on Outlook.....).
The bottom line is that if it can't handle our 16 users, why should it be able to handle 1000's? And whats the plus of using it? All of its features can be duplicated with ease using open source software.
Exchange makes me sick.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
If it aint broke, fix it till it is (broken)
BOSTON SUCKS!
Why change something that works well?
Exchange has the potential to introduce a number of new headaches into a system that works very well. Why change?
If they want to standardize on Outlook for the desktop, go ahead and do that. But that doesn't mean they need to get you to change your entire backend to run Exchange.
When they don't mind business interruptions due to wide open security holes.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I didn't even know that MS Exchange ran on sun.
Does it?
Or will you have to mirgrate everything to NT?
/dev/psychic: No medium found
Sure, exchange is useful for a lot of things...
1. Crashing and burning.
2. introducing a new virus into the whole company
3. Reducing compatibility
If youre interested in any of the above options, pick it... it's great!!!
Between sacrificing goats and dancing naked in the moonlight.
Remember, with Outlook as the desktop client, you have the patented Microsoft Insecurity Inside(tm) design school.
Even Microsoft has been directly and successfully attacked, in a rather significant and spectacular manner (enough that the intruder could go browsing around and make new accounts) through the use of email trojans.
I think there is enough fodder, between the attacks on Microsoft and the various email worms, to ban outlook altogether.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why do they want to switch to Exchange? It seems an awful lot of trouble to fix something that ain't broke... or is it? Or is this truely a case of Microsoft drones trying to insinuate their software just for the sheer sake of it? But before rushing to conclusions, their may be a particular reason why they insist on this; perhaps whatever functionality they need could be duplicated on the Unix systems?
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
the [US, presumably] NAVY uses Exchange for its mail system
I can't wait for the Outlook RemoteControlledAircraftCarrierOverSMTP virus... mind you, we only see a Yank carrier here in Perth every few months at best.
telnet enterprise.vessel.navy.mil 110
user falken
pass jason
rudd +10
engn 100 100 100 100
bsod *
quit
After seeing what Oz politicians have made of the Collins class sub, and a supply ship sized for European shipping pallets (Aussie pallets are slightly larger... oops), you can bet that the Oz Navy will be switching to an all-Microsoft shop any time now, just to stay in character.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I hate to defend a Microsoft Product here, but where I work we have 2500+ users with email accounts. Our mail server is running Exchange ( Exchange 2000), and it hasn't given us ANY problems. Except when someone runs some bad CDO code...but that's not Exchanges fault entirely (partly yes, but entirely no). Our entire site is Microsoft Products though (an MCSP runs things around here). On the other hand, requiring Outlook on the desktops is ridiculous. I can't see any reason for that...unless some people just *like* proprietary MS text formatting and whatnot.
So if you don't have a backup program which works with Exchange, to back up this file you have to take the server down (manually, no scripting here) [snip]
Of course it's scriptable. Have you never heard of the NET STOP command?
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
The proper expression is "You've got another thing coming". I realize that "have got" ain't necessarily grammatical, but this is vernacular we're dealing with here.One of the troubles with people not being well and widely read is that when something new or a new variation on something old comes along, they don't have the proper context in which to place it, and if they mis-hear it, they perpetuate the inaccuracy. For example, "buck naked" (although strictly speaking it should be "nekkid") has, over the past 10 to 20 years, become misunderstood to be "butt naked".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I do not think you are incompetent. Let me explain again - if you have bad hardware or a bad driver, and a piece of code hits the trouble spot - bam, the whole system goes down. Not the application, eg, mail servers, but the whole OS.
With your sendmail-on-linux retort - if you are running Linux, and your eth driver misbehaves, then a) kernel panic, or b) kernel decides the hardware is faulty and shuts it down. Probably a; but Linux will take a suprising number of hardware failures before giving up. Sendmail does not crash; the machine does.
If the application crashes, and the OS stays up, the application is probably at fault.
Something I do take issue with - Apologism for poorly-tested applications, with typical excuses like 'oh, bad driver' - sounds like 'Reboot, Re-install, Upgrade' - avoiding both sysadmin and code questions. The original poster said that MS's own people came out - why didn't they say something about his 'unsupported hardware'? They have the largest testing staff of any software company - can't they compile a supported platform list? Or maybe they ok'd his hardware - he did say they found nothing wrong with his setup....
Credibility. Saying things that aren't true (ie., 'exchange is crap', which it isn't)
Oh, I'm sorry. It is. It's also an opinion, formed from my experiences working with it. Want to define a difference between 'fact' of quality and 'opinion' of quality? - there's a Philosophy department out there with your name on it. In the meantime, truth is not yours.
Zealotry - zoom your mind back 6 years. Remember why we were pushing Linux then? Remember how cool it was, even then? Remember the perverse stability; particularly to those raised on MS products? Remember how much more we could do than before?
There are reasons I and others have system preferences. Preferences only reinforced by working with competing tools over the years...the MS2000 stuff is pretty stable, but it's marginally less than the unices (save SCO), far more expensive, and still insanely difficult to administer.
I'm not a zealot - I'm still working with many different systems, and recognize the value of each. I just have opinions. Perhaps you shouldn't assume inexperience because of that.
Multiple clients: Notes, POP3, IMAP, Web Access - out of the box.
Domino R5 complies to internet standards: SMTP for mail, LDAP for address books.
Replication for mobile users is really good.
Special address book format can squeeze a lot of users in minimal space. One of their favourite demos is importing the entire US phone book in the address book - 100MB disk space.
Server runs on a multitude of platforms: WinNT, Linux, Sun/Solaris, AS400/OS400 (very good scaleability here - if you have AS400 admins in house), AIX, HPUX - it even runs native on S/390 mainframes.
The Lotus Domino security model is imho one of the best out there: authentication is PKI based, Lotusccript needs to be signed before it can be executed. You DO need competent admins to do the install right (as you would with every setup).
Only thing which isn't too good is that the notes clients are currently only for Wintel/MacOS - but in most corporate environments that really isn't a problem. Besides: the die-hard linux/*BSD/[whatever] fanatics can always access Domino using their favorite mail program/web browser. :-)
And it's ofcourse way more than just mail and calendaring
disclaimer: I do Notes development and Administration
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Notes does not have the high intergration with PDAs and RIMs. 3rd party software is an added cost to a Notes shop. The Notes rev of the BlackBerry integration software only came out a few months ago. Last time I used a Palm, it had Outlook integration in the standard software, out of the box. I don't think the same could be said for Notes.
Notes has huge strengths and weaknesses, namely, it is only worth it if you are going to commit to doing everything there way, as otherwise the bulky client (which I have seen used in all the Notes shops I have been in) isn't worth it.
I don't know about Outlook, but IE port to Unix never worked properly and no longer being developed.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The expression migrated to the U.S. from England; I know this because I am English but moved to the U.S. when I was 5 (almost 45 years ago, now!). My mother and father used this expression ALL THE TIME -- it's meant to be somewhat humorous, of course. (Wry anger, or anger mixed with British wit.) It's an English idiom (as in "fix dinner" versus "make dinner" versus the more literal "cook dinner").
Some months ago, somebody in an otherwise authoritative source (something like a national "news" magazine) wrote a column musing about how his mother used to say "you've got another 'thing' coming". I knew then that we were in for a long period of petty squabling over this. All I can say is, the columnist's mother was speaking from the west coast of the U.S., something like California -- they speak weird out there, and are not renowned for their diction! (-8
I don't think the parent poster was incompetent.
There are many existing issues with NT, but they are sort of working out (MS2000 is actually kind of stable).
Leaving {a)} - Exchange is crap. Quell supri'.
I wouldn't use Outlook, too many security features.
Excuse me?
I've been using / administrating / doing consulting on Exchange since the RC1, I went through the first certification classes in Europe. I used to manage a 120 location setup with about 15.000 users and full replication, I've switched from x.400 over ip to smtp. And I've never hated a product more.
;-)
You can use exchange in 2 ways though...
The most evil is the directory... Especially the way it's working in for instance 5.5
Exchange is based on x.400, it's MTA has had loads of bugs, the various connectors are a constant source of new interesting bugs. Exchange is not really even a postoffice when you use RPC, your Outlook client is a database access client.
The binary databases are hard to maintain, grow out of proportion, the calendaring part is not really integrated - That you'll find out after the server has crashed and you loose all calendars.
It's had immense problems handling MIME as it converts things back and forth...
Are you to start replicating - Make sure you have a really strong network.... And with the nature of NT it's not a breeze to remote administrate it over slower links....
And you for sure will have immense fun when some dimwit admin steals your public folders or they just get lost in mid replication - never to appear again.....
I think the best any Large scale shop would want is a stable MTA like sendmail, qmail that can handle load is proven and you easily can manage and upgrade combined with LDAP for routing.
Then you can if you really wish use Exchange, still let unix people admin infrastructure and let the drag and droppers play with their expensive servers.
Just my 2 cents having done this on a large scale.... Today we basically have no problems and
transfer up to 300.000 mails every 24 hours in one of our main locations on a 266 pentium II with 128 meg ram
I'm also in the process of evaluating Corporate Time. I quite like it. I've got the actual calendar server running on a Sun, the web interface running on Linux, and it integrates nicely with my Cyrus IMAP server. The Outlook connector fakes out Windows users, but it also provides a web interface, and a native Motif client for UNIX users. This allows EVERYONE in the company to participate, as opposed to only Windows users.
Yes, they have moved web servers to Windows 2000. However they didn't mention in their announcements that those servers are behind TWO LAYERS OF CISCO LOCAL DIRECTORS. I have done some probing of that monster, and the only possible reason for this is huge number of boxes where load is supposed to be distributed. The funniest thing is, any response from www.hotmail.com that normal browsers receive (that should be a redirect to one of Local Directors on the second layer) comes directly from Local Director on the first layer and not a single byte passes through Windows box. There is a way to get to the Windoews box behind it, but one has to put HTTP request into multiple packets to get a response from there. First layer consists of Local Directors on every IP address that corresponds to www.hotmail.com, they only send HTTP redirects to the second layer (violating HTTP protocol in the process). Second layer has actual servers behind them, and what happens next is hidden from the HTTP clients, so I can only guess how huge and inefficient is the rest of the system. However if someone wants to bring Hotmail down, he only has to overload Local Directors, and being relatively dumb, Cisco Local Directors should be easy to convince that few thousands of packets sent from single box are in fact thousands of users that simultaneously sent a bunch of HTTP requests.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'd like to find out all the names of the :)
microsofties in the company, round them all
up, and fire them. Once purged of the clueless,
the company would probably be healthier
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Of course i agree with you 100%, I was just trying to be sarcastic. I guess the moderators took note. I've seen exchange cost organisations so much it's not even funny anymore.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Another business reason that may stop the change in its tracks is to ask the Exchange evangelists if they hold shares in MS, full disclosure of conflict of interest.
At my last place of employment(55,000 users) we used Exchange and relied upon the groupware. Never missed a meeting unless it was my own lack of caring :)
--Clay
But it's never "gee, maybe I should read a book and do this shit the right way," it's "damn PHB management forced this M$ stuff down our throat, and it's buggy and doesn't work right. Woe is me, i wish I could be running postfix!"
Actually, it's more like...
damn PHB management forced this M$ stuff down our throat, and want it in production mode tomorrow...
They want you to setup something "asap", you do it (and fuckup, of course), it works, but you never get to reinstall/setup the thing again because nobody can live with few hours downtime - and you of course are not going to come to the office on Sunday morning...
The ability to choose which account you send through is only available in Internet Only mode. Corporate/Workgroup mode doesn't have the ability.
Outages every week? What a good IT department heheh. The company I work for has approx 1500 users accessing mail via Exchange. The only outage we had is when we built a new server with 8 Xeon 700's, 2.2GB ram and a half TB of storage. Thats it. I personally love exchange, especially with the advent of Outlook Web Access, allowing me to get my mail,contacts, whatnot via the web anywhere. I found it really slick and smooth so far. Yeah, we are an NT shop, but with due cause as it is. But I must admit, exchange is NOT as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Have it setup right by the right people. Now I know Ill prolly get modded down or something else, but sending a *nux guru to setup an Exchange server is like having an IIS God try to setup Apache. Sure, it can get done, but probably not the best way.
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Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
"Just run both" doesn't work for personnel reasons. A M/S-oriented IS staff will eventually cut off all access to the Unix side, as happened at my company. In my job its extremely important to search mail text from time to time. Outlook has no capability for this. The calendar capabilities are a joke; I went back to my Unix calendar in an Exceed window very quickly. Between these and the virii that strike Outlook periodically, I feel that I've had an arm cut off. I could go on, but the upshot is, we traded a reliable and competent mail system for one that is neither. I'm not anti-M/S - I've written lots of s/w for their systems over the years and they do some things very well. But I am anti-bad-software, and Outlook is bad software.
See http://slashdot. org/com ments.pl?sid=00/11/16/194209&cid=737. What Netcraft sees is a redirect header, made by Cisco Local Director -- not a single byte in it came from Windows box.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Ever check out Bynari's TradeMail server? Or Intrastore Server?
I've personally tried TradeServer. From what I've been able to gather it does nothing special. In fact it will obliterate any Apache, OpenLDAP, FTP and (pick your MTA + POP + IMAP) setup without warning in order to set up its own. The binaries it installs have no visible benefits over the ones I had and in fact don't have PHP or mcal or anything I had in my originals. TradeServer require X on the server (later on I was able to run their admin program with only the X libs and a DISPLAY variable set to my machine).
It definately has promise. They get calendar support by using the "publish free/busy information" feature in Outlook so it isn't truly an open format .vcal format, although this is planned for the future.
Other benefits: the people putting it together are very responsive and helpful, although they do seem a little new to some aspects of server setup and administration. I am watching this software closely because I feel it will probably be the one to "get there first."
PS - Their TradeClient will talk to exchange servers and use their calendar info. :-)
Past experience: had a setup very similar to the one described at a previous company. Had a similar thing happen: some wank with MCSE and a high-level mgmt. title ('cause they know more about this stuff) decided to sell the company on Ex[machina]change. I left the company when I figured out I couldn't stop them from replacing (yes, replacing) our perfectly fine Unix solution with the M$ pollution (among several other things -- straw that broke the camel-book's binding, as it were). Anyway, a smooth talker can sell ice cubes to Eskimos but _you_ have to deal with the consequences. Adding an Exchange server can be a viable solution if: 1) somebody else is responsible for it (I don't have time to read 600 pages of marketing hype disguised as a manual), and 2) you can put the server on a separate subnet so you neither have to deal with the amazingly increased traffic.
HTH.
The Lewis House
I've been on fairly large NT nets with knowledgable staff, and WINS works propery when planned for and set up properly.
The main problem with WINS is that NT is designed to 'auto-configure' for small scale installations. Which means that if WINS is fucked, your network will still kinda work, which is good enough for most shit NT admins. However, beyond a couple sites and a few hundred clients, a working WINS system is essential for NT networking. (Meaning WINS being screwed is not an Exchange issue - it could potentially f-up any NT service from Lotus Domino to Oracle.)
The other problem is that all the NetBIOS stuff, including WINS/NBNS is 1980s legacy crap from the days when a LAN really was "local". (Meaning, it wasn't designed to replace DNS, it existed before DNS was commonly deployed.) Now, Microsoft has overhauled all of this with NT5 and ActiveDirectory, but it's a long road to hoe to get networks up on that system (the interoperability issues with Unix, for example). Furthermore, you can't fuckup a AD network they way you could a LanMan/WINS network and expect it to work, so if your shop is smart and your admins are stupid, it's better just to stay put.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So, is this about the University of Missouri Email Wars, or is this Yet Another University Email War (YAUEW!)? I ask, because your whole message sounds eerily familiar. :-)
At Mizzou, we have thousands and thousands of users who have either "missouri.edu" addresses (faculty and staff) or "mizzou.edu" addresses (lowly students). Our system is unstable, slow, and almost certainly not worth it despite an IT squad that is generally smart, responsive, and eager to please. Frankly, I would never have thought I could care less what the email server was that I was using, but now, alas, I know better. :-(
Babar
But if you use qmail for your mailserver you wouldn't have had to patch it since 1998 :) (v1.03). www.qmail.org
:) ).
Yeah so I'm a lazy person. But I think it's BAD to have to security/bug patch software on a regular basis (e.g. every month or so). Feature patches are fine, but other than that it means poor quality software (yeah Linux ain't that great either, but hey it's free
And if I have to pay lots of money, I really want to see much better reliability and quality. I think the current state of the software industry leaves a lot to be desired. Too many are accepting poor quality stuff.
Just because the academics in their ivory towers say it's difficult/impossible to prove correctness doesn't mean we all have an excuse to make or accept shoddy stuff.
Cheerio,
Link.
My mother (from Norwich) uses it all the time; my father (from London) much less often. Does that help?
The full expression is:
"If you believe that, then you have another think comming."
Thing just doesn't make since...
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
As a consultant to companies running both Exchange servers & Domino servers, I would pick a Domino/Notes setup anyday over Exchange/Outlook.
:)
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D Lotus.htm
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Some reasons:
1. Choice of hardare - Domino will run on most popular platofrms (yes even liunx !). Exchange == stuck with NT.
2. Domino scales better.
3. Domino provides all of the functionality of Exchange (IE groupware stuff, calendars, meeting, etc)
4. Domino uses a _real_ Database as a backend, not just a glorified MS Access DB.
Q. So, if I was based with having to give groupware functionality to about 1000 mail users, what would I do ?
A. Buy a _single_ AS/400, run Domino natively on it, rollout Notes client, and live happily ever after
Tony.
(I would like to express that I work for a company with close ties to IBM, and hence my opinion may be biased, but I do honestly believe that Domino/Notes is a better solution.)
A few links for you to look at (Domino vs Exchange):
http://www.lotus.com/developers/itcentral.nsf/w
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/productinfo/Z
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive
http://www.crn.com/components/search/Article.as
Exchange provides 'out of office' functionality for vacation days. Great I'm out of the office, so is the rest of the department. The factory is stopped because nobody is there to cover that step... Outlook still does nothing to prevent all 4 of us from taking the week after Christmas off and stopping the entire factory.
The other software prevented this by only allowing the max number off from any department by having the requirement of taking the non person (vacation slot) with me. If they are unavaliable, I can't take the day off as vacation. That slot was first come-first served. No arguements over who was first. Maybe you should read your documentation before you make such blatantly wrong statements.As far as documentation goes, well as a worker bee, I never see it. That is not passed out.
The truth shall set you free!
>>> If you think... you have another thing coming.
;)
>> it's hard to hear, but this expression is "you have another think coming"
> Umm...no it's not. He was right, it's "you have another thing coming". Are you from the US? What part?
Umm...yes, it is. What the heck could 'you have another thing coming' possibly mean in that statement?
Umm...no it isn't.
You (and anyone else) can argue until you're blue in the face that it doesn't make sense, just like 'could care less' doesn't make sense. THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. It's an expression, and expressions do not have to make sense. If everyone says 'could care less' and 'you've got another thing coming' then that's what's right, whether it makes sense or not. If you are NOT using an expression, but using words to form a sentence, sure - that makes sense - but 'you've got another thing coming' is clearly an expression, and as such does not have to make sense. To address the original poster : It sounds that way because that's the way everyone (or the majority of people) says it!
You go ahead trying to correct people and they will say "It's just an expression. It doesn't have to make sense." And they're right. Languages are full of expressions that make absolutely no sense.
And if you read the first paragraph of the site you linked to (did you?), you will see that it's "concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers." And in the "Commonly Made Suggestions" page, he even states "When you reach the point that nobody seems to agree with your standard of usage any more, you may have simply been left behind. There is no ultimate authority in language--certainly not I--nor any measure of absolute 'correctness.' The best guide is the usage of literate and careful speakers and writers, and when they differ among themselves one has to make a choice as to which one prefers." Ask 10...100...even 1000 people. 99% of them will say 'you've got another thing coming', not 'you've got another think coming'. Who is right?
There is a HUGE difference between what your english professor wants you to say and what everyone else in the world says (including other countries...). While your version of an expression may make sense, if you're the only one who says it (that way) then who's wrong; you or everyone else?
Sorry, but when it comes to language, majority rules. Period.
And yes, me too - Offtopic (Score: -1
Oh, I almost forgot.
It's like people saying 'I could care less' when what they actually want to say is 'I couldn't care less'.
Most people really do want to say "i could care less". You mean that most people mean "i couldn't care less". However, since it's an expression, they say "i could care less" and people understand what they are talking about. Who is right, you or everyone else?
I work for a major online stockbroker and we have hit this "exchange/outlook vs. unix/(insert MTA of your choice here)" scenario before. The only thing I can say is, for god's sake let the first point of contact be a unix machine running sendmail. Letting (s)exchange be the MTA is positivly retarded on a grand scale. I choose sendmail purely because I have always used it, there may be better options but I havn't evaluated them. Having clarified that, I suggest the model we use which is: big_bad_nasty_internet[tm]->unix box+sendmail->exchange. If there are people that want to handle their own mail (like me) let the unix box forward it on, everything else goes to the exchange box and all the clueless users can live in a land of fallible bliss swappping diaries, schedules and viruses alike 'til the provurbial cows come home. Don't let exchange become your first port of call, put a unix box in there to do the mail routing and you will allow techies and retards(read: marketing) to enjoy their email. I have nothing against "corporate email" systems as such, it just seems to me that this model can keep everyone happy without forcing anything on anyone.
You should teach them HOW to use the calendar feature: ie, assuming someone is available for the meeting until they've actually confirmed it.
As an email consultant who works with jsut about every email system, I must say everything breaks. Most everything costs a lot of money to install and migrate to and most every user will at least bitch once about the change. Saying that, everyone of them has features and reasons why they are better then the others, even exchange. BUT DO NOT choose an eamil system because some tells you to, find a good reason to look at and test at least 3 of them. If you change for politics you will lose the fight and maybe your job. Yes executives are dense when it comes to such matters, havent met many who can make a decision on brains instead of politics. But take my word for it...If you dont choose the right system and then spend the money to install it correctly, someone like me will appear in your office to save the day. Problem here is it might be your successors day. --dale> http://www.jconsult.com
Hmm, Is your office open 24/7? Do they do backups when everyone is home on the weekends? Do they do backups at all? Our outage is Sunday mornings from midnight to 6 AM. Most dayshifters will never see it. Our old system took 1/2 hour. It was not an inconvience.
The truth shall set you free!
Subject says it all... ":-)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Hmmm... Hate to say it, but it says a lot when you need this kind of hardware for a mere 1500 users' email/scheduling ;-)...
On a less ironic note, we tend not to recommend Exchange unless you really need and plan to use the scheduling/workflow functions built into Outlook/Exchange. Even then, working with the Exchange object database is a pain -- not to mention the multitude of stupid 'gotchas' Microsoft ends up leaving in their systems: For instance, does anyone know if Microsoft has fixed the 32k/user limit on email processing rules on Exchange 2000?
Someone whent somewhere, and all they left me was this stupid sig...
It sounds like the "vocal minority" you are referring to either: a) want the scheduling features that Exchange can provide or b) have "heard from a friend/asscociate/whatever that Exchange+Outlook is great. They're running it, why aren't we?! We won't be competitive, the worlds gonna end, aieeeeeeeee!". Perhaps a web based scheduling program of some kind, or maybe you need to add something like Lotus Notes.
Reasons why not to use Exchange in your case: 1) It's going to cost you big time - you're going to buy Exchange, new servers to run it, lots of licenses, lots of copies of Outlook, install said copies of Outlook, copy everything over to the new servers, have your admins trained and certified (yes, if they make you switch they are paying for cert courses). In addition there's the higher maintenance involved w/ Exchange+Outlook - lots of new vulnerabilities to viruses. And then there's the price of the NT or 2000 licenses for the servers. And the overtime involved in getting the system operational. And the downtime involved for the switchover. And the raises your people will demand since the demands on them are now higher.
2) As mentioned above, you've just opened up a whole new security nightmare.
3) Retraining burden for all other employees to use the new e-mail system - potentially substantial.
Try to find out what Exchange offers that your users want - if anything. They might just think "we need it 'cause XYZ has it". They might have a legitimate need you can fill through some other solution that will work w/ what you have.
ObTagLine: The more you run over the 'possum, the flatter it gets.
>To scan every message for viruses, you'll need a >third party product, which will likely reduce >performance and stability to the point that you >have to turn it off
:-)
Perhaps you picked the wrong antivirus software?? I've run Trend Scanmail (www.trend.com) and really like it. No noticable impact on the performance or stability of the Exchange server..
Of course, I'm definately not saying that Exchange is as stable or robust as a Unix Sendmail server... Just that if your careful, you can make it workable. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.... but there ya go..
>Somebody is likely to suggesting hiring an MCSE >to run it. This person will get paid too much, >not know RFC 821 or 822, or anything remotely >technical, yet they'll drain the company of >$80k/year, which could be better spent on more >beer for the developers
In most areas of the country that's pretty high for an MCSE, unless they have other qualifications (other certs, lots of experience, etc). MCSE's pretty much grow on trees these days.
The MCSE tests are pretty easy, so I don't think it's at all unreasonable to want anyone administering an NT server to have/get an MCSE. It's really a pretty entry level cert.
But more to the point, your argument there is a bit of a red herring. All of the Unix admins I know get paid much better than most MCSE's and NT admins. (One of the reasons I love Unix!
---
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
It is an expression and the expression is "you have another thing coming".
:)
It means, you are going to get something but it will not be what you are expecting. It usually implies that what you are going to get will be a rude shock to you and probably quite the opposite of what you want.
I could'nt give a rats arse what that web site states. (hey there's another expression!)
Besides all this, surely we all knew what inKubus meant, and that is what is important. Are we really here to compare expressions, grammar or spelling in an international forum?
Content is what is important.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Do you know if they are still running on those boxen? I would like to think so myself as it is one of the biggest thorns in M$ side IMO. Also, any idea which MTA they are using?
-1 flamebait, -1 off-topic
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Yeah, and the 120 souls who made it to the OpenMail conference this year in Florida speak volumes about it's market share.
Oh... and the latest version of Exchange doesn't use an SQL Server backend.
It works, but administering it is quite complex (since nobody at the company knows enough about it or has the time to learn it, we still only use it for internal mail - still using an external server with POP and SMTP for external mail).
It's quite annoying to have to install Openmail client drivers on every client PC, it's impossible to change username and/or password on a client without hacking the registry, and it seriously slows down some of the client machines.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
It is?
Must be a different US than the one I'm from. Hereabouts, the expression is, "If that's what you think, you've got another think coming." It makes more sense that way, don't you... um... think?
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
It's one of those products that you just can't explain how cool it is and why...people have to see for themselves.
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog
Domino/Notes R5 is a very very mature Calendaring, Email, Application, etc. Platform. You can run it on almost everything (Solaris, NT, Linux, and IBM's line of Machines (Now i, x, z, and p series)(AS/400 = iSeries, Netfinity = xSeries, RS/6000 = pSeries, and the S/390 = zSeries))
Of course the Solaris is of particular interest since you already have those machines available. Domino is a very powerful setup, but of course the negatives include the fact that it's not ubiquitous. Most people haven't used it.
I currently have to support users in a Notes environment, and while you have all the general clueless users that just panic and need some handholding, it is still an intuitive interface and is quite easy to learn.
Compare your costs. If your Current hardware will run Domino, (and beleive me, Domino will do anything Exchange will) then that may be a significant advantage. Separately, you will still have to hire on some Domino Technicians if you want any of the advanced functionality. The Exchange group will have the advantage of having tons of people out there with "certification" whether they be capable or not is another story.
Well I'm sure this is not the most organized argument, but noone had seemed to bring up this direction so I figured I'd pose it.
hi, i also work in IT at the unamed competitor of Nokia and such... must say that it really wasnt a virus which caused that five day outage, it was an unamed admin in an AZ## location. also, typical lack of communication between business units...
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
But does KMail have heavy PIM features too? That's what I'm asking. PIM, e-mail, and newsreader.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
As has been pointed out already,
1) expressions do not have to make sense.
2) you can have 'another thing coming'. That thing is usually something bad.
YOU are the ONLY person I will not disagree with. I will fully accept that English english (i.e., english in England) uses 'think' not 'thing', and this is probably where the expression came from.
However, in the US, the expression is 'you've got another thing coming'. That's just the way it is...
Ok. I see your point. However, consider this. By only having one file holding all the info. You decrease the conplexity of managing said system. You also decrease the complexity of backing up that system's critical files. Hence, making recovery that much easier. If your server is infultrated, and a script modifies all the mail on each users home dir. The recovery procedure will take more time because it is more complex.
As a systems admin's we all know that computer's and the systems that they run are subject to error. It is our job to migitate problems. With that I believe that recoverability definately plays a role in the solution that one is going to implement. No?
I see little talk of this and since you seem very familiar with the subject of unix based email, perhaps you could talk about the recovery procedure for for those systems.
The single file vs. multiple file thing kinda breaks down at large levels. There's some threshold you hit, but I'm not sure what/where it is. All I know is, where I'm consulting now, they're definitely over the line.
:-) The mail servers are all being clustered as I write this, so half of them are clustered (with full failover) as I write this.
The typical mail server (where I'm at now) is a Quad Xeon, 4G RAM, 100G RAID, running Lotus Notes, and supporting up to 3,000 people (per server), with 50,000 people worldwide using email (and calendaring). At this level of use, we do have to have multiple servers, but we're trying to keep all metrics below 50% use (esp CPU and I/O). We could buy one herking big box, but bandwidth to overseas is expensive and unreliable, so we've got positioned, local mail servers. I should point out that all email going in and out, and that the mail gateways, are all running Linux on Penguin boxes.
I guess there could be a speed differene in the I/O channel when writing to a single file (SQL server style) versus writing to seperate files (spooled mail style, and also what Notes does), but I can't imagine it'd be more than a couple of percentage points, and largely negligible. You either have to write the information to a big file with some sort of To: information attached, or you have to look up some file path information, then write to a specific file. Is it faster to write it to a particular spot in a file, or to a particular spot in a particular file? I'll leave that argument for the folks who know, invent, and engineer hardware.
I'll concede that backups is a moot argument, since there are so many products that are able to back up a file even if a process has it locked.
With multiple files, you could span not only disks (at the low end), but RAID systems. Maybe do something clever like putting your email freaks on an expensive high-performance RAID, and everyone else on a slower RAID. (Users here do mail 20-80MB file attachments around quite often.) But that's getting at the extreme end. More likely, if you can use different directory paths, you can add disk space as needed, and quickly, without having to grow files, or file systems.
Oh, and before someone takes the obligatory dig at Lotus Notes, say what you want. It's the only system I've seen that can encrypt email so that the user can read it, but not the mail admin. Incredibly secure.
Slightly off topic, but here goes anyway... Here in our Win2K / Outlook 2K/ Exchange 2K environment they decided to apply the Microsoft security patch that quarantines attachments which it deems to be dangerous. The way it works (under our implementation at least) ...
a) You can't even get access to some attachments to even SAVE them! Someone sent you an exe file .. bad luck, you can't even save it, virus scan it and then run it. This becomes really annoying when you can't send shortcuts to network drives to co workers in the same company because the damn attachments are completely blocked.
b) The brain dead way of checking is based on file extension. If one renames ABadProgram.exe to ABadProgram.txt before emailing and the recipient renames it back, it does not get picked up for quarantining in the least.
If this is the best Microsoft could come up with as a security tightening reaction to 'I Love You', do you really want to entrust your email system to them?
- Chris
Point taken, but it's at least nice to see some logic built into your argument.
With that said, Goldmine fscking sucks, from my experience.
One more thing-- the stability of an NT system is heavily reliant on its' configuration. It's very easy to build an unstable NT box, but stability is an attainable goal. One of the best uptimes I have had was a 1000+ user mailbox server running NT4, SP5, Exchange SP3 with an uptime of 11 months. No voodoo, just attention to detail.
No one, no where, who is an Exchange professional recommends using PST's (the off server email store). If you search google for the exchange faq, you will find in it "PST=BAD". it is a known issue that pst> 100mb can lead to corruption for which there is little recourse.
Exchange's single instance store works really well, and is a compelling argument to maintain all data on the server. Last time I had my exchange admin cook off it for me, the private store (mailboxes) was 8.7 gig, and yet a comma delimited file of all users' mailboxes indicated total summed mailbox size was 10.2 gig. If you are serious about exchange, be serious about keeping all data on the server, as PST do not scale, and have never been touted as such. In a production environment, all they can offer is a method from which a restore server can dump a mailbox to in order to move into a production mailbox.
Your problem is simple an implementation issue
This was the solution that was used at one of the companies I worked at when management realised that those of us without a PC on our desks couldn't read email. Yes, it works OK, but it has one critical flaw. Either you have the citrix client visible at all times, or you don't get notification of new mail. That single fault made it effectively unusable, and we all resorted to having inbox rules that autoforwarded all mail directly to our Unix boxes. Even that wasn't ideal, 'coz Exchange won't forward the SMTP address of the original sender, only their screen name. A bit of sed trickery in my .procmailrc let me guess the
address from the name, with about 80% accuracy, but
it's a far from ideal solution.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
1. Is anyone using OpenLDAP in a production environment? References please.
2. Consistent look and feel/ Rich content. Netscape probably isn't the answer.
3. Group Scheduling. iPlanet does it. When I sync my BlackBerry pager, will iPlanet include items so my pager alerts me 15 minutes before a meeting?
4. Reliability. E2k will do 2 way active-active clusters with Win2k Advanced Server, and 4 way with datacenter. E2k native supports up to 4 storage groups, each of which can support 4 private (mailbox) stores.
5. Your email into a database complaint. Last check, we had 10.2 gig summed mailboxes, yet 8.7 gig database due to single instance store. Functionally, I have not seen or heard of any fundamental issues with enormous exchange databases, but for the restore time should something happen. There does not seem to be any fundamental issues with sizes of databases.
6. Productivity with Outlook. Palms, RIMS, etc integrate seemlessly. Where is the loss?
Look, I am a MCSE, I run OpenBSD on my firewall, FreeBSD on my laptop. But you are talking ROI, and yet you seem to propose a mish mash of OpenLPAP, iPlanet, and Netscape Mail or Outlook Express. Who is buying into that? I am not a MS zealot, but I have yet to see something that does everything that Exchange and Outlook do. And that includes third party support (like RIMS, etc). Even if OpenMail cures cancer, what PDA's seemlessly sync with it?
"1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself."
1000 users is NOTHING in comparison to a decent SMTP/POP3 server. I run a small free email service that has 250,000 <b>active</b> users on a <b>single twin-CPU machine that is over 4 years old</b>. Performance is reasonable and CPU usage averages about 15%.
Exchange has difficulty reaching these levels of scalability without serious hardware, but having said that, I still think it is a very good server for people that require the scheduling features. No open-source product comes close to Exchange in this respect. Products that use the open-standards protocols for calendaring and scheduling have been slow to arise.
Thanks for the tip! I will check this out Monday when I get back in. It also looks like the iPlanet solution will work as well, and it runs on UNIX so all the better :)
This server must server thousands of users, or you're just a zealot spouting bullshit.
:)
1600 users. But I'm still a zealot.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
Also, Exchange doesn't scale well at all. It does scale a bit (you can buy another hugely powerful machine and cluster it) but you have to pay extra licensing costs and get help to do it. The scalability of postfix/sendmail/imapd/popd/ldapd is much easier to implement (and free!)
One advantage behind Exchange (which you can do with UNIX, but you need some coding) is that you can buy a virus checking plug-in. We have it here and it removes dodgy attachments before the users read them. Assuming the virus isn't really new of course.
But there are so many calendar apps, why change the mail server just to get a calendar functionality you can find or implement without mucking with the working mailserver?
itachi
My dad can beat up your dad. :)
Neither make sense ('think' is a verb, not a noun) but they're idioms so they don't have to.
Well, you can just fribble my frog. After all, if the sink's not attached to the giraffe, how can the car start? Friglar strapfan nibble scot, sud bugger nut prit-prang fitang.
'Could care less' is wrong--and dumb. The correct statement is 'couldn't care less.' Words means things. The full expression under argument is: `You think <erroneous expr.>; well, you've another think coming!' `You've another thing coming' makes no sense--it does not parse. Only a mind with a tenuous grasp on reality--one for which the world is not a real thing, but merely a series of ethereal perceptions, would say such a thing. The mind which is used to the concept of the real, the concrete, the abstract, the philosophical, says what it means and means what it says.
If a thousand thousand slimy things cannot speak their own language, they're still wrong.
But this is all hopelessly off-topic. The original post was quite correct--the Exchange/Outlook combination is full of problems. It has some nice capabilities, but it is troublesome and buggy. Does anyone know of open-source clients for Exchange, or open-source servers for Outlook?
I was singling out the topic of the thread and discussion, MS Exchange Server. God knows there are a lot of vendors who feel that documentation is passe, and I was in no way trying to come off saying that MS is the only perpetrator of this shameful behavior. It did not come with printed docs, nor did it come with them in electronic format. The only way to get in-depth docs was to pay extra for them. To give MS credit where it is due, they do include enough to get you up and running with a rudimentary setup, but an in-depth look at the expensive groupware server we just paid a good chunk of our IT budget for doesn't seem like it would be to much to ask for. All we got was the "Getting Started with......." booklet, and a piss-poor "Books Online" implementation. The order form in the box that strongly hinted that we had to order the manuals in order to get a good implementation was just rude. Why do they need to gouge you for the manuals to the package you just paid to use? Put them on the CD in some decent format, and let me read them or print them as needed!
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Well yes, they won't understand that RFC either. I'm convinced that the MCSE is a just a really bad practical joke by Bill Gates, to get back and the kids who used to beat him up.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
My company of 30 people has been happily chugging along using Netscape Calendar. This isn't supported anymore, the original product is CS&T CorporateTime.
CS&T have merged (bought? been bought by?) with another company "Lexacom", and they've changed their name to Steltor. Cute little chameleon logo, just like a certain Linux distribution.
Steltor's CorporateTime product provides a whole heap of features, the ones I use most frequently are:
Some of the features that CorporateTime didn't have in version 4, that I'd have liked were:
CorporateTime does achieve the goal of managing resources and booking appointments. It's the bits that it doesn't manage that tend to chafe me a little - but most of these are human-to-human communications issues like "don't book me for a meeting without at least 24 hours notice".
Well, I think that the bad is really not bad.
.psts and then inport them en masse. You can export this way and then just do a backup up of that directory of psts.
1. Not necesarily. A util called xmerge.exe found in the BORK (Back Office Resource Kit) lets you export via comandline, all individual mailbox content to
2. Exchange can be limited to use less resources that 75% of your ram at a time. You can set restrictions on how much ram it is permitted to use.
3. The exchange information store actually has one copy of that message and TEN indexes. NOT ten copies of the entire message.
4. IM?
5. What do you mean the size of the installation? Any program that covers an Enteprise Level messaging and colaboration system will be big. Show me the alternatives that provide the same functionality at a smaller MB cost.
6. Price. OUCH!
7 True.
8. Yup. no argument.
Thanks, I'll suggest trend scanmail to our corporate IT department.
You're absolutely correct, the MCSE is an entry level cert, which is pathetic, since the MCP is supposed to be the entry level cert.
As to my argument being a red herring, I disagree, All of the unix admins I know get paid very well, but they also do useful things. Most NT admins I've seen use up space. The sad result of MCSE mills.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
I'm a second year Computer Technology student at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary,AB. Last week, our email service was out for over 4 days. Yes, FOUR days. I have numerous other email accounts forwarded to my account at school and was unable to respond to a job offering because of the Exchange servers crash. On the other side of the coin. A guy I know at the U of Alberta claims he has been able to access his email every day in the last five years. U of Alberta runs UNIX. Ok, so I admit Edmonton has one better quality. :)
KMail is a stand alone program. I believe that it can be setup to share its address book with some other programs. KOrganizer was a pretty decent program in KDE 1.1.2 I haven't played with it yet in my new install, KNode the KDE 2.0 newsreader is excellent. Only trouble I've had with it is that it doesn't support multipart messages. It is however a vast improvement over KRN which came with KDE 1.1.2.
Overall I'm just as happy having these programs be standalone. I usually don't want to download news headers when I open up my calendar.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I work for an ISP in Tech support and 80% of our business callers call in regard to problems with exchange servers, one of the most convincing arguments to maintain your current system is the potential time wasted by staff calling support lines and the limited ability of ISP's to actually assist with this problem. Having also administered network's the stability of Linux has proven itself to me where as Windows is a plauge on the earth. :)
1) You live in the US and say 'hereabouts'? You sure you're not in Canada?
2) I've said multiple times that making sense has nothing to do with idioms/expressions/etc.
3) Actually, 'thing' makes much more sense to me than 'think'. How can I "have another 'think' coming"?
If a thousand thousand slimy things cannot speak their own language, they're still wrong.
Language is defined by the people who speak it, not the scholars who profess to define it.
From the business point of view computers in general are only a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Business decisions are hardly exempt from ethics, in fact many corporations now have programs on ethics for their employees. What is different is that technical merit is not the prime reason for a choice, but rather the overall value add (Value provided - cost). Yes indeed software platforms have philosophies, but to hold to these in business is a route to chapter 11. In fact the trend in the next couple of years will be to move email to a service that one buys from a service provider, not a function one provides inhouse, as running email systems is not in the core business of most companies, but currently something they are forced to do.
I just discovered Mozilla. Well, not really discover. But if it had PIM features in it, I would have everything I want.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
If you're going through college for a non-technical job, the only training you will get in computer applications is probably a class or two in a Microsoft product. The computer labs on a college campus usually run windows, and MS Office. Unless you are going to an institute of higher learning to be a programmer/sys admin, almost all of your experience will be in Microsoft products. When a secretary or an accountent is hired at your company, they need to learn an entirely new program to get their email. PHBs notice the increased employee training time. Don't assume your boss is dumb, he's probably ignorant of technical issues and making a call based on limited information.
Not that I'm advocating Exchange/Outlook. I prefer a less virus-friendly environment.
First, I must declare an interest: I work for Sendmail Inc. which markets an IMAp/POP3 mail server solution.
What you have to ask them is why they want Exchange/Outlook. If you have a good IMAP implementation, you can use Outlook on the front end and your users will get folders on the server + shared folders and syncing and all that stuff.
If you want calendaring, the Outlook/IMAP solution will give you that on an individual basis. You don't get group calendaring, *but* nobody really uses that. I've worked at four companies, two were Exchange shops, one was a Notes shop and my current one uses a product called Meeting Maker. In none of them did people use the group calendaring seriously and my current company is the only one that uses it at all.
Directory access: get an LDAP server - any LDAP server. OpenLDAP is free, but there are also commercial ones with nice admin tools.
Then there is cost: a client access licence for Exchange is about £500 in the UK. My company has just launched an IMAP server which for a thousand users will cost maybe £5 per user, or you can get an open source one.
If you use products that support open standards such as POP, IMAP, LDAP and SMTP then you will not be tied into any manufacturer's products. On the other hand that manufacturer's products *will* have support for the open standards e.g. buy Exchange - you *must* put Outlook on every PC. Buy any IMAP server - you *can* use Outlook on each PC.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
My company runs about 2000 users on Exchange, and I personally receive around 80-100 emails/day. Many of those have large attachments, and many are from the Internet. I've never lost anything, ever.
If Exchange is implemented properly, it can be very stable. If the people implementing it don't know what they're doing, it can suck (just like anything else).
I know that some, but not all, of these 'bugs' were fixed in Exchange 2000, but of course, it's drastically different from Exchange 5.5 and requires extensive planning to roll out since there are some rather major restrictions on what you can do and how you set it up.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I hate outlook. I hate the calendar.
I hate the fact that everytime I want to have lunch I need to put it in the calendar so people don't book me for a meeting!
I understand the usefulness of the calendar, but I hate having to make all my plans public in some central location.
Heck! I have enough trouble justifying to people that I skiped a meeting because I was fixing a production outage. They always say "You were free in outlook". Yeah well outlook didn't know that someone was going to eat up all the disk-space on our server did it!
</rant>
--
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I'm going to start restating the obvious under one id until I build up a potentially lucrative listing for ebay.
On UNIX (and with most other mail clients), the files are text, or text with some (easily regenerated) binary index files. Not so with Outlook. Recovering from a corrupted e-mail file is almost impossible.
Or you could have each message in a separate file (possibly messages with attachments as a directory/folder). Not only is this a better analogy of the way paper mail works it also uses the filesystem, rather having a big file emulate some kind of filesystem.
There are several reasons why I would suggest against replacing an existing *nix mail system with MS Exchange.
-A basic install of Exchange is very heavy; you can't run it without a PDC, which means migration and/or synchronization nightmares with your current system. If you do decide to install it, it will install with it SQL Server, Index Server, as well as other Exchange services not essential to the programs function that take up valuable cpu time.
-Customization is a nightmare if you ever wanted to taylor the web interface for your company. It's all made with CDO which is very hard to program.
-In my 1+ years maintaining an old Exchange system we've encountered numerous problems with the databases becoming corrupted, which can supposedly only be corrected using special MS Exchange utilities to uncorrupt them.
I have more personal reasons against it, but if you really want to try it out, go ahead but don't disable your original system!!
I agree that it probably won't help to create something by throwing a number of different elements together, and hoping that it will work OK - but stating that there is no software that has the functionality of Outlook/Exchange is complete and utter nonsense.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
"Outlook is chock full of security holes. Thanks to those holes, it makes worms like Kak possible, whereas it wouldn't be a problem with any other e-mail client." if you're gonna bash... bash with ACCURATE FACTS! KAK was never ever invovled with Outlook, KAK was an Outlook EXPRESS based worm, sure MS is a bunch morons for naming two unrelated products the saem base.. just like "Windows Explorer" and "Internet Explorer" *mutter mutter, grumble, grumble*
I worked at a school district that tried to replace a stable Groupwise setup with Lotus Notes 5.0. The two big problems we had were that the mail web client sucked. Its totally Java based which would not be bad but it was very slow and IMHO was not useable on a dial-up connection ( a lot of our users wanted to use the web client from home). Groupwise's web mail was much better.
Also, we found that the Mac client was not usable on 95% of the Macs we had because of hardware / OS version requirements. In a school district with about 60% Macs vs. PC's this was a major problem.
Of course Notes is much more than just a mail program but I think if the school district had it to do over again they would have stayed with Groupwise.
Additionally, calendering should not be seen as the only feature for which Outlook is so popular... The contact and address book, integration with Office, and VBA support make it a very powerful workflow automater. Any opensource alternative to Outlook would need to provide these features - ie: integration with StarOffice and Corel WordPerfect.
Sorry, you (not Outlook) has a problem. Last enterprise I worked in had > 100k users (and lots of distribution lists) and Exchange Client and Outlook had no problem with the GAL size. Ditto Public folders.
Somebody is likely to suggesting hiring an MCSE to run it. This person will get paid too much, not know RFC 821 or 822, or anything remotely technical, yet they'll drain the company of $80k/year, which could be better spent on more beer for the developers.
The RFC they certainly won't understand is number 974..
Effectivly an MSCE appears to be someone who knows more of the options than a regular user, but still does not really understand how the thing is ment to work in the first place.
I think y'all and the posters who've replied to your post are missing the point. Not only couldn't our NT staff keep the system stable (I was not a member of the NT staff for this project), but Microsoft consulting and several MS Exchange Engineers who were loaned to us because of our ELU could not keep the system stable.
For the record, all Exchange servers referenced were dedicated machines. Every piece of our Microsoft environment was scrutinized by not only our staff, but Microsoft's. There were no hardware errors, no driver errors, no configuration errors. Systems were installed, reinstalled, data moved from machine to machine, and the things still didn't have the stability that our users demand.
If those working on the systems were incompetent, then Microsoft itself could not provide competent professionals. I doubt it.
I am not saying that Exchange is crap for all environments. Exchange is a fine workgroup mailer. What it is not is a good enterprise solution for the University environment.
A while back I had an idea for Java "applets" via email. Since Java can be sandbox, thus making applets theoretically safe, can't the same be done in a email context? If so, then you can reproduce a majority of exchange server's benefits in Java applets. The biggest problem I see is the size of java .class files over text scripts. But that can be remedy via downloading the classes off the web and only sending the serialized data.
Now, you don't have to go as far as to develop your own calendar, since there are plenty of good webbased calendars available for free (running as PHP, Perl, whatever). This in my opinion a good thing as its free (the execs like that word) and usually very troublefree, and no viruses can mess up your calender since they have no way via MAPI or anything else to access it.
You have got to be kidding me. Have you ever actually worked in an office that is predominantly MS? Suggesting some (in the opinion of your boss) cheap freebee calendar off a web site is just asking for trouble. Is there an 800 number for support.
Whilst it's possible Microsoft may have a freephone number in the USA, in other parts of the world it costs money to call them
This is totally incorrect. CommuniGate Pro is a full featured messaging server and NOT only an MTA. It supports SMTP, IMAP, POP, LDAP, ACAP, HTTP. And yes it supports up to 100K accounts on ONE box. The only thing that CommuniGate Pro doesn't support is the calendaring. But I think they are working on that. You obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch is also a good alternative to HP OpenView and the like. VERY nice network monitoring software.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Debating the issue with the "politically strong faction" weighs heavily on their opinions and thoughts as to why moving to Exchange is a good idea. If they want it because of an article they read or a sales pitch they've heard, a simple retort to what they have been told could suffice. If they are in the know, and are planning for an NT migration, well then, that's another matter all together.
Well, first of all, as others pointed out, you have to make them prove that their solution solves some sort of problem that the current solution does not. The ball is in their court to prove their case, and it better be good.
That having been said, is Exchange suitable? Well, up to somewhere around 3000 clients I have heard it is OK. Above that, there are definite scalability problems. From my time at a major auto manufacturer whose name begins with a "F", I know that Exchange is flaky as hell unless it is kept at a very low number of users per-server. So, expect to have to purchase numerous NT servers and task an admin to each one (oh, and of course in each case you need at least two machines -- a PDC and a BDC, so double that machine count).
I don't know the hard details; the last time I looked on the Net for more supporting data to back up what I knew from those in the trenches of the Ford Exchange project, I couldn't find anything detailed. I assume MS must pressure people not to disclose details when things go bad.
I do know a local office that has only 300 people and is moving off of Exchange because it is too flaky.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
LookOut is totally broken when it comes to mail filtering. When filtering messages in your inbox, it totally stops responding to the system until it is done. So say you are on a medium mailing list that sends maybe 40-50 messages a day, filtering into a local folder. You can't do *anyhting* with outlook while it takes ten minutes to filter those messages. At least with NS it filters the messages as it downloads them, so you can read other messages, or change to different folders.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
AFAIK, Exchange works relatively well, considering that it's an M$ product.
Try to list the terrible vulnerabilities that ONLY outlook has - I'd make a case to BAN outlook, not standardize on it.
Short of banning outlook, at least SOME people at your office can have relatively secure (from scripting) email, if they don't use outlook...
so I think the standardization on outlook is the REASON not to standardize on Exchange.
I know I laugh constantly at everyone who gets a new M$ virus, because I'm completely immune.
On a similar note, any time you can avoid castrating yourself to a single vendor like M$, it is always a good thing. And you'd be spending money to change.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I have had to deal with such politics before.. it
was one of the reasons I left for Red Hat a couple
of years ago. My suggestion is the following:
If it happens and it just might no matter what you
present..
Think of the following. If you really dont want to
work with Exchange update your resume and find
somewhere else to work. While it might seem
satisfying to wait for the faction to eat crow
when the Exchange server dies, a new Virus sweeps
and removes everyone's data, or the hundreds of
other problems.. the end results are always an
growing ulcer for the IS staff. You will be much
better off going someplace where you can be
challenged with things that you want to be... and
in this IS short economy.. finding a job is pretty
good.
If on the other hand you want to try the challenge
of integrating Unix and Microsoft.. go for it. You
will learn a lot, and come out wiser about how
things can spiral out of control quickly. But I
really would say that "feet" talk better than
words these days.
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
The main reason for moving to exchange is not just to replace one email system with another. It is to be able to take advantage of all the other goodies, of which multimedia, parallel editing and merging of documents are only the tip of the iceberg.
:).
Exchange is really an ERP solution in disguise, and it's being agressively expanded in that direction. It is extremely easy for people to set up various forms and business processes (purchase orders, expense reports and HR forms etc), and is therefore very attractive for exactly those kinds of people that don't read slashdot
Of course exchange has a huge set of drawbacks, but they are in many ways comparable to the drawbacks of a sendmail based system:
1) It requires experts to set up securely and
properly (it's not impossible, though).
2) It suffers from the usual 4gl trap, that is
everything that is slightly outside of the
scope of the default objects suddenly becomes
very very hard to implement (similarly hard
to writing perl XS modules, for example).
3) Parallel development and good change control
is nearly impossible. This problem is similar
to the problem of versioning and merging
database schemas, as every change you do is
"live".
Office for the Mac does in fact have an Exchange compatible mail client. It's not Outlook, but it will work. Now, the Unix people are still stuck with web-based mail, so I don't think this is a solution. Besides, isn't being able to check one's mail via SSH a fundamental design requirement?
Walt
My company has 17 offices throughout the world, with 9 exchange servers in various locations, and I will say, it is a management nightmare.There are practical uses for exchange though, the global address book, the public folders and the replication work extremely well (In my experience). Delegate permissions are great for secretaries, and exchange administrator is half decent.
The area that it crashes the most is when you have multiple site connectors (X.400 or microsofts own Site Connector), the MTA seems to go into a loop, and crashes it's self.
If you want a bullet proof system, try domino mail on an AS/400. It will allow you to use outlook, notes, pine, etc.. and the reliability is unmatched.
For those who say that it can't scale however, I have seen it scale to well over 25000 users, and that is more than enough headroom for growth in this particular situation
Of course, the real M$ wh0r3s would switch to NT4 or W2K and not worry about stabilty or system resource problems in Windows... I should know -- I'm one of them.
(end comment) */ }
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I agree with this post. Find out why you are being pressured to use Exchange. If its for NT zealotry and you are resisting it because of Unix zealotry, you're in a tough (and not particularly smart) position.
Identify what features the people in power want from Exchange, and find a Unix alternative. Groupware calendaring? Shared addressbooks? If the benefits of a solution under Exchange outweighs the cost of converting to NT (hardware AND retraining AND licences), the security implications, and the support headaches that Exchange tends to bring, then go with Exchange. If the Unix alternative (MailOne or HP's OpenMail are a couple) will cause fewer problems and cost less, go with that.
Don't forget that your job is to pick the right tool for the job.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Well, I'm sure some PHB will still be glad he spent the money on Exchange... because it looks prettier.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It has been a few years since I've had to administrate Exchange, thank God, and one of the things that floored me is the per-seat licensing fee of Exchange clients for the Exchange server. I remember nearly pissing myself when I read that for EACH client that connects to the Exchange server, a fee of $19 (at the time) was required. ($19 * 1000) = $19k more than it costs right now for a working solution. you've already spent the money on the Ultra 2's (not cheap) so I would assume that money is not an option to your company.
I've found (as many slashdot readers have) that perfectly working solutions are "improved" and "improved" until they're no longer working, at which point the person who was against the whole thing in the first place is blamed and reprimanded. Knowing that, set yourself in "defense" mode right now.
i work in a shop that runs exchange. it isn't so bad. NT is the real problem here. slow and unstable...yech.
on topic: why you would EVER change something that works is beyond me, but as a first line of defense, allow me to point you to the M$ licensing agreement. let them chew on that for a while and if they can figure out how much you have to fork out for it, well, by then the Internet will no longer exist...problem solved.
hmmm...
I can't think of a single reason for requiring all users to use the same client. If people *want* to use Outlook, you already allow them to do so (although I might reconsider allowing *that* client at all).
How can forcing everyone onto a single interface be a good thing? The email client should be completely user-selected, so long as it (1) supports standards, and (2) doesn't open security risks.
My site went through a similar nightmare, but instead of Exchange/Outlook, they went to Lotus Notes. Previously, different divisions used differnt email systems. I work in a unix (Solaris) division and everyone used whatever clients they wanted (I use exmh). Eventually, my division replaced all the NCDs with NT machines. I now use Exceed and my desktop is still 100% unix. I run exactly two NT applications: Exceed and Winamp. I can't stay logged on for 6 months at a time anymore, but I like the music.
The other divisions used CC:mail. CC:mail is evil incarnate. Mime attachments generally didn't work very well between us and the CC:mail folks because CC:mail wasn't a real RFC-822 mail package and had some kludgey gateway to talk to real mail servers. CC:mail also had Y2K problems, so management decided to ditch CC:mail once and for all.
Unfortunately, management never realized that all the attachment woes were 100% CC:mail's fault. So they decided that they would force everyone to use the same client. The search went on, and the Lotus Notes group put on the most impressive sales presentation. Marketing won.
Fortunately, Notes does support IMAP and I use fetchmail and continue to read my email with exmh, though this is against the policy. F the policy, I say. I've got work to do.
BTW: Lotus Notes was later determined to have a Y2K bug...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
ok so like this might be perplexing to you opensource freaks, but it's not to those who deal with MS products day in day out. I'm in seattle...and as you can imagine unix has little to no call in anything but high end enterprise like paccar, boeing, etc...
:P )
Basically it comes down to this, people want exhange. They dont know why, but they know they want it. Why is exchange so robust? (XCHG2K is hella phat, and even 5.5 was there) One word: MAPI connections. That's the only reason why it works so good.
So for all you anti-anything-but-unices, SUN has a HUGE MAPI compliant (amonst other things) mail server that is waaaay more expensive than exchange.
Me? Everything has it's place. In the Enterprise, MAPI has it's place, pop/imap only has it's place in the small-mid size infrastructure...but then even still MAPI is usefull there for collaborating...go ahead, share a calandar with 0 problems with pop3/imap clients (whoops! net folders suck in outlook, and the bulliten board dont cut it
anywhoo...my rant for today.
NO SPORK
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I do not think that Exchange is a good idea. It requires a lot of processor power to do a good job, and most of the features that it offers are ignored. When do people use calendar software that Schedule+ or one of the freeware apps doesn't support? When does one have such tight integration of the calendar that people actually use each other's calendars?
I think that basic email works fine with a properly set up sendmail config, and IMAP services provides enough directory support that more isn't needed. People just don't use the capabilities that Exchange does offer enough to justify the administrative headaches.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
One word: Procmail. www.procmail.org. Easy cheap and almost no performance cost. Try to do that on NT.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This wouldn't be such a big issue if it wasn't for the tiny fact that Exchange doesn't play well with generic e-mail clients(outside of Microsoft's...and we know how well they work).
How about tackling the question from the other side? What can one do if they do work primarily on a unix workstation but there is the push to go to Exchange?
Does anyone outside of Microsoft understand the MS Exchange protocol? Are there e-mail clients out there that can get mail from an Exchange server? If the clients don't support Exchange well then how about manipulating a server to mimic a pop server while handling Exchange data?
Of course one very obvious soultion is to keep another machine that has Windows installed just to handle e-mail but I really don't relish that idea. What a waste...
Don't forget the cost of training personnel on new software, both the end user and the MIS staff. Also look at the projected cost figures associated with VB viruses like lovebug, etc., that went through the mail systems of entire companies who had done this. And then include costs to harden down the system so this doesn't happen to you. When they see it in $$ and cents, they might reconsider. On the bright side, maybe this is how you can get your budget upped!!
Scott Plumlee
Exchange provides for more than just mail - it also has built-in calendaring support, instant messaging (in the form of MS' proprietary MSN Messenger client), and some conferencing capabilities, in addition to newsgroup/bulleting board-like Public Forums. From your current setup, it doesn't look like you provide any of these services. Internal newsgroup services can be implemented in Solaris and be accessible with Outlook, but I don't know of any Unix/Open Source implementations of the other services. (Anybody else on /. got some ideas?)
Seeing as your current system works well and the people asking for MS Exchange support are small, it would be a good argument, IMHO, to list the costs and potentially hassles of ripping up the current infrastructure and replacing it with a whole new one versus the benefits of putting in Exchange. As an example of cost, you'd need completely new hardware for Exchange, as it doesn't run on Solaris. You'd also need hardware to set up a domain for it to run in, which means at LEAST a PDC/BDC combo. Then there's the cost of retraining your entire IT staff to support an MS domain/products. Security might also be an issue. (If you shield the servers enough, keep up with patches, and are a real dictator with what ports you allow through to them/out from them, though, they can be okay.)
Of course, if this minority STILL insists that it be done despite the potential costs in time and resources, you could try a compromise where you set up a small domain with Exchange for them and have mail relayed back and forth between Exchange and Sendmail. That way, you don't have to tear up what you have, and they can get the features they want. The big problem with this, though, is if lots of people start wanting accounts on Solaris and NT, in which case things become a management hell, and you have to start thinking about LDAP or something (if you don't have it already).
I think I can say that most people on /. agree that you shouldn't yank out what works and cause hell for the sake of a few ardent complainers. The trick is to show why the costs outweigh what small benefits Exchange would provide to a small subsection of the company.
I dont plan to post to this Article, not because I have no knowledge about the topic, but because the Article was posted by its Author with only one view to it. If the question was framed like "Could you tell me the Advantages/Disadvantages of using MS Exchange ?" it would have encourage some serious discussion here. But since the Question here is "Could you tell me only the disadvantages of using MS Exchange, coz I want to push it down" you are cutting down anyone who wants to make an intelligent post about both sides of the question.
I am not sure why Slashdot still remain so fanatic against other closed source solutions. But I would seriously discourage topics like this unless they encourage discussion from both sides. IF you just wanna rant, then set up a discussion group for Anti M$ groups and just rant.
Two cents. And I am sure to get moderated for this, but try thinking about it after you moderate me down.
Rapid Nirvana
switching to Exchange means putting a Windows box on *every* desktop.
:( I believe there is a program called Mailone or something that lets you read exchange email on unix...I think evolution is supposed to support exchange as well..but not in the near future.
exchange will run on a mac without troubles. There may even be a version of Lookout for the mac as well...
You are pretty much out of luck for unix stations though
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
...would someone want to switch TO Outlook??
After all, it has the following defects:
-the Outlook application doesn't seem to do IMAP. I'm not sure about 2000, but the 97 version definitely does not. This means that you'll have some serious migration issues with existing IMAP account, which will > end up with tons of very important messages getting lost. In that sense switching to Outlook is a lot like having your hard drive crash when you use POP mail with standard settings. While this is not really a big issue with readers of this forum it risks being one with most other users.
-Exchange systems are proprietary. This means that in order to enjoy the advanced features mentioned by Exchange "pushers" your entire desktop base will have to be switched to Windows if they are not already. No *NIX, no Macs. You could perhaps find a third-party solution for this, but then why would you give up one software to potentially embrace two or three packages in order to replace it?
-It doesn't make sense in terms of startup and future costs. There's the rollout cost, the cost of hiring additional support personnel, the cost of purchasing or developing documentation (guess what... when M$ site-licenses something you don't get any print documentation), and you are putting yourself at risk of being ordered to perform software audits periodically. Those audits are expensive in terms of man-hours, lost productivity, and the legal costs of having to deal with M$ attorneys.
-There's precious little likelihood that most users will make any use of Outlook's advanced features unless you develop or pay for extensive tutorials for the whole company. More out-of-pocket money and lost productivity there. And even then you'll never get the sort of efficiency gains advertized by the M$ marketing elves.
Personally I can't think of any reason why a company would want to put itself in a position where they become dependent on the sort of megalomaniac corporation which Microsoft has proved itself to be again and again. You've got the arguments against the switch, demand to see arguments in favor of the switch, and weigh the pros and cons. I'm pretty sure that this should take care of the issue.
Cheers,
TAE
My sig is too lon
In addition, you'll definitely want to set up some filtering software. Ideally you'll just eat executables and Word documents on the server. You should already be doing this anyway, but when you upgrade you have a good excuse to implement a draconian security policy, because everyone knows how insecure Microsoft products are.
You're probably need more IT staff to maintain all those new servers. Now Microsoft HAS got it down to the point where a trained monkey can handle day to day situations, but you'll want a couple of really experienced admins as well to fix things when the inevitable mail worm hits. Those guys don't come cheap.
And don't forget licensing on 4x your current machines for exchange, NT (or 2K) and your scanning software. And the manpower it'll take to set all this up and make sure everyone's desktop is running the right software. Since you'll be visiting everyone's desktop anyway, it'd be a great time to do a licensing audit to make sure you won't have any trouble if the BSA ever comes a knocking.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My suggestion is to offer an alternative package, still running on Sun, something like Lotus Notes. The features you'll want (HA, stability) will be there, and the features they want (collaboration, calendars) will be there as well.
That said, I think the Notes UI is ugly as sin. Argh, I can't believe I just recommended Notes!
1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself.
I'm sorry, but in my experience that simply isn't true. I've worked on a 500 user site running Exchange 5.0 on a quad-processor PPro with 512MB RAM, and it was completely bogged down. Normal end-user work wasn't particualarly slow, but trying to do *anything* on the server was painful. Any window activity regularly took several minutes between screen refreshes, and rebooting the server guarenteed an hour of downtime (30 min waiting for Exchange to shut down, 30 min waiting for it to start back up).
Also, don't forget that you'll have to back up the server. This means that you'll have to purchase a $X,000 client license, plus a spare server to restore in the event of a failure. At least with Legato Network backing up Exchange 5.0, the *only* way to do a restore was to restore the entire database at once.
Causation can cause correlation
First thing to consider is your users are allready using a mixture of clients, and probally like it that way. If you went to exchange, it's Outlook or nothing. (You can set up Exchange to serve IMAP/POP to non Outlook clients, it's not the default though.)
Also consider that until Exchange 2000, Exchange was a seperate enity from your NT Domain. In Exchange 2000 I belive it is intigrated into NTDS (or Active Directory if you want to be MS Buzzterm Complient, even the WinNT5 developers aren't MS Buzzterm Complient, all the icons may be labled Active Directory and Windows 2000, but underneath it's NT5 and NTDS)
If you are going to go down the exchange route, set up a extremely powerful server. All this server should be doing is Exchange. Put a firewall in front of this box, if you know what you're doing, you won't need to give this box a public IP. NT will never be stable when it's overloaded, and sometime pointing that out to managment will sway the opinion in your favor. "Yeah, we can run Exchange for 1000 users, but we need at least two quad processor systems with Windows 2000 Advanced Server and 4+ GB of RAM." Always over spec NT servers.
Take into consideration you authintaction scheme. If you're allready up and running on NTDS thats one less hurdle in the way for Exchange. If you're on NT4 domains, Netware, or NIS, that a big strike agnist.
Take a looke at HP Open Mail over Exchange. Not only can you use HP's client, HP has Outlook Services to make the Open Mail server look like an Excnage server to Outlook 2000. The advantage of HP Open Mail over Exchange is that you still get the shared contacts/calendering, but the server runs on various UNIX platforms INCLUDING Linux.
If the situation gets to deploy Exchange or we'll hire someone else who will, consider finding an ASP to manage Exchange for you. Then it's somebody elses problem if the server breaks. Exchange server will be the cause for stress, stress, and more stress. Let somebody else deal with it.
For 1000+ users, give the project at least 6 months research time. If you're going to do it, do it right the first time. With those 6 months, find all the advantages and disadcvnatages, and all possible soultions includeing alternatives like HP Open Mail and Application Service Providers. If they keep saying they want it now damnit, ask them how they would function if the system wan't implemented correctly and they couldn't get their e-mail reliably. This is not a something that you want to deploy ASAP, espically when you allready have a mail system like you've allready described. I personally admin a mail server that has been up for 140 days without any issues. It's doing simalar stuff to what you described. (automatic archiving, web mail + pop + imap) I wouldn't give it up for the world, but if I had to, I'd consider HP Open Mail over Exchange. I've heard good things about Open Mail from those who've tried it. (HP has and evaluation license) From those who evaluated it and ended up with Exchange, they wish managment had gone the Open Mail route. Most are happy they went the ASP route instead of in house. Hope that helps!
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
the people in my office see me using netscape 6 mail client (one of the few things in NS6 that actually works for me) and they say to me...."this is the mail for netscape??? _I_ could use this." once you show people that there is another way other than Microsoft, they usually are pretty receptive to it. Have the patience to sit and explain to them (the PHBs) and hope that they will listen.
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
I had been messing around with a Linux (Red Hat 5.2) system at the time running SAMBA and had set it up to as a mail server for my own domain. After a few months my confidence level with this system was quite high. I was also pleased to find that performance was excellent.
To make a long story short I switched all of our servers over to Linux. We have had no problems since. We had to constantly reboot our NT boxes. Remote administration was a pain. I can now administer the whole thing from home over X.
There is no compelling argument one could use to swith to NT/Exchange server. It is moving in precisely the wrong direction. Those recommending it are either inexperienced or just plain fools. There is never a good reason to mess with success. If they want to sstandardize on Outlook on the client end fine. But why does it matter?
When Exchange Server fails your company will be relying on Microsoft for answers. That's scary! If sendmail fails a virtualy limitless pool of information is available. If need be you can always debug the problem yourself. To be fair I will also mention the one (and only) time our sendmail system failed. We ran out of space on var. I had to clean up var and restart sendmail. Time to fix 10 mins.
-Stability
-Dare I say "backup"? (it's a pain in the ass - there is NO good solution)
-Email Virus and security vulnerabilities
-Lack of scalable hardware choice
-Lack of cross-platform support (Yes, exchange server supports POP3, etc, but where else can you run MAPI clients - MAPI is required to use any of the nifty features that make Exchange appear attractive, and then you're stuck with Windows only.)
-With Exchange, you don't get that warm fuzzy feeling that you're supporting an industry underdog, in fact, you are propping up a monopolist and proving to Capitalism's detractors that the free-market is broken. (ie. I'm saying if you choose Exchange, you are supporting COMMUNISM!)
-No trust - are you really going to trust that Microsoft doesn't have secret back doors for the NSA (IE's NSAKey anyone?) - or that the hackers that broke into Microsoft didn't insert their own back doors? You can't trust closed-source software. Period.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Beside Exchange servers, as mentioned in other posts, happen to be really slow. Many times i've sent emails to people in the company using exchange and they'd always get it after everyone else.
Thank god we do have the option to choose which mail architecture we use. I do use Outlook as my email client on windoze, however there's an option in it that allows you to sorta "recompile" it to only use internet standards, and I did just that, although I had disabled all my exchange server preferences and configured my good old incoming and outgoing mail server accounts.
Also, to get people's contact information, we use an LDAP setup, and outlook even has that built-in, kinda cool.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Email viruses (and the like) tend to thrive in (and sometimes depend on) Outlook/Exchange environments.
> Firstly, switching to Exchange means putting a Windows box on *every* desktop
No it doesn't. Exchange servers can talk IMAP & there's also a web-based interface that works nicely in Netscape on Linux.
Oh, $DEITY! I have been in this movie enough times to know what's happening. This is when a bunch of managers meet for lunch with their palm pilots, laptops, etc. and start talking cluelessly about technology. One manager will spout off about mSexchange (or some other buzzword the manager knows nothing about), and the "wonders" it does for them. Then all of the managers go back to their company, agree this toy they learned about over lunch must be used, drag the computer people into a meeting, then say things like "Why aren't we using this yet?", etc. ad.nauseum...
And the only way that the managers will be held at bay is with a time consuming damning report chock full of expense, downtime, etc.
There's a manager! Quick, PFY, get me my chainsaw!
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I doubt very much that anyone is advocating Exchange simply to use it as an IMAP/SMTP server.
Exchange is a groupware server. It handles calendaring, discussion groups, boards, forums, surveys, forms, and many other things. Like most MS software it is heavily integrated with other MS software such as NT and Outlook, although some of its functions will work in a more open way.
There is no comparison of Exchange and any mail server. If management want groupware (and there ARE good reasons for using it) then Lotus Notes, Exchange, and maybe some of the iPlanet stuff is about all that's available.
My experience of running a trivial (50 user) Exchange setup is that it's a pain in the arse to manage. In particular, its logging is very poor, and the whole architecture is very counterintuitive if you are coming from a Unix background. However, it does seem stable and secure, and has many nice features, and a good API (if you want to control it programmatically).
Outlook, is another pain in the arse, being insecure (open to macro virus abuse), and in my experience it is confusing for users.
If what you need is fully functional groupware, Exchange is probably your best bet. If all you need is email, I'd steer well clear for many many reasons. If, in fact, all management want is to have shared calendars, there ARE some standalone solutions to that, and iPlanet (Netscape...) over some integrated mail/calendar stuff.
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It adds calendar functions that are really useful, but only if the users all obey the calendars.
Like any groupware function, it's only as useful as the culture makes it. If you boss's boss started scheduling meetings, your boss's calendar would start getting used.
This is nothing new. I remember when I would send my boss e-mail in "cc:Mail" and he would reply two weeks later. Meanwhile, he would send out 5 broadcast voice mails a day. And this was in the IT group. E-mail might seem natural now, but it wasn't always.
Still, a modern corporate network has calendar support. IT either picks the solution, or a motivated group of users picks Outlook/Exchange.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
As someone who doesn't really care about OSes or software manufacturers too much, just as long as the damn thing works, I feel pitching it as Linux Rules/M$ Sucks is not a good way to go. IMX, though, Outlook is a dreadfully overdesigned client, but Outlook Express is too simplistic (I only fire up OE at work when I want to use the Japanese IME), and then of course there's the scope for VB virii, and M$'s total disregard for nettiquette - top posting in replies, HTML to Usenet, inability to thread properly, etc, etc. The last two companies I've worked for had POP3 hosts (one NT, one Solaris) and we choose whatever we want to read mail - I'm a Forte Agent man myself.
Much better than any proprietary system, and as for the calendar/scheduling systems everyone is talking about here, do people *really* use them?
What's with the Holy War stuff, anyway?
I've been in shops that Threw The Switch and mail service was at best flaky while they got the Exchange system working. You can probably sell a dual system as a fail-safe compromise.
Exchange actually is better suited as a departmental mail server than as a corporate mail host. So by all means the people who want to use Exchange should have an Exchange server hanging off of the main mail system, and those who don't want to use it can continue to use the Sendmail hosts.
What a concept.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think that Microsoft products in general are becomming increasingly popular and this is giving rise to newcommers trying to hop on the bandwagon to secure a future with a big paycheck but who don't get MSCE certified then blame the software, not themselves, when things go wrong.
You must also look at the popularity of the software and the availability of 3rd party software. Very few companies will develop their own software solutions but rather purchase them from 3rd party vendors. This is where Microsoft products get a lot of their strength. If you want some sort of virus filtering mechanism for Exchange you have easily 50 or so separate companies with software checked out and ready to go. I don't think this is so on a *NIX based platform. I don't think the software selection is there.
Also support is a HUGE concern as well. If you have a problem with Exchange you have a team of several hundred techs (all MSCE certified themselves) ready to help you get your Exchange server going. Aside from that there are several 3rd party support companies as well that help you setup and administer your Exchange server. On a *NIX based system, if you're running some sort of open-source package you found on the Internet, nine times out of ten all that's available for support are "user forums" where administrators just talk to each other about what MIGHT be the problem and solution. With a fully trained tech support staff you can get definite answers much easier (and usually faster as well).
Also I think the IT industry has a rather quick turnaround time. You're usually in and out within a couple years at these kinds of administration jobs. So you need a product that's going to be well supported and well documented so that a new guy to replace the old administrator won't be in the dark about such things as what patches are installed, what "personal" touches were put into the system, ect... that you would get with a *NIX based platform.
And notice I haven't even touched upon base features because I don't even have to.
Stability, not in just software but in tech support and "longevity" of the company are key factors in picking your server platform. Microsoft wins out in all these catagories. And 3rd party software is much more prevalent and available than any *NIX system.
These are corporations we're talking about folks. Not universities.
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"There is no off position on the genius switch." --Dave Letterman
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Or you could just ran an antivirus program (like Norton or Trend) on the Exchange server.. they scan all incoming and outgoing e-mails.. works great..
I have no great love for Microsoft products, but the Outlook/Exchange solution works well.
If implemented well it allows several important business tools.
Group calendaring (the best feature, IMHO)
Group tasking
Address/Contact Management
Powerful email managment
Yes, you can achieve all these things with seperate applications and servers, but with Outlook/Exchange they are combined into one system.
You can't base all you business decisions on the "Microsoft is Evil" philosophy. You need to base business decisions on what is best for the company's productivity and bottom line.
If someone has a opensource complete replacement for Outlook/Exchange, I'm all ears. Until then, Microsoft has a good product and I recommend using it.
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nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Wow, a system that was built before M$ absorbed it runs a different OS? WOW!
Hotmail needs a light architecture as it doesn't provide what Exchange provides. That's like saying a F1 driver should use a Cavalier because they're both cars.
This entire argument might be due to moronic executives:
PointyHaired Boss: "I want you to order an SQL Server."
Dilbert (thinks to self):Hmm, does he know what he's talking about or has he been reading those IT magazines again?
(asks PHBoss a question): In what color would you like that server?
PointyHaired Boss: "I think that mauve has the most RAM."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I happen to work at the Navy too - in fact NAVSEA in their infinite wisdom required us to go exchange for compatibility reasons.
"heck of a lot of hardware" no kidding . . . We went form a single Sun box for e-mail and News to friggen wall of NT machines. In fact they recently installed exchange at a small detachement with serveral hundred uses and it required 2 $20K servers to handle the load.
Group ware. bla. The future to Groupware is http not some propietary protocol/solution. Our group used a Linux box together with Apache and Perl to provide a wide range of groupware functions that far surpass what Exchange provides. Things like Corporate memo document logs, Drawing repository, Corporate photo album, Online Operational logs, Resource schedulers, Phone books, System FAQs, etc.
Hey, perhaps you remember the I Love You virus and the copy cats after that. What did that cost . . .
Also, what about the others who like Macs, or Unix ?
Hey do you remember "I love U" was that a lot of fun.
Let me preface this by saying that I am a UNIX bigot.
That said, a properly implemented MS Exchange system, in conjunction with Outlook, can provide a lot of features not found in your standard Sendmail/IMAP setup.
Outlook provides a lot of features of those do-all office systems that have been tried many times (and mostly failed, Notes being the biggest exception), including a well-integrated calendar system (users can schedule meetings by e-mail that can automatically be inserted into calendars and acknowledged by receipients). It requires Exchange for the back end, however (using Outlook as an IMAP client apparently breaks this).
It is used quite extensively at my current client, but isn't required. I had to opt for an IMAP solution for flexibility (long live Pine!)
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
I am not my companies' system admin, but being the most knowledgable about linux in my firm, I basically adopted our linux webserver/email server last year (an outside consultant originally set it up). I upgraded the distro & cleaned it up to hum nicely (debian+qmail).
We have 250 users in 6 locations using the system.
Then discussion of changing to Exchange floated around the administrators, and they ran it by me. - I pointed to my box's uptime, and it's reliability, & warned of virii, etc., but through a political move, the email system was changed over to Exchange.
Initially, it was speed (or lack thereof) that was complained about. Linux is surprisingly efficient and quick when it comes to tasks such as this... -The first unfiltered virus hit within 2 weeks, with about 3-4 more virii following the week after the first.
I gained more people wanting the system back on linux that week...
If you do plan on changing to Exchange from *nix, just cover your ass- warn, re-warn, predict the problems, document everything from reliability to uptime, but most importantly:
KEEP THE OLD *NIX SYSTEM OPERATIONAL AT ALL TIMES!
It's important to have a way to send out/recieve those critical projects with immediate deadlines when the Exchange server is down- even if it is only via an IP send/return-address. -You'll still be the hero when the mail has a way to get in/out & the Exchange faction gets the egg on their face.
...some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant...
This is apart from the orginal problems involved in the change over. The virus hits at this *unnamed* company have also increased lately... including a recent selection of Fwd:funny, Jokes and whatever the other varients of the title are.
The complaints about exchange mail here are constant and frequent.
I strongly suggest finding out who is pushing the change over, find out what their goals are, and find a way to deal with it in the *nix enviroment.
Malk-a-mite
I mean to be civil, but lay off the fucking crack, man.
Here are some real-market numbers:
-Exchange Admin (Full-Time) for 5-10 Servers $60k
-Exchange Mailbox Servers for 1000 Users 1@~$9,000
-Exchange Bridgehead Server 1@~$9,000
-Antivirus Software ~$5000
-Client Software (Outlook 2000 free with Exchange)
-Migration ~$6000
You must be so disgruntled becuase you can't get any consulting business, especially at those prices. What are you trying to do, install Exchange of 486's? 1000 users is a typical limit per server for users, not because of Exchange, but all their mail.
As for Exchange/Outlook virii, if you got hit with them it's one of three reasons:
-you're the ass who opened the attachment
-you're the ass who doesn't know how to run the Rules Wizard in Outlook
-your're the ass of an Exchange admin who never installed AV software.
Our company setup an Exchange server and standardized Outlook on every workstation a few years ago. The result:
- We had to hire a very expensive exchange consultant.
- The number of viruses that came into our system rose from virtually none to, "Let's have company meetings on virus saftey since it's happening so much".
- The hardware and software resources for our mail systems rose at least twofold...
- ...while our downtime did the same thing.
I've never thought a simple mail server could use hundreds of megs of ram for a small company!As a tech you have to tell management to listen to the experts (you and your team). I've found it's better to put your job on the line and fight for the Right Thing then succomb to management dictatorship. If they fire you, fine, they're idiots. You don't want to work for a company that doesn't value your expert opinion.
Now that we've told management to fsck themselves, we are running Qmail on linux. Our mail system now has over 3500 users and over 1000 domain names which runs better than Exchange did with only a few hundred users.
The bottom line: Exchange _REALLY_ sucks!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Here's my current situation: We have 2 data centers, each serving the public at large. These centers are in 2 different states in the US. One uses an Exchange server, one site (mine) is still holding out - until they (the PC and NT group) can prove to me that exchange is stable enough to depend on.
My site gets it's mail every day, all day, 24x7. Once, about 2 months ago tmp filled up and delayed our mail for about 15 minutes.
The other site moved to exchange about a week before mellisa hit and was down for 2 days. I Love You took it down for another 2 days. It's been in full production at the sister site for about 7 months now and here are my observations: The exchange server is down EVERY WEEKEND (4 hours +) and _averages_ a couple hours of down time during the week. The PC and NT group says it's stable, and getting better every week. I don't know, maybe they got some new skins for the desktop, but it hasn't changed one bit as far as I can see.
I know this because when their mail dies, my site has to pick up the slack since we depend on mail for some of our system alerts.
Look, Exchange is inevitable (unless some of the open source clones get up to speed). It has business functions that are currently unmatched in an enterprise mail/scheduling capabilities offered elsewhere. But the stability factor can be devistating when you have a project that's falling behind and you need your documentation. Find another way.
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
In the end the users should use what they want and MS does a great job on UI. Yeah, it probably needs more care, but that's what techies are for. As far as scalability, I believe I have heard of corporations that have over ten thousand users on it and it works just fine.
Have you read my journal today?
We actually have a mix of SGI,SUN, and NT desktops. the UNIX boxes run a Citrix client - which we have had good results with
Right off the top of my small, pointy, head.
Pros:
1.)Portability. A user can keep all there email on the exchange server, and access this common mailbox from multiple locations.
2.)Scheduler/Task Manager. The scheduler can be neat for setting aside conference rooms, and scheduling meetings.
And a bunch of other neat features which I have never in my life seen anyone use.
Cons:
1.)High server maintenance workload. An exhange server for 1000 people will need 1 or 2 full time people for care and feeeding of the beast.
2.)No cross platform dependence. You only have windows clients, and a really clunky webmail interface.
3.)Cost. Microsoft charges for exchange server on a per-seat basis. (I think, not sure on this). This can be a decisive factor.
4.)Poor Reliability. Exchange does not have a high uptime track record. Your welcome to throw facts aat me, but based on my own anecdotal evidence, MS-exchange crashes fairly frequently.
5.)Security. Migrating to MS-Exchange invites you to the join the Exchange e-mail virus of the month club. The nature of the way MS-Outlook handles e-mail makes it vulnerable to virus attacks.
As a postscript, I would address the MS-Outlook faction with a functional equivalent to the scheduling and portability issues, maybe with web based email and an online scheduling app.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
The Good
- Unified message storage makes backing up everyone's mail a breeze
- Outlook MAPI clients get instant new message notification without having to check every 10 minutes - A HUGE PLUS. I have yet to see a POP/IMAP solution that does this reliably.
- Connects with pretty much every mail system out there
- Supports Outlook as a MAPI client, and all POP3 and IMAP mail clients running on any OS
- Fairly easy administration and all message system recipients are shown in the "Global Address List"
- Exchange performs quite well on a single processor system with 256MB RAM
- Installation is pretty easy
- Mail server clustering (failover) is supported, although at a cost
- If your users gripe enough, you can enable the web-based messaging at a performance cost
- Messages to multiple receipients are stored only once (with multiple pointers) to reduce information store usage
The BadIn short - I like Exchange for it's features. It definitely has an advantage over sendmail/pop/imap. BUT - The need for a dedicated server (difficult for smaller installations) and astronomical costs make the decision more difficult.
Hope this helps.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
The biggest security hole sits between the keyboard and chair.
-Andrew McAllister
Then someone in the organization needs to do a study to compare the competing groupware products -- MS Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell Groupwise are the main ones -- with your existing system, and do a cost/benefit analysis.
I'm a certified Notes/Domino sys admin, and I'm also about to write the MS Exchange 5.5 exam, so I have some credentials to say the following: I'd choose Notes/Domino over Exchange in just about all circumstances, but in either case make the investment only if you have the developers and business needs to make it worth your while. You can do some cool workflow automation with either tool, but if you don't have the developers to do it, it gets expensive; and if you don't have the business need, then save your money.
I prefer Notes/Domino. Admittedly MS has come a long way in competing with Lotus, and has in fact surpassed it with respect to integration with the user's experience (assuming MS Windows on the desktop), but architecturally Exchange still sucks (and not well, at that). And because all items in Notes are digitally signed by default, and the signatures are checked before code is executed, it's tougher to get rampaging worms bringing down your workflow system (all too easy with Exchange/Outlook). Oh, and the other cool thing Notes does is make digital signatures trivial to implement on forms, so you can actually move towards a paperless office and still keep authorizations and approvals official and secure.
And the Domino server will run on Unix, and it can share postings with NNTP servers, so you're not facing a major O/S overhaul.
At any rate, the bottom line is they've gotta make the business case. If they would like some help with that, hey, I'm a consultant, I'd be happy if they'd hire me to assist them with trying to make the business case. ;-)
PC-Pine. Simple and elegant, but a UNIX mentality helps to configure and use it. Other than Outlook, an average user might cope better with something like Eudora.
This is all about the calendar issue.
Executives like integrated calendars.
They REALLY like to mail people meetings, and click the "tell me when the sucker opens this meeting bomb" flag.
The solution:
-find some press clippings covering the fortune 500 companies who were devastated by iloveyou.
-make virus-disaster-recovery a line item expense. figure out how much losing email for two to three days as well as having lots of files destroyed would cost. make it a line item expense.
-take into account the fact that because outlook+exchange=email worm, everyone's hard drive must be backed up every day on a network file server so you can restore them all when a worm wipes every hard drive in the company. make this a line item expense.
submit your quote to the company for about a million dollars in losses a year, plus the backup system. then when they ask "can't we get around this email worm thing with a firewall or something?"
say: "no, email worms are a feature inherent in the outlook and exchange products and that feature cannot be disabled".
stick to your guns.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
There is, however, a large group of "underground" users who fiercely stick with Other OS environments, and use other email clients. We have pretty good Unix based POP3 servers, and people use either Netscape, or under Windows environments, Pegasis Mail.
The SOP for getting Outlook mail into the Unix mail system used to be setting up forwarding on the Exchange server, but that was incredibly painful, since Exchange stripped off all the mail headers, making forwarded email look like it was from yourself. You had to go back into Outlook to dig up return addresses anyway!
Recently, they just configured the POP3 protocol on the Exchange servers. This works much better, but is still a pain, since Netscape 4.x does not support multiple POP accounts. Mozilla does, as do some other clients. However, Mozilla (M18) still has "issues", so I can't use it as my default email client.
Bottom Line:
-
It is possible to live in an environment that supports multiple mail exchange systems.
-
You are going to have a very hard time converting all your current users to a new system. (I've seen people quit over smaller issues than this.)
-
It still seems silly to tripple your administrative costs, just so people can share calendars...
Find the reason why the managers want to change, and see if there is another, easier way to fill in the perceived gaps in your service.--
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I think the first thing you have to do is find out the precise motivating force for this move. The biggest reason I can think of for making such a transition is to passify the fears of small minds. I mean really. The current solution might be more complicated (on the surface) than Exchange/Outlook but I am sure that if the current admin staff has have of a brain they can learn it. Of course there are other reasons... maybe mangement wants corporate support for their client/server solution. Some people seem to think that just because you have a company to point the finger at when things blow up that it will somehow get repaired faster. We have all been on the phone with tech support and it is no better than getting on IRC or USENET and asking for help. It isn't like you can sue M$ for downtime! Show them the corporate accountability will NOT help make things run smoother. Not to mention the security problems that others have pointed out.
*sigh* Unfortuanly it sounds like you might be fighting a mighty political/buerocratic(sp!) power. The best technical defence in the world is often no match for, "I like Microsoft products." coming from a corporate VP who knows NOTHING about computers. In this case, I don't know what to tell ya. I work for small companies for a reason...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The software yahoo uses for it's mail system would be a complete drop in replacement for exchange, and can obviously handle huge loads. Obviously it runs on *nix.
Why don't they see that thing? Are they crazy, or is the code that much of a mess?
It seems to me they could bundle apache with their software and sell it as one big easy to install deal. they could even make a bsd or linux distro specifically for this purpose.
--
The first thing that we usually do whenever a "small but vocal" group demand new software/hardware/whatever is decide whether such a thing is actually needed because it improves performance, makes things easier, or fullfills a need rather than stroke a few egos or mollify someone who read an article in a magazine. Does Exchange fill a need in your organization's infrastructure, or is this just a group of people who got sold on some MS marketing propaganda? It sounds like you already have a robust and featured mail system in place that does everything that Exchange can, for a fraction of the cost. Unless Exchange does something that your existing system doesn't and your company requires, its going to be hard to justify the cost, time and headache it is going to be to switch to operating systems and MTAs. Standardizing on client email software is a Good Thing, but again you have to look at if the benefits outweigh the costs. Does Outlook provide something that isn't being taken care of now, and if you standardize on Outlook, can you support it?
HP is an american company. As you know the product is produced in the Pinewood England office. Openmail enjoys far more popularity in the EU/UK area than the US.
You probally did Openmail Internals just like I did.
This boils down to the following. Before outlook came out MS had there crappy exchange and MS mail clients/servers. At that point HP was years ahead of MS. HP released a NT version of Openmail. The word directly from HP was MS hit the fucking ceiling. They told HP that if Openmail wasn't pulled from the NT platform that they'd drop them from the NT VAR/OEM program. They would no longer get advanced releases. This would screw HP because they need to write drivers for NT for the custom hardware they make.
Openmail NT was pulled from the product lineup and is a footnote in history.
HP was really hoping that OS/2 would take a better hold of the market. At one point IBM sold a branded version of Openmail. When OS/2 crapped out that left HP out of the intel platform. And thus could never hold the costs down.
As far as cost reductions I can chip in the following. It was never the software it self that created the high cost for us as a HP Openmail customer. It was the cost of hardware and Unix support. Implimenting UNIX upgrades cost far more than NT service packs. Buying K series servers sucks big time.
This is where Linux comes in. If Linux becomes workable to the high end business customer this opens the door for large scale Intel boxes that would run openmail. Hardware costs would be reduced greatly, and the OS would be free.
That's my $.02
These log files are where things are stored before they are committed to the permanent database, and they go away when the Exchange Agent is notified of a successful system backup. (Follow all that? Lots of pieces have to work together here...)
Now, if something (like a locked file) prevents your backup from completing fully (or it even reports the right (wrong?) errors...) Exchange will just leave those log files there. They pile up at a steady rate -- I saw 20 MB/day for a ~40 person college department.
Now, here's the kicker: When the drive where the log files are stored gets to the point where there is less than 10 MB available, Exchange is hard-wired to crash! There's nothing you can do about it, your only option is to free up more space.
Now, I understand that you're in a much larger situation than this. However, in this instance, I was dealing with about 60 GB of total drive space for the Exchange machine. There were users that had 500 MB email files, and they just had to have all their data available to them wherever they logged on!! (Sheesh.) They hadn't had a successful backup in 2 months, and called my company when the email was 'broken.' Fun.
Still, if it isn't your server to administer, and you end up with a Minesweeper Certified & Solitaire Expert (MC&SE) type running things... you can expect reboots about every 4 days, and panic backups about every 2 weeks.
Also, Exchange depends on about a half-dozen different services being turned on and running. Most should start at boot, but don't bet on it. There could be some reason one doesn't start (couldn't lock a file, or some silliness...), and then: No email!
Running an Exchange Server is a full-time job, especially for 1000 people.
- <sarcasm> Remember it's
- GroupWare not just email! </sarcasm>
I'd wager that your current system allows you more flexibility, keeps your users happier, and costs you less manpower than Exchange will.Good luck.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I administer an Exchange Server. I use the term loosely as I don't have any idea how it works or does anything. Exchange Server with outlook is a very powerful combination for simple collaboration. However it is almost entirely likely that you will follow the same path we did and install it, make everyone use outlook then not bother with it again. There is so much that can be done with in terms of project management, scheduling etc etc. BUT we do none of that!!!! We use it for email. When we needed contact management software we didn't bother learning to do it in outlook, we bought Goldman. A great product but everything we use it for we could have used outlook. AND licensing is a nightmare. We are constantly getting new licenses. My advice: DON'T DO IT!!! Unless there is a true commitment to really using it. message typed in hurry, know i grammar bad
Managers may love whatever scheduling capabilities that Exchange/Outlook by them, but they are deluding themselves if they think anti-virus software solves all of the security woes that Outlook will bring them. The gain from the features must be weighed against the VERY real security flaws of Exchange/Outlook that will not be solved by any amount of anti-virus software.
Any realistic cost assessment should account for the possibility of all desktop machines getting wiped clean by the next generation of Outlook viri (that delete everything in sight, and don't even have to be opened or read to be triggered). The Lovebug was just the tip of the iceberg. Scheduling meetings at the click of the button may not be worth this.
I know of an experianced Exchange Admin who might be looking for some short term consulting work.I could clean up the virus action and have everyone back up in no time....
I have been frustrated over the years with the way that politics plays in spreading the Microsoft dis-ease. Let's face it, with all the money in the industry these days we have become flooded with thieves, liars, and charlatans.
Now while it is possible to fake it with Microsoft products, that just isn't going to happen with UNIX. Lesser talent can try and point and click their way to a solution, but hand them a command line and they are screwed!
Microsoft is very, very, good at selling their products to management and lesser skilled or naive technical people. Don't get me wrong I know some Microsoft techies that are quite talented but they just haven't used other platforms and don't realize that computers are supposed to actually work!
As for management, they often follow the adage of "Nobody, gets fired for recommending Microsoft." Well, if the email crashes & burns perhaps they should be fired.
In my experiences Exchange has been a total nightmare and frequent target of jabs against the Microsoft groups. At one company the UNIX group pulled ourselves off the Exchange server and ran our own mail system. At one point the Exchange server was blue screening multiple times per hour! They eventually discovered it to be a bug in MIME attachments or something. How can you possibly take any mail server seriously that causes the OS to crash whenever a user makes an email attachment?!?
Sure all the vaporware sounds great. Seamless calendaring, address books, attachments, and all that good stuff. Just remember, it mostly doesn't work. If you have a clean install of NT, all the latest service packs and patches and you don't do anything "unusual" then Exchange may work out for you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is that management won't get behind open source solutions because of their lack of support. I don't know if you have ever tried to get support from Microsoft or not, but in my experience they have been worthless. You would do better to troll the net for information!
I would suggest that you yell as loudly as is politically feasible to against Exchange. At least when it crashes & burns you will be able to say I told you so, as your pager goes off for the hundreth time that week.
good luck!
We have Exchange on our corporate LAN (230 users), and within the latest year we had two major crashes (downtime 1-2 weeks each), and are looking for alternatives to Exchange. Depending so heavily on one monolithic server for email, contact lists, calendar and stuff left us in a mess - even high management suddenly didn't know their appointments!
It turned out that subtle bugs in the database had corrupted things slowly, and our backups where worthless. When it eventually fell over, we lost most of our archives.
The official Corporate Solution is obvious - our policy is now that we're not supposed to rely on our mail archive...
Hopefully a worse ride than most - things get dead ugly when this thing is gone for a week!
Whish you a less monolitic solution.
-Henrik
Question; is it a request, or a demand?
If it's a request, go ahead and make a sound proposal. If it's a demand, then you might want to do the following:
Seriously, if they really want it, give it to them. Give them a list of every last thing that you'll need in order to make it work. Write down any additional network support costs that you might forsee. Add in any costs for additional firewalls, etc. Make damned sure you add in your overtime for the cost of the migration.
Then make sure you back up everything. In triplicate.
Make sure one of those copies is off-site. (At your house, for instance.)
If they really really want to move over to Exchange, let them. Just make sure you have a migration path backwards. And that you charge them for all overtime that occurs as a result. (It might be nice to get the names of the people who demanded the switch-over in writing, too, just so that you'll have someone to scapegoat if it totally screws everything up.)
This is what I would do, if it were a small company with few servers. If it were a larger network, where you have more than one office or intranet hub, with a mixed client-OS environment, I wouldn't even think about migrating. I don't know much about Exchange, but see if you can add an Exchange server for just the people who want the "added functionality." (And if you go that route, make _sure_ that everyone who uses it is informed that there will be no additional support provided to users of that box, and that uptime for that server is not guaranteed.)
Worst case, your boss is a moron, and fires you because he thinks you're incompetent with Exchange--before hiring you back a week later whenever the three MSCEs he hired to replace you destroy the rest of the network. (This is when that off-site backup you kept comes in handy.) Best case, only a few people use the new server, while the bulk of users continue to use the old system.
Good luck!
James
As someone who is about to change our email system to Exchange, I think the most important thing is to consider WHY you're converting the system over to Exchange.
Remember that Exchange isn't just a mail system per se, it's "groupware". This means you get:
* Enterprise Contacts (LDAP)
* Enterprise Calendering
* Enterprise "To Do" Lists
* An "application" platform
Most of the above (particularly the calendering) are a major hassle to implement with Unix/freeware solutions. You also have the major benefit (from a user perspective) of having this all integrated into a single client (Outlook), that is arguably the best client on the market.
You can also use Exchange as a platform for other applications, like CRM and faxing, that integrate into a single client. You also have web mail (more on that later), offline storage, and everything else you have now.
And relatively speaking (relative to other groupware packages, like Domino and Groupwise) Exchange is cheap.
The big downsides are:
* Exchange only runs on 2000/NT, which means that it's inherently less stable than a Unix solution.
* If you want to run Exchange 2000 you HAVE you be using a Windows 2000 PDC running Active Directory. This basically means that you have to rebuild your entire NT network.
* Exchange is a firewall nightmare because MAPI needs a wide range of dynamic ports. If you just allow POP3 outside the firewall, you lose most of the groupware benefits.
* Ditto for web mail. Also the web client is already somewhat "feature limited". You will basically need some sort of web proxy.
* Relative to your current solution, Exchange is pretty bloated. THis means that you will probably need a LOT more space on the server per user. Assume around 100MB per user. So that means you'll be looking at 100GB of space. However, as cheap as storage is nowadays, I don't consider this a major problem.
* In order to use most of the groupware features you need to use Outlook. This might be a major issue of your network isn't completely or mostly Windows-based. Though I do understand that the Mac version of Outlook works pretty well.
So really what it boils down to is: Do you need groupware? And does Exchange best meet these groupware needs? Other groupware packages include Lotus Domino, Netscape Messagning and Calendaring, and Novell Grouwise. I've personally had bad experiences with Netscape and Groupwise, but YMMV.
If it really is about the PHB's wanting calendars (for one another), could you limit your risks by moving JUST them to a single Exchange Server?
They'd get what they want, without forcing it on everyone else. Plus, you'll be able to show a live comparison/contrast each time Exchange locks up, goes down, passes a virus, etc. and the everyone else on the Unix server is still ticking along with no problems.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
I find Outlook (in my case, Express) to be a very good mail client. The ability to sort out all my different e-mail accounts into different categories (my business, personal, and magazine) is a godsend. It can handle POP3, IMAP, and HTTP mail servers. The real Outlook is really a PIM with this incredible (although M$-made) mail client in it, and if I could get my hands on an MS Office CD, I would, just for Outlook (I think Lotus SmartSuite's grown on me, 'cept for Organizer).
When I do get my Linux box sometime soon, what's the closest thing to Outlook? I'm going to want it _badly_.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Some idiot in your company saw or herd something about MS Exchange and that they are able to burp and fart at the same time while reading there e-mail. So now everybody has to get this new e-mail server application. I speak from experence, Exchange is very problematic, I have yet been able to restore an exchange server, with the help of M$ themselfs. Do yourself a favor. Stick with what you've got and If they want Exchange so bad, then they can support it themslefs.
Every Admin I've met who offers the "solution" of Exchange just thinks it's cool. They usually are MCSE's and have a big personal stake (lots of time and energy) put into MS certification. And there are some things to say for standardization...I just can't think of any ;-). In my experience these "standardized" MS Exchange email systems are highly vulnerable to virus and worm attacks. This is a natural result of the lack of emphasis on security which Microsoft seems to relish and on standardization itself.
zoom, zoom...
If Novell's still selling it, look into Groupwise. It's got all the email, all the calendaring, and all the sharing of outlook. I don't think its got the security problems, and it works pretty nicely. It may be a pain to administer tho. It's also got a decent API that lets you interface other programs with it. In my case I tied in the medical campus event calendar on the web into groupwise to let people post events to their own calendars. The work was straight forward. I'd also look into open source solutions for this same feature. There's something out there called "V Card" if I have the name right--probably don't.
Actually backups are not difficult, restores are. The standard way to do it seem to be to have a second exchange server and restore the entire database to that one, then copy the data to be restored between the 2 databases. This requires a dupilate system, with a matching amount of disk space, and additional Exchange licences, possibilly including the enterprise level upgrades if your database is large enough.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
1000 users is really pretty small, even for Exchange. However, HP's OpenMail provides calendar, address book and email functionality to Outlook users and runs on *NIX. Lotus Notes/Domino also runs on Sun, and I understand they were trying to make the Outlook client fully compatible with Outlook. Exchange can be scary if something gets corrupted. I was once involved with an Exchange server that had a single corrupt mailbox that was responsible for blowing up an Exchange box with 1000+ other users. Microsoft flew people in to help, but they couldn't do much other than to say rebuild and restore from tapes taken previous to the corruption. Remember, Exhange was built to run on top of a modified version of the Microsoft Jet (MS-Access) database (called Jet Blue). Unless you are going to use the latest version of Exchange that can use a SQL Server 7.0 back-end, be scared, very scared of Exchange if it crashes.
dmp
Stop talking about who's to blame when all that counts is how to change --"Born of Frustration" - James
"There is no reason to change the systems utilised currently for exchange of correspondence, or e-mail, as it were, as they are fully functional, robust, and most importantly, compliant with widely-accepted standards. We have yet to experience any problems with this system. By introducing a new system, we risk inconsistencies, service outages, and many other things associated with this sort of drastic change. Thus, I feel it is unnecessary, and possibly quite risky, to remove the current, working system that is in place. Thank you for coming eating at McDonald's, please drive through." If that doesn't work, have a talk with your boss, and subtly hint that a member of the opposing party slept with his wife.
With Don Lapre's amazing money-making plan, I am now able to live in this cardboard box with no worries at all!
I work in a location that gives new meaning to the word "mixed environment" (1) the email/imap works on sendmail I suspect (not my department), accessable from netscape messenger, pine, webmail and outlook.
There's also Ontime32 running on an NT 4.0 server that's also running a unix/telnet emulator. Maybe that's a solution?
(1) - "mixed environment" including dos, through win2000, linux, macs, beos (I think), and netware from 3.11 through 5, unix boxes of various styles and power, and a controls lab that used to run on 6502's (commodore 64)
There's something similar at the company I work for. IT runs Exchange servers, and everyone has to use M$ Outlook to get their email: I personally think this sucks. I feel that using a POP3 mail server and allowing all users to access their mail through their chosen email client is the way to go.
On the topic of uneducated users, about every email client in the world is easier to configure than Outlook. There's also the possible element of expense: if not all members of your user community have Outlook, you'll have to purchase copies of the software (or at least get a big site license).
You've got the possibility to piss off a large number of users by forcing them to use Outlook instead of the programs they already know and love.
I'd have to agree. Companies like it for it's groupware capabilities. Being able to share your calendar with co-workers and being able to reserve conference rooms and view scheduling issues are just a couple of the good features Exchange offers. Unfortunately, the Exchange/Outlook combo sucks with regard to virus propogation and some security issues. I'm not promoting Exchange, but I can understand why large companies want and use it. *nix systems just don't offer that kind of groupware functionality as far as I know. But it won't be too long before they do!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
Have there been any specific reasons to switch to outlook/exchange? Or are people just saying it, and 'yes men' are jumping on board because it sounds professional?
A large number of other comment seem to agree with me, as well as my own personal experance in doing a 1000+ rollout.
I can point out that Seimens used to use Unix system for everyone world wide, which was a single Sun server- they replaced the whole thing with an Exchange farm and have had many, many headaches from the process.
Any process will have hidden costs, downtime, and lost productivity - for what? What feature does Exchange have over what they are currectly using?
And, I am not saying that Exchange is a bad thing either. If it is used as the default from the beginning, or if there are statigic reason to change then by all means, change.
As for me being disgruntled? ha. I don't work as a consultant, 'cause I know how to do the work.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
The Exchange in Office Mac, IIRC, is actually a rewritten version of another popular Mac email program that got discontinued (the name escapes me), and the guys who wrote that got hired by Microsoft's Mac software division.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I can say that PHB's like being able to see each other's calendars. Exchange/Outlook makes this really easy to implement and for a small shop (single server, and say under 100 users), it's really easy to set up right out of the box.
There's a product called Meeting Maker that allows controlled, user initiated proxy (viewing of someone else's calendar). *And* it runs on Windows, Mac, PalmOS, Java and UNIX.
It even scales to thousands of users and runs on various server platforms too...
No, I don't work for them or own any stock.
-jjh o|
--Do what I did when my company wanted Exchange.
"Exchange, hmmm.
Well you'll have to send me to school, and we'll need a new server, and licenses.
Hey I know! Let's use mail.com they do Exchange hosting...
Well no, our intranet would be gone...
No we wouldn't have all those neat things that Notes does for our clients...
Hey but you could do an auto sig...
Oh, OK you want to stick with what we have? Well alright."
This
On the client side the DB (.ost file) also is subjec to frequent corruption and is utterly unrecoverable Try running "SCANPST.EXE" on the file. SCANPST is installed by default with Outlook and works on .pst and .ost files. (Sometimes you have to run it more than once....)
Two months ago, the central IT department at the large Silicon Valley company for which I work sent everyone a message saying they would be rebooting the Exchange servers that night. At the end of that message was a short blurb that from now on the Exchange servers would be rebooted on the first Saturday of every month.
Last month this schedule changed to the first Friday of every month, and yesterday we received a message that the servers will be rebooted in the middle of this month as well (tonight, to be precise).
Your mileage may vary.
I have to agree here.
I work at a company with about 10,000 users. We have 20 exchange servers. And even with this many, they are still fairly bogged down.
I work with another company that has 5,000 users. They have 2 DEC Unix machines running sendmail, and one of them is a backup that only takes over if the first has a hardware failure. So, in reality, those 5,000 users are all on 1 server.
What does this say about Exchange? To me, it says that Exchange is incapable of handling more than 1/10th of what Sendmail is capable of. And realize, the hardware on these machines isn't all that different. Also, the site with 5,000 users has roughly 1.5x the mail volume per user.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
The cpu and disk cost should be low: the data structures are simple and scale well.
The only operation that's "expensive" is the one that
most people want
few programs provide.
This is overlaying multiple people's calendars when looking for mutually-free times for meetings, and it's cpu-and-memory-intensive on the client machine.
In short, start a counter-community who will demand the others drop Exchange (as it refuses to exchange data with non-MS products (;-)).
--davedavecb@spamcop.net
I know for a fact that Exchange doesn't support mass mailing lists out of the box. I'm sure there is a multi-thousand dollar add-on that will enable it, but you wanted reasons, and this is one, unless you keep a Nix box around just for that purpose.
Sig missing. Reward.
Actually, it might make support easier in the long run, but not in the short run. Anyone out there who's worked at a helpdesk knows that if you mandate change, more people will call.
That's not to say that you can't set a policy that people are grandfathered if they're using something else, but that new people must use (whatever), or that you'll only support (whatever). If you force everyone to change in a short period, for the next couple of weeks, you'll get a flood of calls about it.
First, you'll get the simple, 'I need help configuring (whatever)', which isn't bad, but we all know that they majority will wait 'till the last day mandated for the change.
Next, you get the 'I need to pull my (email|history|preferences) into (whatever)' type calls. Depending on exactly what they want, and what they're going to/from, this may or may not be so easy.
And then, anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks in, you start getting the 'Where's (feature) that I had in (last product)?' along with the 'This is a technical question, and I called technical support, and I expect an answer' and 'What, it doesn't have it? Why they hell are you making me switch to (whatever), then, when it's clearly a piece of crap if it doesn't have (feature).'
If people are getting along fine with their product, let them keep using it. If they start having questions, then you politely inform them that you don't support that product, and if they want support, they'll need to more to (whatever).
If it's something that you just happen to know, because you really use (last product) yourself, you need to tell them that it's an unsupported product, but you just happen to know that answer, and so you might not be able to help them next time. [DO NOT let on that you know (last product) well, or you'll get people calling the help desk specifically asking for you]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It would be impressive to see a SMP system
running Netware 6 and Groupwise 5.5x.
I have ran older versions of Groupwise over
the years and find it runs great and more
useful then Exchange. But I would agree
on the "if it aint broken, then don't mess with it" argument. If force Exchange on the network, then put those responsible in charge of it (setup and support) and NOONE else, that will serve them right.
From running an Exchange server and dealing with users who're all on Outlook, I learned very quickly to hate Microsoft.
Their server relies on entirely proprietary storage methods, and when the "message store" decides to corrupt itself, it's a nightmare to recover.
The Outlook client is another nightmare, given its ability to let users receive virus files and infect their own machines because "Bill_Gates_piece.jpg.pif" appears as "Bill_Gates_piece.jpg" when they're looking at it.
Now, I've got a better reason to hate Outlook/Exchange even more - my parents are currently going through recovery from a nasty little W95.MTX infection, which wouldn't have happened if they were using just about *any* other POP3 client for their e-mail.
I've heard all of the arguments about the calendar, the address book, directory services, et cetera ad nauseam. Let's be realistic - nobody but the PHBs actually *relies* on the calendar/scheduling functions, and any LDAP server will work as the directory (Stalker's CommuniGate Pro, for example, includes LDAP services as part of the installation - and it doesn't require migration to NT to run it, either.)
I'm still using Eudora in an office where most of the employees have to call the Help Desk once or twice a week because Outlook or Exchange is misbehaving. I'm just glad that I'm no longer the one that has to support that monstrosity.
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
Points for Exchange...
1) It is trivial to set up. By this I mean the default (insecure) configuration can be running in about fifteen minutes.
2) It works well with Microsoft clients (i.e., Windows).
3) Good support for calendaring/scheduling applications.
Points against Exchange...
1) It's difficult to secure. I could take up a few pages listing the problems with viruses, attachments, and suchlike, but it would be far better if you looked at SecurityFocus for yourself. Some things cannot be secured except with client-side modifications or zapping usefulness like e-mail attachments.
2) Stability. I can't offer much except my experience with Exchange vs. Sendmail. The Exchange server required weekly reboots -- I'm not certain if this was the fault of the underlying OS (WinNT4) or Exchange, but my perception was that it was unstable. When we got hit with a ILOVEYOU variant, the script that MS provided would crash the entire box. Sendmail ran forever until once when the CPU usage peaked and sendmail's threshold limit was exceeded. This took over twenty minutes to figure out with technical assistance.
3) Exchange does not work well (or at all) with non-MS clients.
4) Cost is high in comparison. 5) More difficult to integrate with non-MS servers.
As someone else mentioned, the calendar/meeting integration is key to a large business.
;)
I've used Exchange at two of my past three companies. I have worked with the Network admins at one company in particular. Yes Exchange may have it's growing pains. But it really does help us schedule meeting rooms and people.
I have also ran mail servers on both Unix/Linux and NT. If I was looking to handle mail only, I would stick with a mail server (qmail). As a manager, Exchange really does have it's advantages, including the near future of integration with source safe for those teams of programmers on WIN platforms.
I have one foot in both worlds (linux & MS). You almost have to remove the blindfolds and appreciate both of the OS's for what they are. Provide your mgt. with the pros/cons of each. Your mgt. may be narrow minded with the bells and whistles of a new application as well. Remind them of that.
The new Exchange server may help eliminate meeting room confliction between teams and help bring everyone together, but is it worth the time and pain of removing a perfectly good system already in place?
Hey just my two bits!
Mark
BTW...Does anyone know of a GOOD scheduling tool on the Linux side of the house, besides a Netscape related product?
I'm not just saying this as a *nix advocate (which I am) but I can't begin to tell you how many virii have been spread that are specifically designed for the Outlook/Exchange combo. Just take a look at McAfee's site and see what types of viruses you find and see what percent only work with Outlook or exchange or work better with them. If you must have calendaring there are *nix solutions available and if the company doesn't want to go with a *nix solution, try Groupwise with Novell first. It's a much better product and doesn't transmit nearly as many virii. You should be able to make a compelling case just looking at the virus problem.
Have you brought this up HP OpenMail with them? Its a very nice system, and is compatible with almost any mail client, including Outlook.
I administer five Exchange boxes (Quad P-III Xeon 450's with 1GB RAM each) to support over 3500 users. We have one site that is spread out over about 7 geograpic locations and is connected with OC-48. Uptime and reliablity are VERY importiant for the company that I'm working for. I have never had any significant problems with Exchange, in fact I have been very surprised at it's performance. My biggest problem is training users (and management) about the things that they can do with Exchange. Exchange is one product that MS got right.
We pretty much know what people on /. will say on this one, don't we? BTW, if you've had Exchange forced on you (like me) make sure they turn on IMAP and/or POP support so you don't have to use that buggy MS client (Outcast? ShoutOut? Outtake? Outdated?).
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
My Co. has been using an Exchange server, and although it is functional with those calendars and automatic meetings, we only have about 60 users. Maybe more like 80 or 100 if you consider we run internal and external systems (the internal is inside a bank and is isolated for security purposes). I forsee the management of the Exchange users getting out of hand real quick as we exceed 100+ users. I don't think I would trust any M$ product with ~1000 users and not expect it to crash regularly, either.
Sorry - I forgot to add full shared calendar and schedule support to the good list. It's one of the most given reasons for choosing Exchange.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Those logs are probably typical, except for the fact that most Exchange admins have given up logging downtime.
Exchange is based on two gigantic JET (think Access) databases. Desipte being on the market for 4 years, the database format has never, ever been stable.
Databases are not a hard problem, and in theory are prettier than a bunch of little files and indexes all over the filesystem. Microsoft even has a decent solution in MS-SQL. Other vendors like Lotus and Novell do not have serious problems with database consistancy. The issue isn't the database -- it's Exchange's buggy shitwad implementation.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Day one:
[it guy] So, you have current antiviral software, and you understand our connection policies, right?
[me] Yep. Any of this you want to see for yourself, or is my word good?
[it guy] Nah, you're ok.
Day 20:
[me] So, how bad did you guys get hit by that new virus?
[it guy] Not too bad - only about {# corresponding to 8% of the company}.
[me] Ok. You do realize that you're the biggest point of vulnerability on my network, too. We use straight up SMTP/POP/IMAP, both for portability and 'cause it's safer.
[it guy] Yeah, I wish we could too. Then I could let folks use pretty much whatever mailreader they were comfortable with. But {corporate, marketing} won't let us - they think it's much cooler to stay with Microsoft's "integrated" stuff. Mostly it's just a pain to deal with on a continuing basis.
Every client in the last year, it's been pretty much the same story.
And nobody has ever hacked a *nix architecture, right? Hrm.
At least be truthful.
What about Lotus Notes? It runs on Unix. I worked for a University and they supported ~12000 students on a few midsize servers. It has a pretty nice Email client as well as webaccess. I have seen Exchange running at a local Navy datacenter. It was supporting about 25k users, but the boxes were HUGE.
> OutLook has security problems. But step 1 is to
> put in a GOOD anti-virus app at your entry point
> to Exchange, and all other mailbox servers if
> you really want to cover yourself.
I can never believe it when I hear people saying things like this. Outlook blindly executes certain script attachments without prompting the user. That's a serious sercurity problem. The solution to the problem is not to try and stop such scripts from ever getting into exchage. That's just treating the symptoms. The solution is to fix the PROBLEM, not the symptoms, and the problem is outlook, not the viruses themselves.
Calendaring.
Lowered training costs.
Lowered support costs.
Ability to add on required widgets.
That required widget where I work is document retention. Owing to a legal battle a few years ago where someone found a steaming email that tipped the case, Legal decided that all email shalt live for 30 days and none more (with a few exceptions). We had to come up with a way of doing that, and a way of preventing email from being downloaded to the client. Needless to say, we didn't settle on Exchange (and I've admin'd on qmail, sendmail, Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, TAO, OpenMail....)
In a tech-saavy company, with tech-saavy people, the email system doesn't matter. Out here in the real world, where folks can't and don't install their own anything, and you have to send them to class, you do have to homogenize to save money.
Do steer clear of Exchange. Storing all the messages in one big database is asking for trouble. And it is trouble when the message store gets corrupted.
Why not consider Novell's Groupwise. Cost for product are about the same, it's widely scaleable, and has all the features (minus the problems) of Exchange
As an added bonus, Outlook is supported as a client. Webmail is available, Palm PDA's can be synched with Adress book and calendar with Puma's software.
you can also forward mail from the same domain to other non-groupwise servers, for legacy system support.
Between that and your comments on viri it's pretty obvious you have never experienced the real world. Try telling a pointy haired manager that it's his fault that he sent the "I Love You" virus to all his golfing buddies down at the country club. You'll quickly find yourself on the street trying to peddle your half-assed Exchange configuration to some other sucker.
But, but, but they said in MSCE class that it would work just fine!
At my previus job we had made the same transition. From AIX to Solaris Sendmail and then ultimately to MSExchange. Some of the reasons that we moved over where.
1. The cost of the hardware for an x86 platform was significantly cheaper.
2. The cost of people to adminsiter the tech nology was cheaper. (UNIX admins are more expensive thatn NT Admins)
3. Exchange provided canned Web access to email. No development resources had to be reasigned.
4. We needed to standardized on an email platform. So that tech support needed only to manage one piece of software.
5. The tight integration between the MS Office product, which was already standard, and Exchange made the multimedia capable Exchange much more viable.
6. Exhcange is not just email it is groupware, meaning it facilitates the organization and sharing of information for teams.
There where many other reasons, but these are the ones that I am sure show up on every list. Basically, this is what management is thinking. If you can counter these points with solutions that run on your current unix setup then you have a good chance of turning the tide of change. Be forewarned, comercial solutions that do this on unix systems are just as if not more expensive than Exchange. Then you are left with the question of what Emial client do you standardize on?
Outlook is probably the number one security risk on the net. Compile the list of security issues and use that in your case to not fix something you already have working.
You don't use outlook for it's email capabilities anyway, you use it for the shared calenders, I'm sure you can find another way to do that.
Our Enterprise (well over 100k people spread over the world) uses Exchange. Outlook couldn't handle the load. I guess we are going to be going to Outlook2000 in six months, but as of right now, we are running Exchange 5.0.xxxxxx.
I wouldn't use Outlook, too many security features. Exchange doesnt have the goofy preview and run malicious code stuff going on. But, like people said before - if its not broke, don't fix it.
-- toolie
It looks like almost everyone in this message thread keeps bringing up the e-mail virus issue. Unfortunately, none of them know what the hell their talking about. I've run large Sendmail and large Exchange servers. Contrary to what appears to be common belief here on Slashdot, running Exchange *DOES NOT* necessarily increase your risk from e-mail viruses..
There has never been an e-mail virus that effects Exchange server.. Email viruses are entirely a client side problem. Specifically, there are two factors that *may* increase your vulnerability to e-mail viruses:
1) Migrating all of your users to Outlook on Windows. Although Exchange will do vanilla POP/IMAP/SMTP (thereby allowing non-Outlook users to get and send mail) I'm assuming that your management wants everyone to use the shared folders, calendering, etc of Outlook. (Otherwise what is the point of moving to Exchange??). Outlook is *THE* target platform for e-mail virus writers. If a significant portion of your users are currently using something else for an e-mail client, moving them all to Outlook will DEFINATELY increase your vulnerability to e-mail viruses. However, if most of your users are already on Outlook or Outlook Express, you've already got that level of vulnerability. Whatever you run as an e-mail server isn't going to help or hurt.
2) In addition to a normal personal address book, Outlook/Exchange users all have a global address book that lists the e-mail address's etc. of every account on the Exchange site, as well as distribution lists, etc. This is one of the nice usability features managers love about the Outlook/Exchange combo, but is also one of the things that makes it a lightning rod for e-mail worms like ILOVEYOU. ILOVEYOU would distribute itself to everyone in your address book. For Exchange sites, that meant EVERYONE in the damn company. Each of these systems would then AGAIN send it to EVERYONE, etc. Note however, that this again isn't an Exchange specific problem. All Exchange sites will have this problem, but so will any sites that use another method for creating a company wide address book in your e-mail program. This includes using LDAP, or just manually/automatically, etc pushing out a new address book file to all desktops.
As you can see, Exchange *ITSELF* isn't vulnerable to e-mail viruses, and does not *necessarily* increase your vulnerability to e-mail viruses. An Exchange setup does, however, encourage you to create a nearly worst-case possible client-side e-mail setup. This is definately bad, but you might *already* have this level of vulnerability no matter what you're running as a mail server. It's the client site setup that is the problem...
In any case, no matter what your mail server is, you should definately be running an antivirus software on the server to scan all incoming and outgoing e-mails. Trend Micro makes a good one for both Exchange and Sendmail, and I believe Norton does as well. Running a good antivirus software is the ONLY effective, realistic, server side measure to protect your users from e-mail viruses.
You might definately want to find out *WHY* management want you to move to Exchange. Is it just because it's the new buzz word around the CEO clubs? Or do they want Exchange specific features??
If you do have to go with Exchange, like most NT "solutions" it can be made reasonably reliable, but that means throwing quite a bit of hardware at it. Plan on a lot more hardware to run your Exchange server than you currently use for your Sendmail server. For just POP/IMAP/SMTP, Exchange is unbelievably bloated. It's size only really makes sense if you look at all the other stuff it does...
Keep in mind when sizing your server that unlike a Unix Sendmail server, a lack of resources (cpu, ram, etc) won't just make the system run slower, it will dramatically decrease the stability of the system. Also, an Exchange server (unless it's for only a VERY small number of users) should definately *not* be running any other services (it should not even be a domain controller). This seems strange to most Unix admins, who are used to being able to push thier boxes to high levels of utilization, but is unfortunately pretty standard practice in the MS world.
You might also be able to run a hybrid mail setup. Use Exchange in the office for user mailboxes, scheduling, etc. Leave your existing Sendmail servers up as your "mail hubs".. That way your exchange servers can remain behind your firewall, with the more easily securable Unix systems getting the exposure in your DMZ. Also, if your Exchange servers should take a noze dive, Internet mail will just pile up in the mail queue on the Unix servers until you can get things straightened out.
Good luck!!!
Most of you bitches whining about Exchange/Outlook being hard to manage speaking "from personal experience" are just incompetent. You can't figure out how to configure anything more complex than an SMTP daemon, and you fuck the whole works up. But it's never "gee, maybe I should read a book and do this shit the right way," it's "damn PHB management forced this M$ stuff down our throat, and it's buggy and doesn't work right. Woe is me, i wish I could be running postfix!" Furthermore, you can't
--
--
You want to play a fucken game?
I've been in both environments - MS Exchange, and Sendmail - I concurrently use Wintel, Mac, and Linux machines - and I think MS Exchange is the best thing out on the market right now for corporate email/messaging - yes, there are a lot of vulnerabilities with viruses and such - but hands down nobody has the features that Exchange does unless it's a custom web solution (and even then it's not like running MS Exchange). It would be nice to see someone step up and create a similar package that runs on a Unix based server - but until then, MS Exchange is the only way to go...
I am an MS-Certified Exchange Guru. I've been responsible for over 30,000 Exchange / Outlook seats worldwide. That being stated, I'm also a Linux/Solaris/Unix expert, and can look at Exchange from a pro-MS or not-so-pro-MS standpoint.
In terms of eye candy, usability, and features, the Exchange / Outlook combination has a lot going for it. Built-in calendaring (nice for an enterprise), contacts, public folders, collaboration, and the like. Plus MS has been doing this for over four years, so the solution is much more robust than when they started.
Another great feature about Exchange is interoperability. It talks POP and IMAP, so your users can keep on using Netscape / Pine clients if they want to. And there is a web-based client (Outlook Web Access) that works across all browsers and includes the calendaring and contact features.
All of that being said, yes, Exchange is a great enterprise messaging / collaboration solution. (No, I don't work for MS marketing.) It works with everything and has achieved robustness.
However, there are some downsides. (you knew this was coming, right?) Exchange is an expensive solution for the server, the Client Access Licenses, and the desktop Outlook client. In addition, reliability is determined by what operating system you run, and Microsoft doesn't play with any other OS's except Windows. Which also means you must have a full NT Domain / Active Directory set up beforehand because that is the security model Exchange relies on. In addition, global Exchange infrastructures are complex to set up and complex to support.
Is Exchange the right solution for a new company starting out using Windows servers and clients? Yes, if you want to shell out the bucks! Is it the right solution for a heterogenous company that already has an e-mail solution in place that is working well? Maybe. Depends on where you want to put those dollars.
David Allen
Independent Consultant
Exchange database is a mess. It's nearly impossible to restore a single user's mailbox unless you have a duplicate exchange server to work with - each of our 10 offices has not one but 2 $50,000 exchange servers, one as a hot backup because the thing crashes so often (and to restore mailboxes) - when the entire mail system goes down you're likely to find that at least 1/2 of your backups are unusable (you discover this about 2/3rds of the way through the restore I've found). Our last failure knocked us out for 3 days, that's working 24/7 to restore. Microsoft, of course, was of little help. On the client side the DB (.ost file) also is subjec to frequent corruption and is utterly unrecoverable (this usually happens one hour into your 16 hour flight to Tokyo). On the plus side you have slipstick which is an amaizing exchange and outlook resource, and you have 'groupware' features. Kind of. For example, if you want to share contacts between people you can, but not if you want to do it through the API (i.e. make your neat Word letter template see someone else's contacts for addresses). Here's one I just had to deal with - exchange automatically resolves email addresses entered in contacts to the GAL (Global Address List) - and resolves them with an x400 format REGARDLESS of how you have the user's mail configured in the GAL. Even if you don't *have* an x400 mail entry (because Exchange 5.5 uses x400 as the default protocol, I think). Try to send a contact to someone and all they see is O=[Org]/OU=[unit]/CN=[user]. Try to access the GAL through the API and you get the same thing. Beautiful. I could continue but it's depressing me. I hear Exchange 2000 is *much* better but I'll have to see it to believe it.
closed minded is as closed minded does
exchange server with outlook client has alot of nifty features like automatic meeting scheduling, tasking etc. but you will only get these benefits if everyone in the company actually uses the software correctly. suppose i want to schedule a meeting with a dozen other coworkers and outlook looks at all their schedules and determines a time all are available. if any one of them does not use the scheduling features of outlook (you mean it does more than email?) then their schedule is completely open and the meeting may well be in conflict with their actual schedule. training is not the solution either. we trained everyone in our organization, but for a large enough percentage of them it just dosen't sink in. here is a suggestion: identify the individuals who are agitating for exchange and put their department on it until they beg you to switch them back.
Exchange can play nicely with other mail programs, as it supports POP and IMAP with no trouble.
:) I use Staroffice 5.2's IMAP client to connect to our Exchange server -- it works well, and you don't have to worry about them nasty Outhous^H^H^H^Hlook virii.
:)
Well, not much trouble.
Mind you, the server is a Dual Xeon with 512MB RAM, Gig-Ethernet, and bunches of LVD SCSI drives in RAID-5. It's just barely enough to handle Exchange.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
What do you mean? Exchange has shared folders, which are sometimes handy for small items.
where I work, we've got netscape suite spot setup.
It's got the netscape messaging server, directory server, pop and imap servers, as well as collabra (it's own news group server). This is working for us fine. A major advantage of this in your situation would be that you don't need to add 20k to your cost of starting the operation as you've already got the necesary hardware to run it all (our setup is running on a single ultra 60 w/ external raid 5 controller). Calendaring is a little trickier. We've had to hunt around for a decent third party vendor (working on our second trial now) but that's not a major issue. 100% of the company uses email while maybe only 20% use some sort of calendar.
hope this helps.
The difficulty comes when installing Exchange, as well, because of many reasons: the perceived instability, the huge amount of computing resources needed compared with sendmail, and the various security concerns.
One thing you may wish to check out is HP's OpenMail. OpenMail runs on Solaris, HP, Linux, and (I believe) AIX. It supports all the Internet standards (POP, IMAP, X.500, etc). But, most importantly, it offers MAPI support as well - allowing full integration with Outlook. This includes calendar sharing and public folders. To top it all off, it's also designed to work in an HA environment.
--
Welcome to the land of the easily amused...
This sort of discussion went down at the University I work at a couple of years ago. That time period is now called by everyone (even the upper level of University management) the Email Wars.
For nearly two solid years, there was a large push by some in upper management to migrate our entire user base (some 80K students, faculty, and staff) to Exchange, regardless of the number of technical staff and managers informing said upper management of the large downsides, not the least of which forcing a client (MS 9X/NT) platform on the faculty.
That being said, we settled down to have a modest Exchange environment with about 5000 users across two campuses, and about 80000 users across two campuses using the freely available and open-source Cyrus IMAP server from CMU.
In the past year, there have been more serious security incidents involving executable content with the Exchange servers, forcing the University to purchase a Sybari license to prevent being overrun with virii. The Sybari stuff is not inexpensive.
My current position with the University is as a senior software/systems engineer. For the most part, I design mail systems. In my professional opinion, unless the features that Exchange gives you (basically calendaring and integration with MSOffice -- everything else, including folder sharing and collaberation are available in more secure products) are worth the amount of time and money that will need to be spent to secure the environment, it would be a bad idea for folks to migrate from an IMAP environment to Exchange.
Exchange in all our tests proved to be less scalable than a UNIX based IMAP solution. More people are required to support fewer users on Exchange. On top of that, individual servers crash often enough that it is not really an event when it happens. Admittedly, an individual Exchange server crashing only affects a couple thousand individual mailboxes, but they crash enough that spreading out load in necessary to maintain the illusion of continuous service. This is not a knock against the people running th Exchange servers. The Exchange admins I work with are bright, talented people. The server software crashes all on their own. Microsoft's own consulting people have not found a flaw in the Exchange system design here. The software just crashes often.
That is the security and performance part of my analysis. Beyond that, Exchange generally does not like working with the outside world. Mail routing can be an issue unless you have a very simple network design. Features in Exchange can be fairly confusing to even experienced users. My personal favorite in that vein forwarding. If a user wants to forward their mail another system (say a personal workstation) Exchange will munge the headers so that the original recipients of the message are not entirely clear. This has led to some embarrassing incidents where people have replied to messages that they thought were to them personally, but were actually to a distribution list. The reply went to the reply-to, which ended up distributing to everyone on the original list.
Even beyond that was the arrogant attitude displayed by Microsoft when bugs were reported. At one point, we discovered a bug that would crash the storage server when accessed via IMAP. Once a check was signed, their interest in working on problems with our existing implementation was gone. I know this should not be unexpected (Reboot, Re-install, Upgrade being the MS Tech Support Mantra), but when Microsoft representatives are in a room with the University officials and actually say words to the effect of, "Who are you to tell us what is wrong with our software", it at least validates the anecdotal opinion of Microsoft.
Much of this may not apply to your situation, but this might. When we did our studies of cost per user of a UNIX based IMAP solution as opposed Exchange, it ended up being an order of magnitude cheaper to use UNIX for the bulk of our email serving.
It is inherantly insecure but can be made secure (things like it being an open relay by default isn't much different from any other mail system). You'll not only need multiple servers and failover systems but you (and the rest of the admin ppl) will need some intensive training as it's not so simple to implement in a big system as it is in a single server environment!
Better the pride that resides in a Citizen of the world, than the pride that divides when a colourful rag is unfurled
Okay, there goes my Karma. It's just my feeling someone has to say this.
Exchange is much more than just an e-mail solution. It's a way to share information inside organisations. A modern (buzz)word for it is groupware (here's a list). You can keep your agenda in it, look at other people's agenda's, use calendars for meeting rooms, beamers and other comodities, reminders for meetings, cross reference all these, etc. All this, you can sync with your handheld, and is _relatively_ easy. Exchange is backed up by a whole army of newly trained MCSD's who might not know too much of the product, but can get it up and running and are reasonably cheap.
Unfortunately, while there are some alternatives for unices, they're not as proven as Exchange. To get all of the functionality that exchange offers, you need a well trained team of *nix operators with product experience. Those are going to be much more expensive than the knownothing MCSDs. In a corporate environment, costs (licence and operating) and risks are important arguments.
The major showstopper for Exchange would be that it runs on Windows. In an organistion that doesn't already deploy windows as a server environment, the costs for acquiring this knowledge would IMHO outweigh any benefits Exchange may offer.
Of course, if your organisation is going to use it just for mail, then there is no need to use exchange, or any groupware. Probably there are at least 100 reasons not to use exchange, which undoubtedly will be stressed by as much people in this discussion.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
The better questions is, There really needs to be a question about this? I think it to be quite clear with all of the MS viruses that are rampant throughout the emails that get sent. MS is extremely vulnerable to new viruses, and an NT server or whatever running anything MS needs to be rebooted at least once a day for it to run properly. The good bet would be to do so once an hour....but that's my opinion. I've worked in companies with UNIX and Exchange servers, the UNIX servers are very stable while the Exchange servers needed some severe help. Ask management this question, do they want to keep overhead low by having one or two people doing UNIX support, since its pretty easy, I've done a little myself, ****OR**** do they want to hire a whole new department in order to chase MS bugs, fix the NT servers, help users with Exchange...etc.? I think that answer to this is quite plainly obvious that UNIX is the answer. ....Tanks.
I work in the IT department at a large state university (Montana State). We have a number of email servers on many different platforms, from POP on UNIX to pine on VMS to Outlook with Exchange server on NT. We offer options for everyone--some people just want the simplicity and efficiency of pine, some people want POP email with the added features of attachments, etc. that are easy to do on a POP client/server arrangement. Other people need calendars and scheduling that Exchange provides. We charge 10 bucks for email accounts and 90 bucks for exchange? Why? It's more trouble than all the others combined. Not only do the virus issues kill, but when people get their desktops upgraded, oftentimes it is difficult to transfer the multitude of Personal Folders, PABs, Offline Folders, plus maintain all the online stuff. But it's the viruses that are the worst. Everytime there is an outbreak, the idiots just open the attachments and spread it. Luckily for us, everyone has everyone else's email thru the exchange directory, so if one person opens it everyone gets it. We have protection installed the database, luckly, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain. When I LOVE YOU came thru, the virus protection deleted almost 900,000! attachments in a day and exchange was about 4 days behind mail traffic for the next week. The only advice I am going to give you is add, don't subtract. If you think Exchange is a SUBSTITUTE for a nice, reliable *NIX based POP mail, you have another thing coming. Just wait til the next genius virus writer comes along to fuck your shit up. Blah!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Uhh not true, Exchange Server has POP3/IMAP4 and LDAP protocol support. If UNIX gurus want to use some lame POP3 client they can. Same goes for Macs. Get a clue before you post.
I was gonna ask who pissed in your post toasties this morning, but then I was stupid enough to click on Read the rest of this comment.... and tada, trolltalk. Brilliant troll. You suckered me (yeah, I know, not a real difficult task).
Personally, anyone that tells you exchange administration is 'easier' than Unix solutions is crazy, but you do get that wonderful calendar all tied in with your email client. I've been looking at Unix based web calendars and other solutions, but haven't really found anything that our users will tolerate yet (maybe someone could point me in the right direction? We need a Unix/Linux server with Linux clients solution.).
Bite my yammer.
For starters, I'm no Exchange proponent. BUT, there are some feature concerns which should be addressed.
What is Exchange going to give you that your current system doesn't? Group calendaring and a global & searchable address book. There are the two big features you would receive. There's no doubt in my mind that your current setup is far more robust of a mail system, but if you need these features, you should consider Exchange or HP OpenMail.
If you want to increase the robustness, stability and/or security of your current mail system, consider replacing Sendmail with Postfix. You'll never consider using Sendmail again.
Qmail is another mail-only option as a replacement for Sendmail. The downside to Qmail is that users are forced to deal with the Bernstein deciples for support. Just subscribe to their mailing list and you'll see what I mean.
Don't let everyone here tell you that Exchange has no purpose--it does. It's simple to manage and offers functionality you don't currently have. In addition, standardizing on a MUA such as Outlook will make supporting your end users much easier in the long run (I'd consider doing this whether or not you switch mail systems).
-Jozero
To be completely honest with you, you are going to have a tough fight ahead. I have read some really good reasons from Slashdot users why you shouldn't change a thing, but are these going to change the minds of those who want Outlook and Exchange? No.
I have fought that fight. Technical reasons do not penetrate the thick heads of pointy haired managers.
My personal experience is to ask them specifically what they want. When they respond with Outlook and Exchange, ask why. Get to the core of what they really want, and be prepared to have the Unix alternative solutions. If you can answer with "we can currently provide those features, without spending additional monies on equipment, application and server licenses, training, additional administrative support (Exchange is a Full time job) and support contracts with MS", you will be more successful.
If you do not get to the core of what they really want, Outlook and Exchange won't be any better than what you are currently providing.
I run two Exhange 2000 servers supporting a large number of users. I haven't had any major problems, minor bugs. Administration, however, consumes entirely too much time. Just $0.02.
Footnote, one of the "Faction" leaders may be leading the charge just so to take some credit when the implementation is over. If this is the case Good Luck!
Rob
Awesome!
As a former Exchange admin (well, and all the other BackOffice stuff too), I can say that PHB's like being able to see each other's calendars. Exchange/Outlook makes this really easy to implement and for a small shop (single server, and say under 100 users), it's really easy to set up right out of the box.
Has anybody had any experience with that *NIX MAPI product? What was it called? MailOne? I'd be interested in playing with that sometime I think.
"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."
If you want to enforce a standard, make sure you decide on an open one, such as SMTP/IMAP... MS Outlook for the desktop would work just as well as pine, mailx, and Netscape. The fact that management types cannot learn how to edit Majordomo mailing lists is NOT enough to warrant switching to a proprietary, unstable system.
Our entire comapany uses exchange, and it sucks. About 300 + people I guess. It is SLOW and we are running it on Dual pentium Dell servers. 500mhz each? 1 gig of ram. It takes sometime from 30 seconds to 2 minutes for me to get my mail in the morning. Plus the fact there are no MAPI clients for our linux desktops. The interface annoys me personally it has to many bells an whistles that no one would ever use. (who needs an email time line?) that makes the software a pig.
Your company will be sorry.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Exchange is as we all know a popular but haxardous choice of a mail system. If you are going to hire at the low end of the food chain, they may be able to handle it but not be able to re-learn anything else. Personally, I feel that the corporately hazardous nature of the product which has the potential to totally shutdown the entire organization, etc. more than outweigh such difficulties. Personally I would find it a breach of fiduciary responsibility to expose a company to the kind of threats that Outlook presents.
Firstly, switching to Exchange means putting a Windows box on *every* desktop.
Why does it mean that? I use mutt to read mail from an Exchange server just fine. Exchange supports pop and imap, if the administrator enables them.
and after a month of fighting it, you'll want to exchange it for something else!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I am just writing to ask what a HA configuration is?
Exchange w/ Outlook is much more than just an email client. In my office I don't plan a single meeting without it. Its nice to be able to plan a meeting while know everyones availablity. Its always a pain scheduling a meeting only to find out everyone is in another.
Forms are another Good Thing. I do all of my OT, Sick time, expense reports and purchasing through Outlook's forms. Forget the stupid paper trail.
Allof tasks are scheduled through outlook. If my boss wants me to do something, instead of telling me at the water cooler he sends me a task. I then have them all located in one central area so when I have idle moments I can quickly check off a few quick tasks.
Put this into a conduit with my PalmVx and I'm a travelling warrior ready to dish it out with the big boys.
The main reseaon is that if you standardize on Outlook you're stuck running outlook. Users on Mac's (designers, for example), and Linux/Sun/SGI (developers, for example) are out of luck.
The other reason is cost. Why bother spending the money on exchange (with it's horrible liscensing fees) when you already have a perfectly good setup.
Not to mention the fact that MS is evil.
Yeah, god forbid standardize on an e-mail client and make support easier. That would be terrible!
ALG
Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop
Looks like it's a matter of politics, rather than anything technical. After all, your current system works well, so why change? I'll lay odds that, if you push them for reasons to convert to Exchange, you'll get a load of managementspeak babble that translates as "because I say so!"
As a political problem, it has to be dealt with in the political arena. Technical arguments will simply get ignored. Is another group trying to take over your mail opearion? Is somebody looking to hire a bunch of shiny new Microsoft droids and fire the longhaired hippy wierdo freak Unix types?
One friend of mine opines that Microsoft sales reps give blow jobs. It's a better explanation than most as to why companies pull damfool stupid stunts like this.
--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Point out that the recent batch of email viruses have targeted exclusively microsoft products. I may not have my facts straight on this, but if memory serves me right only outlook was vulnerable. Even if this was not the case, outlook was especially vulnerable. You should also find out why this politically forceful wants to standardize on MS products. They may have some concerns that you can address legitimatly without switching over.
I met three cases of system unification. One on Linux, two on Windows. Frankly the Windows unifications were a disaster in all senses. Systems crashed too frequently and there were serious conflicts at all levels. The most unfortunate was the fact that in both unifications managers kept singing "M$ rulez and everthing else is ... and technical staff is ..." Even when systems started to crash so badly that there were technical stops for more than a week.
However in one case we kicked out management's opinion and forced the Linux integration. And that solved 80% of problems.
Note that here the problem is not on who's better. Frankly the problem is in offer. If you get trouble on Windows, you don't really have a large level of maneuver. If Exchange burns down because you have too many users than pray because management will crucify you as you can't offer anything else. On *NIX the situation is completely different. If some service gets too burned, then you have a large room of options. You can cut some services partially and temporary. You may try to use some weaker hardware and interface it with the main iron to avoid overloads. You may transfer services from server to server mostly in a "stop-copy/move-launch" manner. You may play with kernels, platforms, packages versions, scripts to level demands and improve quality of service.
On Windows you are stripped of all this. Even a registry wizard will have trouble to transfer services from one computer to other. Scripting is miserable, specially when M$ is axing all remains of command line tools. You cannot use weaker hardware for backup or salvage tasks. If something on Windows gets wrong then it gets wrong. And management will say that you are a jerk because you didn't have a Certified Microsoft Technician/Admin/User paper. Even if you have been running like mad a week before and saying/demonstrating/crying that a 4500 user database is on the edge of getting trashed without any chances for recovery.
PS: Backups? Please no talks about backups. Due to the SUPER-ULTRA-MEGA-integration of Windows systems they were useless. Only mirroring 70 HDD's would help to recover.
"Can you help me come up with opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks as an enterprise e-mail solution versus a nice solid Unix solution to present to management"
/. terms: "Help! I'm under attack from the evil forces of M$! Any unsubstantiated rumours and scare stories I can pass off as gospel truth are deperately needed. I have to resist NT at all costs, whatever the real pros and cons are. Any Windows NT uptime stats and security information which are really based on casual use of Windows 95 on dodgy hardware would be particularly useful."
This is a rather strange question -
1. If this guy is so convinced that Exchange "sucks", he should have solid reasons to present to management already. If he doesn't, then he's just as bad as the "politically forceful faction" blindly pushing Exchange.
2. Opinions without facts to back them up are not really convincing to PHBs in terms of a big decision like this. Better stick with the "facts and experiences", I think.
Of course, the question should really be "Someone has proposed that we move to Outlook/Exchange in our organization. I know nothing about it, but I do know that I'm comfortable with our current solution, and given our mixed-platform user base, I don't see Exchange as a viable alternative. How do I communicate that to management effectively?"
Or, to rephrase that in
Fact is, Exchange is a damn good solution, but only if it's a damn good fit for your environment...
I was in a similar boat myself, with a fully functional sendmail system. My new CIO basically forced it down our throats, despite weeks of arguing and debating. It was ridiculous - he kept inisting that this was a viable soultion, all the while various .vbs script virii were hitting us almost weekly (as you know, MS Outlook is the easiest, and therefore prime target for such attacks).
I'm the junior sys admin here, and both my senior admin and myself presented him with TONS of stuff to argue against it. What the CIO basically did was stack the deck against us by creating requirements that could only be met my a MS Exchange/Outlook deployment. The key features we lost on were centralized addressbooks, calendaring, and centralized user management (Domain authentication). That's it.
We showed him how we could create this functionality via centralized web interfaces and LDAP. His argument was that any other solutions would need to be "jerry-rigged", and that Exchange/Outlook has everything "out of the box".
Unfortunately, he makes a great point. If there is a centralized messaging solution from our side of the fence, I couldn't find it. I wish I could have come up with better alternatives to counter his argument. The office suites and messaging suites are where Linux needs to improve upon if they want a shot at the desktop.
There's a strange movement out there amongst executives that just accept the NT solutions, despite all the reliability, security, and scalability issues that Microsft lacks in. There's something we arent doing right on the Unix/Linux side, and I hate to say it's marketing (cuz' that's where Microsoft spanks us).
You have a tough fight on your hands. Try these places I looked at for evidence:
Unix vs. NT Organization
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/
Anti Microsoft Organization
http://users.aol.com/machcu/amsa.html
I also searched Google for "Sendmail vs. Exhange" and came up with alot.
Good luck.
I don't know much about email filtering but maybe there doing this because it will be easier to filter trough people's email.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Exchange is really nice for it's groupware type capabilities, we share calendars and so for. One of the conference rooms actually has its own account, and it works very well for scheduling. The big problem I've found in working with exchange is the information store - it's one big database and seems to be somewhat prone to becoming corrupt. Ours is currently quite a mess and I've had to delete some email accounts and recreate them to clear up phantom messages and the like. In fact there's one box I just can't delete. I'm not sure what this would be like for a very large corporation - we have about 100 or so users on two different servers.
Anti-virus filters only work on known viruses. That means they're almost always a day late for things like the love bug.
...But the NAVY uses Exchange for its mail system. I was at Naval Sea Systems Command and helped roll it out there. While it requires a heck of a lot of hardware, the groupware features are what makes it stand out. Exchange 2000 is even more stable than 5.5 and I bet you will see it popping up more and more.
While I don't believe MS is the solution to everything, I like Exchange.
http://packetnexus.com
If you deploy your software smartly, you will rarely ever have problems like the other doomsayers say. Set up a test environment and trial products before you roll them out and mandate their use. If you experience problems, a support contract helps in getting those problems corrected, all without the user even knowing. When you're ready, deploy.
But this forces everyone to change to a Windows desktop!
What percentage of employees in your company do not have a Windows PC sitting at their desk? Most people can safely say that number is negligible, but in the off-chance you have an office filled with Linux or Solaris users, I guess this could be a factor.
But this forces everyone to use Outlook!
Some might consider this a good thing, but be aware that there are web-enabled versions of Exchange/Outlook that allow you to access your corporate mail from a web page. Secure it and firewall it if you're worried about security, or make it available only to employees dialed into your Intranet.
Doesn't Exchange also offer POP support (maybe by a 3rd party if nothing else)? Is there anything stopping you from using your existing mail clients?
I'm a Unix guy. I work on several Solaris systems every day, code a bit in C, a bit more in Perl. My company has also standardized on NT desktops and Outlook for e-mail. As much as I hate to admit it, Outlook is extremely powerful, and the ability to coordinate appointments and the like makes Outlook very attractive, especially when every employee in the company is guaranteed to be compatible with the system. I don't usually have to worry if so-and-so can read the attachment I'm about to send him because he has the same setup as I do. Homogenous desktop environments is a huge boon to inter-office communication.
Oh, and I use 'mutt' at home.
Outlook isn't free. Doing a quick price check on CDW, it costs $97 for Outlook 2000. Of course, it also comes with pretty much any Office install (SBE, Professional, Premium) so the cost has most likely been paid already in any organization that standardizes on Office as the main productivity suite. Plus there's those goddamned CALs you gotta buy.
(time to go offtopic for a sec)
Speaking of licenses and crap, what is with all the different licensing schemes available for NT? Most annoying one has to be the Small Business Server edition of Backoffice. God forbid you ever realize down the road that you might need more than a single server in your environment. When that point comes, get ready to reinstall, cause there's no way to get it to join another NT domain, and it won't let you add other servers to its domain. There's also that 50-user absolute cap.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Actually my boss's boss does schedule meetings and my boss still doesn't use it, believe it or not. His boss ends up coming by right after each meeting started and says, "are you coming?" or some such and my boss runs off to the meeting unprepared or sends me (shudder).
I suspect these politically-powerful forces you speak of want to move to Outlook because it offers groupware (calendar, todo lists, discussion groups) as well as messaging. That's really the only legitimate reason they might have to want to standardize on Exchange. Otherwise, Sendmail is a better (and less costly) option.
You might take the "UNIX has better uptime" approach. The thought of having to pay you to come in and reboot an NT server every x days or so might cause them to think twice. You might also try the "sendmail is a proven standard" approach: why replace a reliable, fast, secure, *free* mail server with an unreliable, slow, and *costly* one?
If it comes down to the wire, tell them you'll quit if they force you to support Exchange...
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I thought you got banned from slashdot? Oh, I see, you changed your L to and I and a 1 to an L... very tricky.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
We use Outlook 97/98/2000 on the desktop but plain old Sendmail and qpopper as the backend on Sun boxes. Shared folders and calendaring work just fine - they are implemented with the "Internet Only" Outlook client via WINMAIL.DAT attachments, which get interpreted automatically by the clients.
Oh crap, Outlook 2000 just cratered on me again. Excuse me while I reboot before I blue-screen....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
If they need Exchange-like features other than calendar (shared message folders, etc.), just install cyrus. Probably a good calendar server exists, too, but having no need in such a thing I never looked.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Bad slashdot posters!
As usual many people are quick to let their opinions ly as act around here... thats okay. Slashdot is definetly an opinion driven site.
However those who keep say using sendmail and a myriad of other programs to do enterprise wide email and more just haven't had to do this in the real world. IMAP will break down. Even with MBX format for everything once you get 100-150 employees and the average mailbox hits around 80 meg per user you must then goto distributed servers. This isn't pretty or fun and a real bitch to maintain, because you will have to maintain it. Once your company hits 200 or so and the typical mailbox has grown to 120 meg... its over.
Why? Not just because of the email load... but because at 150+ your company must have a calendar solution. This is how Exchange gets pushed through the door in a lot of places as an "intranet" package... even though we all know how far short it falls in providing such. The calendaring is weak... delegation is weak... there are no real simple ways to build web based tools... etc...
What do you do then? Well you either have to goto Exchange or Notes. Nothing else is really close to these in terms of overall 3rd party apps and management appeal.
It is really choosing the lesser of two evils... we made the choice for notes. Notes sucks. The client has the worst interface ever (well this side of an amiga app). The server proc hangs on our solaris boxes all the time... the clustering in it is retarded. At first we thought we were really screwed. But as time wore on we got used to the admin quirks of notes and much to our suprise users actually started to really like it. Notes has now replaced a lot of one off products for databases... it is the standard calendaring tool and most importantly of all it made management happy. Sure its not the best thing (hell we still have all our mail pass through a sendmail server first) but it is a real enterprise wide solution that was the same setup cost as Exchange and with a MUCH lower operations cost per year.
--- I do not moderate.
I used to work at MS, and let me tell you Exchange is probably the most useful app MS uses. It's used for freakin everything, mail (of course) scheduling, tasks, news group (type things, I'm not sure what there official moniker is), mailing lists.
:P. I just got a new job, which also uses exchange. here, however - they use it for email.. just stupid old, could have used sendmail/pine email. no GLA, no one schedules anything on it. nothing. the only reason I even use it is because outlook at a built in spell checker. hell, aspell is a better spell checker and you can hook that into mutt/vi (or whatever).
Actually my favorite feature is being able to find out who my bosses boss is via the GAL (global address list). find out what discussion groups there part of and join those. etc... Find out when my boss has meetings, so I don't have to worry about here dropping in
funny thing, when MS Exchange 2000 (platinum or whatever) was in "dogfood" email was a joke, nothing worked. everyone's email was constantly down, we actually had to make eye contact with people (ack). meetings we're made by someone walking around the offices and saying "ok, meeting time", "huh?" "didn't you get the mail?", "no. exchange is down", "oh right". However, by the end of the beta, the exchange started working just fine.
hmm. I guess that was a ramble..
this is my sig.
With all the crackers out to get M$, Outlook
and Exchange suffer a higher %'age of directed
hacks/virus attacks. It's like wearing a KICK
ME sign. Not that other MTA's and email clients
aren't succeptible to virus attacks and security
breaches, it's just that most people spend their
time and energy attacking the frontrunner.
We find it very comforting that the majority of these major attacks hardly (if even) affect our enterprise (Sendmail/Netscape Communicator), while our neighbors spend days mopping up. Our users
even recognize that fact, in between bitching about wanting to run Outlook for the calendar
snozz, and b$tching about how bad Communicator is.
Exchange is Inappropriate for The Enterprise when it violates the Prime Directive!
Duh! (Not that it ever stops them though...)
sig fault
Has there not been enough M$ bashing lately? /. deemed it necessary to throw a little wood into the fire ... was there any doubt that this question would amount to anything other than a exchange/outlook flame?
lock and load boyz
Does anyone know how to get Outlook to apply the rule "mark the message as read." I can have it "Move a message to specific folder" but can't figure out how to get the filter to mark email as read. One would think this would be easy to do in a VBA script.
/. isn't the proper place to ask, but which newsgroups should I be asking in?
Also, why are the "Perform Custom Action" rules all blank? How do I add another one?
Thx.
Ok, so
Wow! Amazing...
We have the exact same thing here.
Oh yeah, it's called the quarterly mail cleanup, where the admins delete any message older than 3 months.
I run an exchange server at my company (about 150 users) and it seems to be a good solution. I will admit that we have to reboot the mail server weekly, but the features that it provides are great and it's extremely easy to manage. It interacts with Outlook in ways other servers cannot do, and it adds user friendliness to users on Outlook.
For a place with 1000 people, you would need a pretty bulky box to be able to run exchange, most likely. We have a Dual pII Xeon 550 with 2 gigs of ram and it's slower than my p133 at home, because of all the freakin resource sucking services that exchange installs. A place with 1000 people would require some major juice, I would think.
On a related subject, we dropped Russell Calander Manager. Calander Manager imediately showed conflicts in schedules (vs waiting someone reading mail and replying) With Outlook, those checking the calander at the beginning of shift go to cancelled meetings or miss changed or recently scheduled meetings because there wasn't time to sift thru all the stuff in the inbox. With Outlook you have to open any mail that may contain a schedule event to update your calander. Same thing applies for cancelled meetings. I have found out about meetings after the fact. I have attended cancelled meetings. In Russell Calander Manager, some of the users were confrence rooms, vacations and the like. I could schedule a meeting and include the confrence room as an attendee. I could schedule Easter off and include the apropiate vacation slot as an attendee. It works first come first served. No arguements over who was first. Anyone else later would be get a conflict as the confrence room or vacation slot was unavaliable to attend. This made confrence room use a breeze. If you really needed a room, you could e-mail the person who scheduled the room to negotiate and they could re-schedule freeing up the room so it could attend your meeting. (the room auto accepted the first requester). With Outlook sometimes two groups arrive to use the same room. A person has to read all the mail for the room and reply to it later (not real time by someone not working 24/7). Therefore several people can get unconfirmed dates and times for a room. What a mess.
The truth shall set you free!
I've had to deal with this as well, though not quite on the scale you are. SO many VPs and such seem to have come from using exchange somewhere else that they want it.
What do they want, though.. find out. THey obviously don't want exchange.. that's just a server. They probably want to use Outlook + appointment sharing. That's a big one. What else do they want?
On the bright side.. Exchange WILL support imap, and pop3, and has a web interface, and if you use any active directory stuff, it makes it even easier to use.. but wait.
If you are primarily a unix shop... there is a unix program (MailOne?) that supports exchange & exchange scheduling. Maybe check that out.
I think the issue is that, we say 'it's an internet email system; it's fine how it is now' but what they want is much more than that.
Show them the price of doing it properly (including such things as: all mail must be stored on server, redundant servers, single point of failure, etc). Draw it all up, and present it as a cost, because that's the bottom line.
Also look at notes.
If they need to see each others calendars, look into Meeting Maker. We are running several thousand MM seats (Win, Mac, and Unix, even Palm) on a handful of Mac servers with excellent reliability.
What you need to do is find the business reasons that they want to switch. Is there something specific they want to be able to do that exchange allows? If not, then it is stupid to switch. If so, you need to find out
a) what the costs are to implement said functionality with exchange
b) what the costs are to implement said
functionality without exchange
Include all costs - hardware, software, licensing, support, man-hours of work, user training, sysadmin time on installation of outlook on all machines, server maintenance, scalability costs, etc.
The problem with most decisions is that the full costs are hidden. It's your job to bring them to light, and to show what the actual costs are. If they are willing to take those costs for the functionality they want, fine. Its your job to give it to them. However, if they don't know all of the options and their true costs, then that's your fault. If the have the knowledge an make bad decisions, there's nothing you can do.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I run the mail system for a smallish company and I currently use sendmail, pop, imap and friends. Everyone uses either Outlook or Outlook Express on the desktop which is fine, but there is one problem. Many people want to use Outlooks Calander sharing stuff, which aparently only works with Exchange server. I've tried Outlook's "Net Folders" thing which tries to share the calander information via e-mail but it sucks. Anyone know of a way to use the shared calander functions without Exchange? We're running a mix of Solaris and Linux, so a solution for either would be fine.
As a prior victim of Exchange, I feel your pain.
There can be, however, a bright side. Please name your company so that we can short it. :-)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I would suggest looking at HP Openmail. It scales far better than Exchange, and supports MAPI (as well as cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, POP, IMAP, etc.) The only got'cha to this is: Openmail will only be as good as the people who administer it. As a Unix based system if you throw MS based person into the mix you'll have trouble. If you have good UNIX people you'll do well.
www.ice.hp.com
Runs on HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, and now Linux. I'd recommend the HP/UX and Linux versions. They are the most up to date.
First of all what servers and clients are all the nasty new viri hitting Exchange. Also with procmail it is much easier to filter them out before they get into the hands of users than with Exchange. The more important reason is your people. It is clear from the question that you have admins who know the *nix solutions that you are using and have been using them for some time. Given this fact you will have problems with Exchange because while yes you all could learn it and sooner or later get it up to speed there would be a painful time there during the switch and most likely for some time afterward. Also you would have to get all new hardware (and if they are upgrading the software anyway you could get much more bang for your buck from a *nix solution) and software also from what I have been told by Exchange admins you *will* have problems with anyone not using Outlook like most M$ products it does not play nice with others. So the real question would be would any benefits of a switch (I can't think of any just at the moment) out weigh the obvious problems, downtime, and money (both lost and spent) that it would cause. OTOH if they do switch and you need to get rid of the Sun boxen send me a email :)
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
we use exchange at my company (aprox 200 ppl local , and over 20,000 global) i find with a network of this size it is hard to manage user profiles. especaly when i have to migrate a user from another site. it also take a long time for changes to propogate throughout the whole network.
on our network, so many Exchange users have lost messages, that we now mostly keep our messages in .pst files and back those up to our user drives on the server.
.
Everyone has painfully learned that messages left in your inbox are messages you don't want to keep long-term.
Now, think of all the extra network traffic this practice generates. .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If you find yourself backed into a corner and installing an Exchange server, buy a backup program that talks to Exchange and can back up the Exchange database live. Do not take no for an answer.
Exchange keeps everyone's mail messages in one huge database in a single file, which it then locks everyone else out of. And I mean *all* mail messages, unread and saved alike. So if you don't have a backup program which works with Exchange, to back up this file you have to take the server down (manually, no scripting here), back the file up, and bring the server back up. During the weekend or after hours, naturally- people don't like it when they don't have access to email during normal buisness hours.
Not backing the mail up is not an option. A single bad block can corrupt the whole mail DB, and trash everyone's mail. And we all keep mail around for one reason or another- often critical information is kept in the form of saved mail messages- all of which can vanish because of a single bad block.
This isn't Microsoft bashing. I've had this happen to a company I was working at (fortunately, I wasn't responsible for the mail server at that point). Save yourself the pain.
The one big file also accounts for the scalability problems of Exchange. Remember, this is running (by definition) on a 32-bit x86 machine, which gives you a maximum process size of about 3 gig. Mapping files larger than this so you can treat them as a data structure is impossible. This is why, as of a year or so ago, Exchange couldn't handle more than about 400 people per machine. They may have fixed this since then (I doubt it, but anything is possible). Don't take assurances- ask to talk to someone who is running 1000 people on a machine before simply beleiving that it can be done.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
There are a number of reasons that the politically powerful would prefer to use Outlook and Exchange. First and foremost is name recognition. They've never heard of sendmail or q-mail, but Exchange they have. The second is the groupware features like calander, address book, etc. They don't realize that you need a dedicated admin to handle an Exchange server of 1000 employees, or the new equipment. We have found a solution to both of these. We run sendmail on an ultra 5 (small company with 35 users or so). On the desktop is Outlook. If you put Outlook on all of the desktops, you need to make sure that they are IDENTICAL versions or it can cause a serious headache (which I'm living with right now). We periodically push a new address book out to the users. You can also use LDAP for address books with Outlook. We have a web based calander server from Sun that works okay for that part of groupware. The advantage to this setup is maintenance. We spend about 10 minutes a week fixing things. This is usually new aliases, removing aliases, adding/removing users, etc. In the 10 months since we brought this system online we've had 0 major outages.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Why is it with these proprietary things some management go freaking ga ga over Calendar/E-mail integration and seeing other managers schedules? We have Novell Groupwise where I work and I'd have to say about 20% actually use the Calendar, and 1-2% actually use it to send appointments. We'd have been better served with Sendmail, and some other app for Calendaring. What's even more surprising is that NOONE has proposed a standard integrating E-mail and Calendars (at least I don't know of any). Why do we want it? I have no idea. It seems, to me, that my calendar is NOONE else's business.
Gorkman
Maybe they should ask whether Exchange is the appropriate solution for the job, and not just ask for people who can tell him why Exchange sucks.
I have found that management seldom listens to techies who come up with laundry lists of reasons why the solution they (management) have chosen is wrong. Examine the problem with an open mind and help them make the right decision. Maybe thats Exchange, maybe thats staying with Unix.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The ILOVEYOU virus was designed to run on Outlook and Outlook express - MS exchange helped it along. Your chances of spreading MS-hostile viri to the enterprise are reduced if you're not using MS related email software. (I know, oversimplification, but I didn't spread ILOVEYOU with my Netscape email) -
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Good decisions are based on good information. A good approach might be to do some rough calculations on the cost of moving, including 'costs' for downtime, etc. Compare that to the value gained by making the switch (I'll have to assume it's to gain Exchange specific features). Perhaps research what it would cost to implement third-party tools to achieve the same functionality.
Outlook also has the great potential for spreading viruses throughout the network because incompentent users are always opening up attachments. Look at spending another 2-3k just for a virus protection system that'll take care of this problem
There's also StarOffice Schedule. The StarOffice FAQ #14 says the network schedule server is included on CD-ROMs.
Well, at an extremely large US electronics/phone company the corporate mail system which runs on Exchange was recently down (unusable) for five days - worldwide.
You may also want to consider the cost of installing Exchange servers at each site and the administrators to look after them (because that's the way Exchange works (and I use the term 'works' in it's widest possible interpretation)).
A centralised hotmail like service is pretty much the way to go. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are a fuckwit. Especially if they insist on Exchange.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
When managment starts "fixing" things that are not broken. It's obvious they have to much time on there hands. They should be out getting more business and making the company grow. Not looking for new ways to increase overhead - especially when everything is work fine.
Generally, all the people I've heard about who are running Exchange have a unix box running sendmail/whatever to translate messages between the internet and the exchange server. Some just run the unix box to move messages through, others run anti-virus/spam removal programs on the unix side. Last I checked on http://mail-abuse.org/, Exchange didn't even support dnsbl features...
The only reason to run Exchange is to take advantage of any "features" the management thinks they need, in which case you will just be another mailserver platform to your administrative costs.
At Wang Global we had 20K users on 7 Exchange servers. They worked just fine. I've also done 500 on Dual servers with 512MB of RAM and they were fine as well. This was v5.5, which I know was much better behaved than 5.0.
As for backup... Most packages can now backup and restore single mailboxes easily. It takes longer, but it works fine. To totally rebuild a failed server you do have to restore the entire database. If they already have WinNT they already have a backup solution. Just get the Exchange add-on which usually costs $1K-$2K.
If the "Exchange faction" can give hard, detailed technical reasons why a move to MS Exchange (including downtime, costs for licensing, hardware for infrastructure, people costs) would be beneficial that's all well and good. We both know that on technical merits the existing solution is optimal. However that's not where this battle will be won. Follow the money instead.
Unless they can put a monetary amount on the reasons and justify that amount in cost savings somewhere then your best bet to squash these morons is to present your case to the bean-counters in terms of cost/benefit and ROI of the existing system.. which we both know will be considerably less than anything the Exchange peons can come up with. Case closed.
Every company above a certain start-up metatlity bases infrastructure decisions on how it affects the bottom line. You handle it the way suggested here and I guarantee you'll not have a problem.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
Management looks at exchange for features, you need to meet the features head to head.
Your should look at HP Openmail. It will run on Linux/Solaris/AIX/ and HP-UX. So it's much more flexiable that Exchange.
Openmail provides native support for Microsoft Outlook functionality including synchronization iwth PDA's. From an outlook user standpoint they will not know if they are on an Exchange or an Openmail server. From an administrator stand point they will know that they are not on an NT box.
Check out hp's openmail product and the Linux download to test it out.
I'm seriously not trying to bait anyone here but
Why don't we rephrase the question to say "My company wants to use a Microsoft product and I am a *nix zealot. How can I convince my company that switching to anything else besides *nix is wrong?" Im sick of zealot BS posted everytime just to slam MS. why? Is sun realy any better? Or redhat? ot any other software company that has the intent to sell a commercial product? The fact is use your best business judgement for each individual situation.
You cant just make broad swipes across the board deciding what is right for every situation. Simply view the software for what it really is - a tool. Not a personal look into who or what you are.
Nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft, AIN"T quite true.
The company I work for is a Microsoft shop currently because of a certain person who is no longer employed here.
Now for the reasons NOT to go with Exchange:
This is to say nothing of the pains of going back to a *nix based system when your management realizes their mistake.
It has always been my opinion that management should not make IT decisions, based on the facts that; they (typically) have no IT experience, will not ultimately carry the burden of failure on an IT project, and are impressed by buzzwords. Anyone who is impressed by a word, should be taken out back and beaten/shot/hanged.
Given the choice between migrating to Exchange or damnation, I really can't see much difference. However, I would probably pick damnation cause I assume the reboots would be shorter.
I gave up thinking of a cool sig
At times like these it makes you wonder. For all accounts it sounds like the system works great, right? So why change it? I've heard a lot of EE's make jokes about the CS field being about "if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features."
;-).
What we have here is a converse, a return to the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." If users are able to use Outlook if they want, then who the hell cares what it runs on? The only thing that matters is that it stays up, which from what I've *NIX is the way to go
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
the last time the iloveyou virus came by, we had to shutdown (entirely) exchange but sendmail just kept on running.
if our entire company was based on exchange (and I shudder to think of the consequences) our whole email system would be down for most of a full day. quite unacceptable for most businesses.
sendmail (or better, qmail) doesn't get affected by the viruses present in the mickeysoft world. that's reason enough to not use it in the backend.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I would have thought the USS Enterprise would have a much more advanced messaging system than Exchange. I guess you have to put the Captain's Log somewhere though.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Sounds like someone has forgotten the rule of purchising: Figgure out what you want, have venders demo their solutions, choose the ones that work and buy the best price.
I don't know if exchange is beter or worse. Only you can answer that, and only if you get all your potential venders in to show off their solutions. Make sure they cover what unix users will do. Make sure they cover speed and relability. Make sure they cover ease of use.
This is not religion. You will not go to hell (though until you quit/retire it might feel like it) if you make the wrong choice. You also won'tgo to hell if your choice is different from someone else's. You might get fried if you chose a solution that doesn't work.
Basicly my question is why is exchange the answer without knokwing the question, and without evaluating other possibal answers to the question.
Groupwise also runs on Solaris.
Ask Slashdot - google for stupid people.
It is sad but true. Using Exchange & Outlook, users of the system end up getting more from it.
With Exchange's calendar, scheduling, public folder, etc. users' not only are reading and replying to emails, they are also collaborating, checking schedules, booking rooms for meeting, and yes, browsing the web, to name some of the things that you can do from within Outlook, when Exchange is the server.
So as you can see, Exchange gives you a workflow, something that many organizations are looking to do -- and this workflow translate to VALUE for your average user.
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
It is *not* hard to set up Solaris, sendmail, imap,pop and ldap. Perhaps what you meant is it takes different skill sets. True, an MCSE might not have those skills. Minesweeper != sendmail :)
With all the replies hopefully you will get to hear mine. I have been a Unix admin for 6 years and I have 4-5 years exp. being an Exchange Admin. The thing here is you don't have to switch over. You can setup an Exchange server and connect it to the rest of your organization very easily. Then all your high ups who want exchange can have it and the people who don't can keep doing what they are doing. I would highly suggest you take this route and keep them all happy.
Of course if your boss is a moron worried about his bottom line he will be upset having to pay and exchange admin and a Solaris Admin. Unfortunatley most IT people care about making things easier on themselves and the cheap route. Your job is to give users what they need to keep them happy little worker bees and not mad raging bees.
.. but seriously. We talked about it here--management wanted all Microsoft in-house--that was, until Exchange and Outlook was hit by the infamous Melissa. The 'rumours' they heard of outlook e-mail born virii were proven to be true every time they watched the news, read a paper, etc.
-k
...if for no other reason than susceptibility to virii that exploit default settings of Outlook--unless you send out staff to install all computers with specific instructions to kill auto-preview, etc. We've been hit with every last one of the Outlook-exploiting virii to come out in the past year, and while it's mostly an annoyance, it does tend to tie up the servers for a few days.
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-- Geof F. Morris
You could use backup software that does a brick level backup. Then you can backup and restore individual mailboxes. -JB-
Friend of mine worked there this summer. From what I've heard, they've pretty much gone the way of win2k.
Can anyone confirm/deny this?
.j
/dev/psychic: No medium found
and after a month of struggling with email viruses and unexplained crashes, you'll be out-looking for something that works!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Exchange server can be a nightmare to restore from backup, but the main reason the powers that be want to use it is because it is a groupware solution that helps facilitate things like meetings, document collaboration, public folders, ect, ect.
Also Exchange server provide many more ways of getting your e-mail than just POP. You have
1. POP/SMTP
2. Outlook web access
3. MS exchange protocol
So basically all the mac/*nix/win people can use it. Nothing wrong with that.
Rather than try and fight Lord Gates and his armada of Deathstars, take the battle somewhere else. Outsouce it! Currently my company uses united messaging, you can find them at http://www.ummail.com. If you go with a outsourced solution it accomplishes three things.
1. Its not on your lan, no security problems there.
2. If it breaks, you aint gotta fix it.
3. Centrally locates your server so remote users and offices have access to it.
So now you can completely leave all the politics of the situation outta the loop, its not on your lan, to the non-outlook clients its just another pop server, and best of all, if there are any support issues, your users can call united messaging for support!!
Beutiful aint it?
--Toq
- Employes to run the Exchange servers full time: $50,000 yr x 2
- Number of Exchange Servers needed for 1000 users: 12 @ $5000 ea.
- Cost of conversion: $$$
- Cost of software: $$$$$
- First Outlook virus: $$$$$$$
- Cost of late night / weekends ruined bc of a server issue: Priceless.
It just doesn't make sense from my point of view, (and no I'm not 100% anti-MS) when you have a machine which already does the job. Is there just a feature that they want (calender maybe?), or do they think that Exchange is a truely better package?I'd place together a detailed report on the cost advanges of the current system vs Exchange, including training of employees, operations, install, etc. Point out that the current system is free, accessible, etc and the move to Exchange should fail.
If they really push their side, point out Lovebug, and the other viruses.
But don't come across as 'This is an MS product, and like hell we will install it and run it.'
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I fail to see how Outlook has anything to do with the "load". It's a client. What couldn't it handle?
Let'em install Exchange!! really! it will cause so much trouble and cost so much money that whover opposed it will be heroes for the rest of the existance of the company!! sendmail will be back in in about 4 months, i guarantee you.
but of course, if you own stocks of your company, sell them before they start!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I worked at an organization that had been using good old sendmail and pop3 and Eudora and things were okay. Then, the command came from up high to switch over to Exchange.
While it's possible that the IT dept. didn't set things up well [although this is unlikely, since the company was large and had a pretty experienced IT team], without question, retrieving email was significantly slower. For remote users connecting via modem, it was even worse. Also, the servers had a tendancy to go down a lot. I seem to recall everyone had to install some sort of Outlook plugin that auto-compressed attachments, which may have reduced strain on the server, but made opening email with attachments slower still. I ended up yanking that plugin.
Of course, this is just my experience, and it doesn't mean all Exchange setups are going to be slower. Likewise, I can sort of see the pros to going Exchange/Outlook -- the synchronized appointment/scheduling stuff is useful, and the contact lists, when set up right, are useful. Although, I suspect you could do all of this with other tools as well.
Parting advice -- do not install cc:Mail, no matter what the admins say.
I'm (more or less) the tech guy at my company (small, only 150ish employees, but with a fairly large WAN). Recently, we switched from Post.Office (which sucks) to Microsoft Exchange 5.5.
Here's the reason why: middle and upper management LOVE the 'groupware' features that Exchange and Outlook 97/2000 provide. This is why they forced so hard for it. (and in my case, I work for a bunch of locked-into-the-Microsoft lifestyle weenies)
I don't know how decent Exchange 2000 is, but IMO Exchange 5.5 sucks bigtime from an administrative standpoint; the GUI is nothing short of abysmal (sp?).
I'm losing the UNIX vs. NT/2k war here, but there are also some alternatives to Exchange. One of the most promising that I found was HP's OpenMail. It is pricy (as if Exchange isn't...), but it boasts (perhaps claims is a more appropriate term) better compatibilty in terms of MS Outlook than MailOne. Best of all, there is a linux version of it. No clue though, as to whether there is a version of it for Solaris.
HP Openmail http://www.openmail.com/cyc/om/00/index.html
If Microsoft still has to run Hotmail on Solaris/Sun boxen and BSD, why would you want to run their email servers?
I think that argument says it all.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
...so the story goes something like this. I have this friend that had a web domain plus a couple of mail accounts lying around in an Exchange/IIS/NT4.0-server setup. The mailboxes lost sync with the NT accounts, showing up in the list of mailboxes in Exchange as containing some number of messages, and E still accepting incoming mail for those accounts while refusing mapi/pop3/owa access. After a lot of hacking around with NT accounts trying to reconnect the accounts, we gave up. Sooo. There must be some other way to access the mailbox data right? That's when the fun really starts. We were totally unable to export any of the accounts in any text format. Can you spell P-r-o-p-r-i-e-t-a-r-y? The mailboxes resided in a giant file in a binary, unpublished format of course. We never succeeded in getting the mails out of there, and had to ditch the mails that had been received. The moral of the story:
Once your in, you can't get out.
Oh, did I mention that his domain setup is now is Linux based?
/cj
Please post the CVS / shell script you speak of... and the hooks from DevStudio, also, as I can't figure out what you are speaking of.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Don't waste your breath. This guy isn't interested in why Exchange could possibly be a *good* thing under any circumstances. He isn't interested in how to make an informed business decision based on facts. He has a gut feeling about something, fed by years of /. FUD, and can no longer see clearly enough to even ask the question in an impartial manner. Never mind that the situation may end up requiring Exchange, and then again may not.
What you say? Exchange could work in some situations? Pshaw, I say. So what if they've got users? The only reason *anyone* uses Exchange is because they're trapped in MS's plans to take over the world and install mind control chips in every God Fearing Patriotic American's Brain, causing them to Worship Satan and Eat Babies.
Oh yeah, and Hotmail runs off Exchange now. But I guess a 1,000 user network is probably way bigger than that.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
The previous corporation I worked for was entirely MS software based, and their exchange server worked fine. You need to find out why these people want to move to MS software before you can counter their arguments. But the number one reason, from what I read of your request, should be if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It is obvious your setup works. Why change it for no real performance advantage?
Would they need to retrain you and your staff?
What about licensing? MS has some not-so-nice per-seat licensing on their software, this might be the case with exchange.
Personally, I like exchange. IMAP, POP, easily deployable web interface. But, you shouldn't switch to satisfy some whim.
I think if you present how switching would affect the Bottom Line (tm), management would see your way.
-- bearclaw
Sendmail and Exchange aren't comparable products. Lotus Notes and Exchange are. If you just want plan POP3 email, Sendmail or something like it are the way to go.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
This happened at the company I currently work at, in the last year there have been 4 worms, that have shut are system down from 1 day to 3 days.
They have had to hire more people, and put a 2nd computer on many peoples desktops.All this, and are mail load is still the same.
The only reason anybody in a company would want to do this, is so thay can hire more people for there empire building.
It's slow, expensive, virus prone, and unstable. There cost to impliment this is going to be higher then expected(or reported by the guy who is empire building). Its TCO will go throught the roof compared to your current set up.
not to mention the nightmare of changing from one systen to another.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We were looking at having to implement Exchange here for about 2000 users. Fortunately for us, our Financial Office killed that idea. It was going to cost us $300,000 just to get the hardware, the software, and the extra people we'll need to administer the system. Or we can spend $11,000.00 and upgrade the Netscape mail system we have now. Hmmmm....
HP has a product that might be a better solution. It is called Open Mail. It is not opensource, but I am willing to bet that it is more reliable.
IANAL... But I play one on
The corp I work for has been running Lotus Notes for 5 years now. We have just signed an enterprise agreement with MS that gives us site wide OS and mail licences, so, of course, they are looking into migrating everything to Exchange I feel your pain. In your case it seems far more practicle just to install outlook on the desktop, leave the backend in place for now. The easiest and most efective way to get this accross is to figure out how much in terms of man hours, upgrades and new hardware the transition will take, convert that to dollars, and see if they want to pay for it. I know around here, most of the stupider ideas have bee squashed using this method. If they still want to go ahead with it, add in a raise for yourself. good luck
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Don't forget Qmail.
_________________________________________________ Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
That would be a good example of why a homogeneous Exchange envionment would be a bad idea, least in my book: Exchange centric macro virii
We have Exchange in our office for mail. Not a day goes by we don't curse it for some reason. Constant crashes, hiccups, misc errors... problems connecting to our webserver. Once it was down for almost a week. We finally had to bring in an outside consultant at some insane fee to help us fix it. We're currently trying to convince our Systems Admin and management staff that a simple sendmail box is the way to go. If you already have a working sendmail solution, don't even think about leaving it!
I am in a company of 50 or so people, and we are a linux shop. Our prod (and staging and dev.) machines are linux. We are looking at making our developers us linux, because we deploy linux. My question is "How can a company transition AWAY from exchange, to something Linux?" We have exchange running, biz dev and mkting love it, IT hates it. Everyone is accustomed to using outlook, and the scheduling and calendars is critical (at least they think) to them. How does a company transition out of Exchange, so that they can provide most of the functionality of Exchange and transition smoothly (maybe even to the point where users can use outlook if they insist) to the new linux product. A web-email, imap, pop, shared-calendar, tasks and contact mgt. applicaion that is integrated, robust, reliable and able to replace exchange must exist somewhere. Does anyone have any experience on trying to replace exchange with linux software?
My last company was one everybody in the modern PC world (and UNIX world for that matter) knows about. They used exchange server for everything. When the company was about 2-3 years old, the exchange server crashed, and everybody who had email stored on the server lost 2-3 years of email. Yes, there were backups, but they were all CORRUPTED. M$ loves monolithic binary databases that require days and days of time to verify once they reach anything other than "toy" size (when they work at all). Plus the fact that you can't (couldn't at that time) do "live" backups produces disincentives for running and checking backups. They sacked the IT guy, who was a really good IT guy -- he was forced to use exchange server by the company execs. They replaced him with a series of clueless IT people. It was a shame.
There is no reason a competent sysadmin can't make Exchange run smoothly, and there is no reason to forgo this sort of functionality in favor of some sort of "all free software" credibility. Exchange is well worth the money for these and other reasons, and any
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You want to play a fucken game?
AFAIK, Yahoo uses Rocketmail, which they either bought from Rocketmail, or they bought the company.
-pbk
Yup, which is why every few months I show up to work with signs plastered over the walls and on all of the entrances saying "Do not open attachments named whatever.exe". Currently we have signs saying "navidad.exe" that went up a couple days ago.
Also, depending on the nature of the virus, they will also disable the dial-in modem pools, turn all the file servers to read only, and damn near send everyone home for the day. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there, reading mail in mutt on my Solaris box wondering what all the commotion is about.
*sigh*--Joe
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Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Chances are this is one of those groups of people who don't already have a good email client and are blaming their problems on the email server, etc. These people are ignorant, stupid and dangerous. They see someone else using it and think "that's way better than we have!" when they don't even know what they have. Also, it's often much more painful to do a transition. Users have no concept of the behind the scenes work to train, install, transition, etc. to bring up these new systems. Often locking the organization into a period of difficulties and learning. They also are more than willing to make decisions for everyone else based upon their wants.
You really are better off with what you're running, particularly if it's efficient and stable. That's the ultimate goal, because downtime is opportunity lost. Nothing worse than trying to recover from Microsoft server crashes. Visualize your email being out for a day or two. That should wake them up.
Best approach is to query these malcontents on what they believe they are missing out on. Find those features in their mail client or new one for them and make that move. It's always easier to sieze the initiative early in these debates, if you don't they will and you'll be up to your ears in FUD about something you know works just fine. Be sure you get management by in at highest levels as quick as possible. They respond well to $$$ which will be lost if you do any kind of transision.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, the best answer I could give you is it depends. What is your primary server base? Are your accounts primarily NT or Unix based accounts? The real strongpoint for many mail systems is seamless authentication, so it depends on your server base. Exchange 5.5 properly implimented is quite reliable, and so is the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) version of Exchange 2000. When I say 'properly implimented', I mean that you have to have someone who knows the product at least a little. If you have seen setups crash and burn, it's not due to the Exchange software bits, but usually to a dork who tries to B.S. his or her way through the migration/implimentation.
You also need to consider how big your IT staff is and what kind of skills they have. If your IT staff consists of a few very few knowledgeable people, then a Unix-based system can be installed and maintained through sometimes complex, but less often maintenance procedures. If you have an IT staff of scattered skillsets, then you might consider having a consulting firm install Exchange 5.5 or 2000 and have them document it all, then your staff maintain it. This latter option would provide easier maintenance with a lower knowledge-level requirement for staff members.
The point is, that if you're looking for a reason to hate Exchange, then I am sure you will find people posting here to commiserate with you; but you will also find just as easily people willing to commiserate over unix-based mail systems.
While not a popular stance with the younder slashdot readers, software isn't a religion, it's a tool. Good software meets a need with a minimized amount of cost- sometimes that cost is in software price, sometimes in staff salaries, downtime, etc. If you would like to talk about this more offline, send me an e-mail.
I'm just scratching the surface of the number of problems you will encounter if you are someone who already knows how email works. This is one of those, "If Exchange/Outlook are all you know, you'll think you know everything, but if you know enough to ask, it's not for you" things.
Exchange works well, when designed well. I've done Exchange deployments in companies many times this size, I've admin'd companies larger than this too. If you set it up and do your sites and organization layout correctly, you'll have few problems. 1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself.
OutLook has security problems. But step 1 is to put in a GOOD anti-virus app at your entry point to Exchange, and all other mailbox servers if you really want to cover yourself. Make sure and get a backup software with a good Exchange interface. I've used both ArcServe and Backup Exec, and prefer Backup Exec. An option is to do a brick by brick backup where you can restore an individual mailbox, but be careful as this is much slower than a database backup. Microsoft has a number of whitepapers on their site about the care and feeding of the Exchange database. With v5.5 most of that is no longer needed. You don't need to repack the database every few months like you used to.
They also offer some excellent whitepapers on optimizing the server. This mainly has to do with memory and how to set up the drives for performance and fault tolerance.
The appeal of Exchange over things such as pine and sendmail is integration of the calender and task scheduling. That is a HUGE feature for the management types.
The real question is to look at the reason to change. It will be effort to move mailbox info over to Exchange so make sure it's worth it. I do mostly Unix work now, but still use Exchange/Outlook for email. I just think it's one thing that Microsoft really got right. There are a number of companies with over 100K users on Exchange.
You should have really taken the time to implement an anti-virus solution before the problem got too big. Both on the servers and desktops. You can also use system policies that absolutely don't allow attached executables to run from the Outlook client no matter how hard the user tries to run them. --JB
love bug
Also, from what I remember, Outlook gets testy when it loses its server connection for any length of time, and most of the times I had to reboot my development box (typically 2-4 times a day; thanks Win98!) were due to Outlook hanging and bringing the whole system down with it. (An honorable mention for causing similar problems goes to Visual SourceSafe...) This kind of thing, multiplied by the number of employees you have, is a lame time-suck...
Be sure to look before you leap...
The real advantages to Outlook over OE are the PIM features. If you don't need some serious PIM stuff OE is by far the better program.
When you switch over to Linux, I'd recommend KMail as a good OE like e-mail client. I've been using it for a little more than a year now and have found it to be quite good.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
It seems to me you have a pretty simple and clear case to keep the system you already have. It's obvious that the only reason anyone in
your company wants to have an Exchange Server on the network is "ease of management." I'll bet dollars to donuts that your "polical
movement" is primarily comprised of users or unknowledged, dare I say "techninal," advisors/systems analysts. Your company already has a _Huge_ investment in the Solaris-base mail system. Excluding Sun contracts, the money has already (and in my opinion) been well spent.
Let me recount my personal experience with M$ Exchange..
I worked for 2 years for Citicorp Insurance Group, now obliterated, due to the Citi-Travelers merger. During my time there I was an
adminstrator of a heterogenous computing environment, including Sun E4000's with Solaris and Oracle, and an assorment of Compaq
hardware running M$ and Novell. Our M$ server worked well enough but often times were a bitch to deal with, considering all the changes that were going on with the company, ie moving users around and deleting/adding new users. NT _can_ be stable given extremely expensive hardware and _NO_CHANGE_. Don't mess around with a server when you get it running. As part of our closing, my
counterpart took it upon herself to "migrate," if you will, our exchange server from one working machine to a different one so that the
original could be sent away. Sounds simple enough, except that Echange doesn't like to have any of its services restarted (unless its a full
NT/server restart). All in all, she lost all the mailboxes and was unable to retreive them even with "backups." But thats another story. I
wouldn't bet my Disaster/Recovery strategy on any M$-based products due to my own experiences.
Also keep in mind that with M$ comes the ever popular licensing agreements. When you purchase your server, you will buy NT Server and the necessary components (Exchange, et al). You will need BackOffice clients for _every_machine_ that connects to it, including those non-M$ desktops that use the SMTP or HTTP connectivity. When you start adding it up, it can be _QUITE_ expensive. Once again I remind you, you've already made an investment in a great and well-functioning mail system. You know the saying, "if it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it."
These are just my experiences and opinions, but I beleive that after you have reviewed all the posts here today, you'll have one hell of an arguement for
keeping your system the way it is. It's my opinion that the only reason that companies choose M$ products over other, better-qualified products is based entirely on ease-of-use/managemtn. As such, they can hire less-competant "administrator and analysts" at less pay to work with the stuff. If you still have a problem, let your managers and CxO's know that I am available for a fee to conduct an independant technival review of your entire computing environment!
mrBoB
I have a mail account that uses the web-based version of Exchange. The user interface and functionality is horrible. It looks like it was implemented as a check-list feature. Plus, I have to use a kludge that somebody cooked up to set/change two passwords, one for access to the NT domain and another for Exchange. The passwords expire on a regular basis and you need both passwords to access your email.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I can give you an *exceptionally* good reason why not to use Exchange. Recovering from corrupted mail spools (which CAN happen quite easily) is extraordinarily painful and unwieldy. It basically requires that you have a hot spare of your mail systems ready to go, and frankly, the only reason I'd be keeping a hot spare around would be for hardware failure... not software. (I don't use software that's so bad it requires hot spares--which is what it basically comes down to.)
Let me outline you how exactly an Exchange administrator is supposed to "recover" from corrupted mail spools...
You have to build an *identical* system to the one that has begun corrupting it's spools. Then the administrator must manually (this can be scripted but that still doesn't make it any less horrifying) migrate each and every user off the damaged Exchange server over to the new one, leaving the corrupted data behind. Microsoft has provided no way to try to untangle corrupted spools whatsoever, and there's not even a way to just grab someones spool file and manipulate it.
After you're done you can do whatever you like with the old mail servers, but either way, at minumum your Total Cost of Ownership (a buzzword Microsoft Reps seem fond of flinging around) just *doubled* the price of your hardware for running an Exchange server.
...with a normal *nix-based system, you can at least just restore some backup files and go from there.
And, of course, don't forget that if they get Exchange installed there, you can bet they'll be wanting to move to Active Directory next so they can try for a Single Sign-On solution. The short of it is that your politically powerful faction that's pushing for Exchange is also likely pushing for more power in the office, and Active Directory has the unfortunate effect of concentrating complete control of your network into the hands of whoever owns the master directory server, which will probably be them. I've seen a lot of different corporate infrastructures, and none of them so far have really been able to dispose of the web of trust issues that something like this brings up.
Example: If you have an IT security department, and an network infrastructure department, the network infrastructure department is the logical choise to be responsible for maintaining the Active Directory servers. However, if anyone in the IT security department (or, say, PAYROLL for an even better example) is actually logging into the Active Directory crapola when they boot up their computer, all of their files are effectively under the control of the network infrastructure department. It's an improper trust relationship, and there is no way around it.
Microsoft makes a lot of nifty products that are easy for users and administrators to use. Unfortunately they lock you into a particularly small set of possibilities for organizing how your equipment is managed and controlled, which represents a HUGE threat in the form of weak/broken trust models resulting in possible collusion and/or internal espionage.
(Basically, if it looks like a Fisher-Price toy, and works like a Fisher-Price toy, then it isn't something you should be basing your buisness model on.)
Perhaps you should look at the situation backwards, as opposed from your prespective. Why would management want to standardize on Exchange? Does it provide more functions/better features or does it just sound sexy? Once you find out what they want it will be a hell of alot easier to defend your current implementation and shoot down exchange since its obvious you don't even want to consider Exchange. I also would recommened changing your perspective on the situation from "what I like and do" to "what is best for the company as a whole". Afterall it is your job to evaluate and make a decision based on careful consideration and research of all products. If they don't respect your decision then you got another problem and you can submit another ASK SLASHDOT "Where can I get a real job?"
The majority of users who use pine as their mail client are:
a) able to easily find work at a new employer
and...
b) likely to pursue that option if mandated to switch to Outlook.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I have worked with both Exchange and Groupwise, and if given a choice of making $50K/year as a GroupWise admin and $100K/yr as an Exchange admin, I would take the Groupwise Admin position. Keeping Exchange servers up and running is far too stressful for me.
From a "politically sensitive" corporate point of view, e-mail enabled calendaring, including task and meeting assignment, is the reason that so many people want to switch. Check out the freshmeat section on Calendaring Programs. Being able to have everybody on the same calendar, and knowing that the calendar names are exactly the same as the email names is a non-trivial item for anybody who has to schedule more than one meeting a month. I have worked with shops that went away from other solutions, simply because they wanted e-mail enabled calendaring.
Things to mention when considering migration:
- Cost of training users.
- Outlook installs with a default of MS Rich text format. Most users are so tickled by this feature that they forget that anything that goes out of the outlook/exchange environment can't read this.
- Users *must* be trained to create *.pst files on their own machines, and to create rules that move things to those separate files. The largest disadvantage of Outlook/Exchange is that all of the e-mail and attachments are stored in a single file, encoded and encrypted by outlook standards. Kiss goodbye to searches by anybody but Perl demigods.
- Users must be trained to use the calendaring feature effeciently.
- The cost of the user training, at 4 hours per user, is left as an exercise to the IT person who needs to makes sure that is included in the budget.
- Also included in the budget must be extensive training for IT, at least two dedicated boxen (one for Exchange, one to make copies and backups of the server-side giant file), more cabling, upgrades to client machines, and several small factors.
- This does not include the cost from Outlook/Exchange security holes. MS Outlook is the soft target of choice. Any Cost estimate must also include the cost of obtaining and maintaining virus protection hardware and software. It must also include an hour of e-security training for each user. Are you WinX users used to right-clicking to run the virus software? Can't do that in Outlook. Look for information on lost time to virii! Multiply that by the users in your network, by department, and give a cost estimate, by job description.
This may be so far down that you don't get a chance to view it. I hope this helps.I work at a large bank in Pittsburgh, PA and we standardized on Outlook and Exchange. We had tried putting everyone on a small number of very large "super-servers" running Exchange but we found that we were killing the servers. Then we introduced more servers and spread the load out, which worked better.
We have to keep a very close eye out for new viruses coming in the door, especially macro viruses, since MS allows macros in almost everything.
We have also had to rebuild Exchange databases that have gotten corrupted. This is not due to virus action but just to the nature of Exchange itself. You need a good backup strategy or you are in for a lot of headaches trying to recover lost messages.
Never Touch Running System
Just a quick note as far as the one feature that is missing from most packages other than Exchange ..
.. and it is worth pointing out that in Exchange server it is true that you can put 10K users on a single box that has been buffed to the gills .. it is also true that said box will be operating at it's maximum acceptable capacity at the time it is turned up. Rather than the more intellegent option of leaving some capacity for growth and expantion .. which we all hope our businesses will do.
.. basically that when spec'ing out a machine for server duties .. estimate it's requirements .. than double them .. than double them again and that is what you will need for the life of that machine at least until it has served long enough to justify replacement.
HP Openmail has a built in feature to emulate the calandering functions of Outlook. It is as seemless as using a microsoft database and has far less hardware requirements in terms of up front capital and server headaches than Exchange.
This on the basis of having say 8 HP Openmail servers running on HPUX servicing the mail and workgroup requirements of 30 Exchange servers if equiped roughly equally.
oh
an old CNE technician I talked to when I was learning Novell 3.0 administration comes to mind
Since leaving that company, and doing my own thing (including hosting sites myself), I use sendmail and IMAP on Unix machines. You can easily use Outlook or whatever and get pretty much the same functions. When I was using NT 4 and Exchange 5.5, there were a number of things it couldn't do that would have been nice. But, I think you can get most all of what you want from using other sources.........
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Exchange has two "advantages" over it's competitors: it's easy to set up (compared to Solaris, sendmail, imap), and it presents a uniform interface for users.
The first isn't an issue for you since you already have Solaris et al. set up.
As for the second, there's no particular functionality that Exchange/Outlook provides that isn't handled by other, separate programs. That's just a matter of user education. You can run Netscape/CS&T's calendar server on the Solaris machine, if it's calendaring you want. There are some weird hooks into Outlook from some other MS products (DevStudio, for example) that can be replicated pretty easily with CVS and a shell script.
You're probably aware of the disadvantages. HA isn't an option: it WILL crash. You'll need a dedicated NT sysadmin if you don't already have one. Preferrably one who's had to rebuild an Exchange server after it's crashed (which can be a brutal, time consuming job) and not a fresh "I just got my MCSE so I must be smart" type. Expect to have planned outages weekly to reboot "just in case", because otherwise the monthly crashes will be unscheduled and will take significantly loger to recover from. The exchange box should be a really really beefy single CPU machine with as much memory and disk as can be managed (as in, it'll cost as much as a Sun), and nothing except Exchange should run on it, to reduce the frequency of crashes.
--
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
My school has NT servers handling email, but will never even consider the Microsoft Exchange again. We also discourage the use of MS Outlook and MSIE, and those who do use them are not guaranteed tech support from the school for issues pertaining to their email client or web browser.
The campus network had turned into a playground for script kiddies when we were using MS internet server and client software. So far, the kids haven't shown quite so much skill at exploiting our current mailserver software or Netscape Communicator.
GE runs Exchange for their corp email system. They have over 415k users in the global address list and run it on Proliant 8-way machines running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Seems to work ok for them =)
The earlier versions had problems. 4.0 was particularly troublesome, as I recall. I know I had many headaches with it. I was pretty green back then, so I'm not sure if the problems were Exchange or the administrators, but it broke all the damn time. We didn't lose much mail but we were constantly seeing things stick in queues, and every once in awhile something would disappear. That's NOT good in a mail system(!).
In my next company they were running 5.5, which was very solid. We scaled successfully from 50 users to about 400 over the space of about two years, and then merged with another company of about 800 employees. There were little glitches here and there, but we never lost mail due to any mistakes or bobbles in Exchange. There are some maintenance issues in 5.5, and it's not very scriptable, but it's quite trustworthy.
I'm currently doing an Exchange 2000 installation into Windows 2K. (Keep in mind that I'm also installing Linux, BIND, and Sendmail here.) So far I am very impressed.
I don't yet fully understand the implications, but it appears to me that Exchange's integration into Active Directory is going to be a very powerful tool, and not just for administrators. I haven't seen anything equivalent in Open Source at all. I think LDAP may do some of the same things, but my impression is that the LDAP tools aren't anywhere near the maturity of the Win2K tools. (Of all the things I'll say here, this is the area about which I'm most ignorant, and I encourage corrections.)
While I would personally be very comfortable with a Unix solution, the fact that you have to write scripts to do most complex tasks on a regular basis means that junior admins just aren't very good at it. I'm trying to build this system so that junior admins can run it safely but still be able to do powerful things. And I don't have time to write a library of scripts for them. Exchange is really the only reasonable answer in this sort of environment.
Keep in mind that you do not need to standardize on Outlook at all. You do get some nice shared calendaring features if you do that, but you can support IMAP and POP3 through the server quite easily. The server issue and the client issues are different: don't let them confuse the two.
For mail storage, I don't much like the idea of zillions of files on zillions of computers. I prefer the 'keep mail on the server' model, a la IMAP. In a commercial environment I'd call this almost a necessity. It's very difficult to monitor hundreds of NT machines at once. Instead, you put all the eggs in one basket, and watch that basket. :-)
I don't think I'd personally want to do a mail store on a Linux machine quite yet. Ext2 is fragile as hell. ReiserFS looks better but I'm only just now going into testing on it. Solaris or SGI with IMAP would be reasonable solutions, but very expensive and the client would lose a lot of the power of a directory system. (even if Active Directory IS 1.0, it's still a hell of a lot better than NT 4 was!)
To give them some of the scripting power, I'm setting up an external Sendmail (or possibly Postfix, haven't decided yet) relay. That way, they can get most of the Unixy scripting power if they need it -- the sendmail transforms can be done at the relay. And they get the nice solid safety of an NTFS information store, which I like a lot. I also trust Sendmail and/or Postfix more than I do Exchange, as far as security is concerned -- opening an Exchange box directly to the Net frightens me. I much prefer the relay idea. But I don't trust Linux/sendmail to keep the information safe once it's delivered, thus NT/Exchange on the backend.
Keep in mind that Linux's issues with filesystem reliability are being remedied, and that Exchange 2000 is relatively unproven at this point, so don't rely on these comments much past March of 2001. By then the picture may be quite different.
But right now, it sure looks like Exchange is one of your better bets for corporate mail.
You could lock up your Sun servers and throw away the root password, and they would serve mail perfectly for the next 37 years or so.
The Exchange server will require constant maintenance: modifying settings, changing accounts, installing security hole patches, installing OS patches, upgrading OS, rebooting perodically, etc. etc. etc.
First a bit of background about exchange.
1: There are 2 choices with exchange right now, 5.5 and exchange 2000.
I'll give some 5.5 background.
1: If you are using this in an enterprise, you will need Exchange Enterprise server. This will let you have a message store greater than 16GB's. (Unlimited)
2: If you want things like clustering etc. beware with exchange 5.5. it does not do it very well at all. Its an active, standby config. (1 is active, the other is standby). When the first one fails, the second pops up and has to start the services. So you may have between 30seconds - 5 minutes of downtime for "clustered failover". Also, for your clustered servers to work, you need shared disk. (They need to share the same array). This would mean you would need to buy a pretty massive compaq or something.
3: 5.5 offers ldap/pop3 and webmail.
The downsides of webmail. It is recommended (by microsoft) that you move webmail to different servers and have your users connect to that. They recommend you do 2 (IIS 4.0)web servers for every exchange 5.5 server.
If you run IMAP/POP3, your users must connect to the server they are homed on. They cannot connect to 1 server and in the backend be connected to the server their files are on. So if you migrate servers with pop/imap users, you need to change each clients PC.
4: If you want resources like conference rooms, that do automatic accepts etc. in my experience you need to devote a dedicated conference server to do accepts for this. This requires that the machine is always logged in running outlook. Ok well there are technotes saying you dont need this. Too bad I couldnt get it to work.
5: Exchange will NOT install without a true domain controller. That means you need a PDC installed on your net and your exchange server as a member server. (Samba will not cut it) (at least not 2.0.7)
6: Now lets analyze the cost, assuming this is an enterprise.
You have:
2 Big main servers
1 Shared disk array
1 Tape backup server
1 Tape backup software
1 Exchange plugin for the backup software
2-4 Pc's for webmail
1-2 Conference room servers.
2 NT Enterprise server softwares.
1 NT Server software (backup server)
4 NT Server software (webmail)
2 NT Server software (conf rooms)
Now there is also the licensing for every user you need to pay for. EVEN for your pop users etc. The rule is "if they have a password, they need a license".
Now it is not all doom and gloom. You do get some cool calendaring and stuff that people like. Is it worth it? Depends on how important things like calendaring and reliability are to upper management.
There are also some weird bugs with 5.5 SP3. (Sp4 was released this week, but I havent tested it yet)
a: When you migrate users from 1 server to another, mail to the user during this migration gets bounced (User does not exist). Moving large mailboxes can take up to an hour (or longer).
b: You cannot migrate users from 1 site to another. (You have to copy to PST, and then import to the other site). (If you didnt appreciate rsync, this will make you wish you had it.)
Now lets go to Exchange 2000.
Note: This is infromation gained from speeches, and grilling MS reps, not from practical experience!
1: You need an active directory server. That means you need to be running a MS Active Directory server for your network. This could potentially become a win if you had your unix servers authenticate against it via ldap. But then again, it could also be a nightmare. Just a hypothetical.
2: It now supports active/active clustering. (So if 1 fails you still keep chugging along.) The bad thing is to get 2 way clusters you need 2000 Advanced server. To get 4 way clusters you need 2000 Datacenter server. (not cheap) Again these machines need to be connected to the same array. So that would mean some big hardware (compaq etc.)
3: As part of AD, you can move users across sites now.
4: You need less frontend IIS servers (according to MS its now 1 for 2 (as opposed to 2 for 1)). However now every frontend IIS server needs to have a license for Exchange 2000 server. (did not in 5.5)
5: Improved ways for backup. (You can now have multiple backup types for your server, so that different types of users, can be backed up with different frequency.)
6: If you have pop3/imap users on different servers, they can get to them by going through 1 server.
The plus for 2k would be the active/active clustering and the fixes. But then again, you have a lot of changes to make to fit it in.
Conclusion
Depending on what your internal architecture consists of, you may have a lot more to change than just adding an exchange server. You might have to add in a PDC, or AD server. You will have to put all your users in there for authentication.
Be careful with trusts, sometimes they are not your friend.
Make sure you set up a new account to be the exchange server manager.
If you run 5.5, run the Mailbox Manager. It allows you to clean up mailboxes over time.
If you have legal or compliance issues, you can have exchange be like big brother and copy all mail (to anyone) to an account for review. This is called message journaling.
The costs will mount up quick. Depending how much you have in your existing infrastructure, a figure with costs for a reliable solution, with certain uptime requirements may be prohibitive.
That may be something to ask of management. "what are the uptime requirements for the e-mail system".
Oh and last and final: Whatever you do, frontend your exchange servers with dedicated unix servers for outgoing and incoming smtp mail. That way you have things like support for things like the RBL/DUL/RSS, as well as aliases, redirection to things like mailman lists, and many more.
Hope this helps
-- C
Imagine the savings. Once the company is using Exchange/Outlook all the way, there is no point in having any firewalls installed. This saves not only the cost of those firewalls, but also the admins running them, and all the troubles when you can not connect to the Qua^W Naps^W important work-related servers...
In Murphy We Turst
E-mail's probably not the point here. Groupware is, especially calendaring, meeting scheduling, shared employee directories and so forth. The Echange/Outlook combo gives you that, and a nice snappy IMAP server doesn't. Insisting on staying with your generic POP/IMAP solution is hobbling your company. If your company is big enough to benefit from real groupware, then you should spend the money on, yes, commercial groupware. But not Exchange.
The first big reason to avoid the Exchange/Outlook combo is its 99% focus on Windows clients. The only full-featured Outlook client is for Windows. There is an outdated, semi-functional one for the Mac missing many key features, and with no ability to connect over the Internet at all. Exchange does have very nice web-based functionality as far as such things go, but in the end, that's still web-based calendaring, email and so on, with zero integration with other apps.
Second is the not-inconsiderable security problem. Outlook's problem isn't simply that it's highly vulnerable to viruses and trojans; so are many of its competitors. The big problem here is that all such trojans and viruses are written for Outlook. Nobody writes viruses targeting Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, not because they're less vulnerable, but because Outlook's the biggest target to hit. With any networked Windows environment you need three layers of virus protection: realtime on the desktop, realtime on the servers, and realtime on your e-mail system and its gateways. That said, most of these precautions are protecting against things that attack Outlook and Outlook Express only.
Third is vendor lock-in. Want to make use of Exchange's collaborative features and real enterprise calendaring and resource allocation? You'll generally need not just any major database server, but MS SQL Server. Want to upgrade your mail client but keep the current versions of your word processor and spreadsheet? No can do, if you're using MS Office. Got Unix servers and mainframes you'd like to put your mail system on for high availanbility? Exchange only runs on WinNT and 2000.
I'd go with Notes/Domino. Besides supporting the Mac fully, it has richer web functionality, extending to nearly any custom apps you write. It supports offline users better, with the ability to deliver even interactive apps for offline use. It's seldom if ever the target of viruses and worms, and best of all its servers scale like a champ, running not just on WinNT and Win2K, but also on most Unixes (not to mention Linux) as well as the AS/400 and System/390 midrange and mainframe systems. With Exchange you have to add more physical servers for every x users. With Domino, you can migrate your entire system to big iron quickly, you can choose your ideal HTTP server, databases and so forth, and seldom if ever have to change so much as a line of your custom code.
Outlook is a user's dream and often an administrator's worst nightmare. Domino gives you more flexibility on both the server and the desktop, and far fewer security headaches.
HP OpenMail is a nifty drop-in replacement for Exchange that allows use of most of Outlook's non-mail features, but it doesn't address any of the problems raised by deploying Outlook.
Outlook's vulerabilities as the #1 target of virus authors cannot be understated. Ask Ford or any of the other Fortune 500 companies whose entire mail systems were taken offline for between 1 and 3 days when the "ILOVEYOU" trojan hit.
Kirk RULES!
And just don't get me started with Voyager.
"Borg babies"
I was working IT Support at a major automotive manufacturers WHQ when they decided to switch over from they're older and imposibly stable profs mail system (propriatry IBM Mainframe mailsystem) to Exchange/Outlook and it was a nightmare. /servicepack 4 or 5 on a then top of the line Dell Poweredges and IBM NetFinity Servers.
The Exchange servers couldn't handle the load of more then about 1000 people at anytime (even though the specs for it say otherwise) and it wasn't like it was a hardware problem, it was fine. The application never failed to crash/lock/quit responding at about the 1500 user mark those. at least one of those servers went down every week in the beginning until they trippled the number servers to handle the load. (running it far under Microsofts Specified User Limits)
This was on a NT4
Its posible that with Win2k and the new version of exchange this problem might have changed, but Sticking with your current setup is the best bet.
Take my word on it, if you switch to exchange most likly your going to regret it.
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Why or why not? If it ain't broke, don't repair.
Even if Exchange + Outlook would kick ass,
switching such a busy site will turn into major
PITA.
Provided that such a change will require buying
new hardware, I suspect that your pro-Exchange
management expect a nice little envelope from
hardware vendor. If the envelope is fat enough,
you're probably out of luck.
KuroiNeko
What it has forced upon the company, though, is an increased IT budget. We have software engineers, especially, who now have Windows machines on their desk whose sole purpose is to read email. Nothing else! A fair number of these folks don't have Windows machines at home; they have Macintoshes, Linux machines, FreeBSD, or some other UNIX variant. So the only way for these folks to read email when they're working at home is to carry a laptop home with them. A bit ridiculous and expensive -- not just in procurement costs, but also in maintenance costs -- to have an entire desktop or laptop computer whose sole purpose is email. But that's what you get when you go with a proprietary system instead of one based on open standards.
To be fair, there is an HTTP interface into Exchange that we have here. It gets the job done, but it's annoying, and I've had it wipe out my entire inbox before. Also, you can supposedly get at your email on an Exchange server with POP3 and/or IMAP, but you're still excluded to some degree from the calendaring (mis)features.
I haven't used this, but I've heard HP OpenMail quoted as an alternative to Exchange that runs on practically everything. Don't know how true that is, though.
Managers can't identify with Unix, they can, however, identify with MSFT. Good luck but I think you will lose.
I work two different places. I work for a state pollution control agency running Exchange. I worked as backup Exchange admin. My second job, I work part time for a small ISP. Here are the two setups.
ISP: GW2K Pentium 333 with two 6gig drives and 128M Ram. 6000 pop accounts and a few mailing lists running majordomo and sendmail on FreeBSD. It suffers almost no user complaints and we had to reboot it last year to move it to a new UPS. The uptime before that was 800+ days.
State Agency: Exchange running on three Compaq dual processer boxes. 860 total employees, one of the boxes acts as primary domain controller. Each box has a 25 gig raid array plugged into it. The raid holds the mail, the internal drive holds the diff files that should be able to be used to reconstruct the database in case of a problem.
User complaints are moderate. Exhchange sometimes runs slow and we don't really know why. It is much better now that we added second processors to all the machines. We are thinking if we buy another machine to act as the domain controller perhaps we can reduce that load.
Then there are problems. The exchange admin went on vacation for a week. Two days into her vacation, mid day, I detected prarie dogging people saying "Is exchange down?" I was in charge of going down to the server room and discovering what was wrong. The server had been running for a couple of weeks with no reboots (somewhat rare) and it was all hosed up. I shut down everything and rebooted. When the machine came back up the exchange database was corrupt. Exchange would not start. The corruption had occured sometime before the last two weeks and exchange will run fine on a corrupt database. At that time the agency was on a two week backup rotation (yeah, I know stupid but it wasn't really my job) The backups were backups of the corrupt data and the first of the month backup had a bad tape and was un-restorable also. The mail database had grown to 16 gig - the maximum database size for exchange. The diff files could not be applied because the database would have to at least temporarly go over the 16 gig mark. A data recovery firm was brought in but it took months and bukoo bucks to mostly only recover document attachments. Email was down for over a week and I was sweating blood spending days on the phone to microsoft.
OK, many hard lessons were learned here. We did many things the wrong way and we have tried to change as many of them as we can. The setup we now have makes one of the compaq mail servers a backup machine. The backup tapes which are made every night are automatically restored to the backup machine and this process is tested every few days.
And the really important thing to me, I shed that job and now work in a department with a fleet of unix boxes. Life is good.
Microsoft has a very powerful marketing machine aimed at the suits. You are in a tough position right now because Microsoft has convinced your boss he is behind the times. That's a bad place to be. Life for you is really simple now. Simple and stable. I would fight hard to not change. Good luck!
This question never should have been posted. It is just crap. Exchange works just fine. I feel MS' licensing is outragous but that is another story. Complaints about stability are BS. It is like any other piece of software. If you don't configure it right or you run it on hardware that is not on the HCL you will have problems. It is possible although not mentioned in the post that managment is looking at the calendaring and workflow functionality that exchange makes easy to use. Exchange licensing is cheaper than Lotus Notes and OpenMail(hp's groupware/mail product). If they are just using email and have no need for the groupware functionality then I would say stick with what you have otherwise do research..don't make stupid biased posts on Slashdot.
I can't believe I forgot this...
If your office decides to use Exchange, and then "standardize" on Outlook, unless you have additionally found a way to prevent each and every user who uses that Exchange server from disabling their anti-virus software (ha! good luck on that!) you're going to be ensuring that pretty much every user using mail from your server is a possible target. More importantly, two to three times a year when a *new* macro-virus comes out that the scanners *can't* spot, it's going to rip through your office like anthrax, and the additional load is going to make your Exchange server eat itself and DIE.
If you're already using an HA rig to deal with email, then you've got a pretty considerable load on those things already I'll bet. Imagine what happens when 20-50x that load starts pounding the server for about an hour or so.
And sendmail doesn't require an experienced admin to setup right? Granted, in this case, they already have unix/sendmail admins.
Also, plan on downtime. Unlike Unix mail systems, Exchange seems to need to be taken down for maintenance every so often. I'm not an Exchange admin, so don't ask me why, but every Exchange site I've worked at has had to do this.
We have several dedicated Exchange boxes that are up 24/7. Those almost never go down for maintenance. The only exchange boxes that get taken down in our infrastructure are the ones that run other things besides exchange.
All that being said, given a preference, I'd rather admin a unix box. I know and use MS products because the company I work for is almost all Microsoft. And you know what? I don't give a damn. They can do what they want as long as I have a job that I enjoy. Regardless of what I use, Unix/MS/Mac products, there will always be new challenges and that is what I enjoy most.
Happ(o)
Can you help me come up with opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks as an enterprise e-mail solution versus a nice solid Unix solution to present to management
It sounds like you've already made your decision. Exchange 2000 is a really stable, powerful platform. However, I'm sure you'll find plenty of FUD to the contrary if you ask enough slashdotters. I've worked on networks for large school districts and businesses and I have nothing but kudos for Exchange 2000.
A speech...
That sounds like the main issue that your company is addressing. They want to, like most companies, standardise on a package that allows them to replace their admins and still have it supported. They also want to use a single, standard, interface so they don't need to train up users and can get other, experienced, employees more easily.
So, if you are trying to avoid Microsoft, address their core desires. Give them another alternative that has a single, standardised set up [or at least, like MS products, one they percieve as standardised]. Find them a user interface that they'll find easy to get experienced users for.
If you love the geek side of all the interesting challenges, or are trying to protect your powerbase, it is probably time to move on as it sounds like they have already made the conceptual shift to try dis-empowering the IT staff.
I have been working with Exchange for about three years and recently did a roll out to about 1200 users. Here is what I like and don't like:
Pro:
For a MS product its got a good admin tool and pretty easy to configure.
Stable - regardless to what people say, when exchange has had trouble it has been more often NT related than exchange. This mostly comes down to how NT handles virtual memory, which is to say it doesn't. Don't go light on the RAM.
Con:
Security & Virus - I have yet to see a really good scanner that can catch everything. Yes get a good virus scanner on the server but even more important don't forget the desktop. Outlook security patch and a good anti-virus scanner can keep e-mail worms under control.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
Start watching BugTrack/SecurityFocus and mail any/all of the security advisories to the senior management that will be making the decisions. To be fair you should also report the security issues with your current set-up and the associated fixes. Force the management see the security issues and the time differences between fixes from *nix vendors/open source developers and Micro$oft. I am fighting the same battle, I have found that if you can provide proof that the M$ product really does suck instead of just saying that it does and touting your current system you get better results. I am still (happily) administering Sun and HP-UX servers, I won the battle that one M$ zealot started on my team. PROVE that Oracle on Sun beats the *&#(@*&$@(*#& out of SQ(eee)L server on NT. (My own victory, a no brainer but..) I wish you luck in you battle.
Forget the recount,
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Reminds me of an advertisment the danish beer brand Tuborg once had: When does Tuborg taste best?
-Always.
--
Exchange 2000 is Per Seat licensed only. At $67 per client and $4,000 per server, software only. Or with the "competitive" upgrade you get a whopping $13 off! But for your place, that may be worth it for the $13,000 it would save you. With those numbers, it should take all of 20-30 minutes to convince management not to do it. And you can thank Microsoft for doing all the work for you.
First you talk about your client mix: Outlook, Netscape, Pine. As Pine is Unix-Only (if I am not mistaken), there seem to be Unix clients within your company. And Unix clients usually cannot connect to MAPI servers. So you will have to enable POP/IMAP connectors to the Exchange servers. Another source of problems and license fees.
Majordomo - I am nearly sure that Majordomo does not work on WinNT/Exchange. So you will have to migrate the automatic maillist operation done by Majordomo into an Exchange application. I personally do not know one, but I am dead sure that a migration (if possible at all) will not be a nice job.
Then there is new equipment. For Exchange you need WinNT/W2k plus enough licenses plus exchange plus licenses plus Outlook plus licenses. For HA you will need a HA server for NT - probably high-end Compaq servers with fibre-channel backbone and storage array - or something similar - at least for the central servers. The price is considerable.
Ah yes, Server load. In my old (consulting) company we had ~40 Exchange servers (Compaq 5500 and 7500 - all RAM/HD/CPU-maxed) for ~7000 people distributed accross the country. Now do a bit of calculation. The price is nice...
If you can prove to management there isn't anything they want that you can't already do, then it would be hard to justify the expense and potential problems that come with the switch.
-
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
We have had slowdowns in the past, but they were mostly bandwidth issues in the remote locations. You just shouldn't try to run thicknet on a subnet that has computers transfering 5 gig databases and expect your 5 meg emails to download to outlook very fast.
As for people setting up schedules, when Outlook is setup right it will check all recipient accounts to make sure timeslots are available and will give an error if they aren't.
As for the ILoveYou virus ... the gateway to the server filtered out some 500 infections ... and we had only 3 computers get infected and damaged company wide.
In short, if you set your system up right, and actually teach your users how to use their systems and common sense, Exchange will help you organize a lot of your business related activities.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
Here's an example:
.vbs-worm-infested per minute; our 486 runs Sendmail and Inflex (search for Inflex on freshmeat), and blocks all those messages.
At the company I work for, I had replaced a Lotus cc:Mail server running on NT with Linux+Sendmail. The Linux email server supports our 100 users or so on a 486sx; the NT box required a high-end pentium system.
The NT box required a reboot every couple days, and had major problems requiring my boss and myself to spend hours every week trying to bring it back up after it stopped working for one reason or another.
Now, a couple years after ridding ourselves of that awful heap of crap, our corporate parent company has decided that all the child companies should be homogenous. They run Exchange.
We have resisted, so far, and will continue to resist. Why? Because they have many thousands of dollars worth of email server that falls to it's knees while propogating thousands of
Initially, whenever they bombarded us with thousands of vbs messages per minute, our 486sx would also be brought to it's knees by the load of scanning and refusing so many. Then, because the software we use to scan (Inflex) is in the form of a shell script, I was able to write 4 lines of code that throttle it back.
Here's the cool thing: It was trivial to add a feature that greatly enhanced our mail server, giving it the capability to deal with the problems that result from the parent company's server NOT being able to deal with their own problems.
I have added all sorts of features to this script. I am not a programmer, yet, I can add features to filter mail any way I want, or to do just about anything else I want with it.
Meanwhile, there are people getting paid six digits to keep these Exchange servers running; and I have a much better server running Sendmail that only requires cheap skills and cheaper hardware.
I'm probably going to quit if they make me run an Exchange server.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Anybody know of any linux based group calendar management programs?
Our head office recently migrated from Netscape Calandar to Micro$oft Exchange. Trouble is, our office is exclusively Linux based, so we're left looking for a Calendar program we can use.
Any ideas?
Chris
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
>opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks
Recently we all saw as Carnivor creators wanted a "rubber stamp" telling us that it is "good". Do you like it?
Now you asks for "rubber stamp" on report that "Exchange sucks". I hate this.
Exchange is not a solution for everybody, and may be it is not for you, but it does not sucks. It works for many organizations, and it is not management nightmare.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
I used their backup and antivirus programs and both were complete and total crap. Somewhere archived on Slashdot is a long rant I wrote about their horrible, horrible backup system. It's utterly broken past a certain number of files and all their workarounds, well, don't.
Avoid ANYTHING by the former Cheyenne. Absolute shit products.
Ive worked at two companies that moved to Exchange. In both cases they never could stop using the Unix-based services altogether. Keep running your listservs and server-intensive processes on unix, and use Exchange for all the individual end users in the company, so you can still have the neato ("bells and whistles" yes, but actually they are extremely handy if everyone knows how to use them) features it provides, like its remote-access model (ala IMAP), meeting requests, web access, contacts/smart address books, etc. Theres lots of different ways you can have one email system proxying to the other (or in both directions if needed). Tell the MS pinheads at your company that youve moved everything to Exchange, i guarantee you they will *never* know the difference since they obviously dont have a concept of the more sophisticated things you are doing anyway.
I'm a sysadmin for about 1000 seats on an Exchange system with servers that are geographically spread out. We also have a Unix sendmail/pop3/imap system in place for a smaller subset of our users. Both systems work well. Many of our users on the Unix system are using Outlook to access their email.
If you are getting pressure from users about using Outlook, then an Outlook front end to an IMAP back end is probably the best of both worlds.
Using this combination you can get 95%+ of the functionality without having to commit yourself to running NT/Exchange. Most of the cool Outlook features are client functionality and not based on the server.
Everybody thinks that you need Exchange server to schedule, but this is absolutely false. The meeting invitations and accepts/refusals are all just emails. The format may be some MS proprietary thing, but if both sides are running Outlook, then the email transport doesn't matter. The only thing that is server based is the ability to view free busy time and Microsoft kindly included a mechanism to publish and view free/busy times at a URL. This functionality was intended to allow free/busy exchanges between organizations across a public network like the internet, but it works just fine inside a company as well.
The downside to using this combo is that you need to buy a copy of Outlook for everybody who is going to use it.
The upside is that you already seem to have a high-performance, high-functionality, and high-availability system in place. Why mess with that when you can simply change the front end, while still providing a choice of access methods for those that don't want/need Outlook.
The downside to using Exchange are the licensing costs, the fact that all users on a single server are using a single giant database (this is also a strength of the product), and vendor lock-in.
I'd be curious to know what you are using for email virus scanning on your exisiting email system. We are currently using some homebrew filters and they are not that easy to maintain. The antivirus stuff on the Exchange side works well and is reasonably flexible (i.e. we can filter stuff even if it isn't in the current virus definition files)
Just one user's opinion, but I wouldn't choose it if I were the decisionmaker.
sulli
RTFJ.
I've had LOTS of experience with GroupWise, and haven't had any 'nightmares' to speak of. Challenges, yes, but just getting Win9x to run consistently is a challenge. And you don't *have* to run the GroupWise client at all. Novell supports using the Outlook front end against a GroupWise message store, giving you the best of both worlds: the desktop interface that your users like, and a backend that won't make you old before your time.
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
Times when Exchange is warranted:
Times when Sendmail is a better choice:
Believe it or not, we're just rolling out an email strategy for our branch offices. (Airline IT == dark ages.) We pretty much had to choose exchange because of the airlines' insistence on using NT-based solutions. If it were me, I'd slap sendmail on a Linux box in a heartbeat. It's more scalable on less hardware than Exchange, and (I think) is easy to administer. You be the judge. -ErichTheRed
that Outlook has a MUCH better interface than Notes, despite Notes' longevity and arguably more maturity.
I'm currently in a similar situation in needing to fight Exchange, and I've come across Steltor (formerly CS&T) CorporateTime . It's a Calendar Server, but it has an Outlook plugin that makes its calendaring functions look just like Exchange's, plus it adds support back into Outlook for IMAP (which is, for some reason, taken away in the Exchange-enabled version). And the IMAP server looks like an Exchange server for email.
I haven't had a lot of time to look at it, but it looks like a real option (and it runs under a variety of Unices). It might even be possible to fake out your users. Anyone else know anything?
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
I ditched exchange for sendmail.
Exchange is a memory hog and it has tons of security flaws. And one thing that pissed me off is that there is no way to uninstall it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
.... you know the rest.
Put the burden on this vocal group, and have them provide a Cost/Benefit analysis. Should be a slam dunk; if your mail works now, and they want to change to something that also works, there is no added benefit to offset the costs incurred.
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Outlook itself is a hog on resources. Often times, when 'my users' are going be working on something significant or large, I recommend for them to shutdown Outlook.
It launches countless threads, uses a lot of memory (sorry, don't have a number, but it normally drops a standard machine down to 77% resources free), and, in my experience, doesn't help with the stability of windows in general.
It works for us, but... at a price.
2. The Current system works.
3. Cost of the new system.
4. The uptimes over at netcraft.
5. Everyone else is using Unix, it's the standard already.
6. Microsoft has a habit of giving you the perception that you must upgrade (both OS and Machine) to get nonstandard "features" which are usually broken in the first implementation, which in the end requires another upgrade.
7. Microsofts support costs are extraordinarily high compared to other venders. (see Unix is the standard).
8. I personally have NEVER seen a Unix system crash.
I'm sure there are more....
Burn Hollywood Burn
The other question might be "how pretty is it"? I've seen people in a company bitch about a perfectly decent mail system (WITH a built in calendar feature) because it was through a green terminal screen and didn't look 'modern' enough. I'm wondering if the opposition you face is of a similar nature?
If so, would it be possiuble to make (or find an OSS equivalent) GUI windows front-end? Do they want to change for feature reasons with Outlook (possible), or is it just cause they want it to look like Outlook?
--sugarman--
My company has flip-flopped over the last three years as to which e-mail system we should use, so I've had a chance to try out a few.
What I really learned from all of these mail server transitions is that moving mail service from one MTA to another is error prone and bound to cause grief. You should expect to loose mail and hair, unless you're prepared to put a hurculean effort into transitioning every last little bit of mail from the old mail server to the new. And if even one piece of mail is missing, it's a sure bet that the user who owned it will devote themselves to making you miserable.
I would also like to add that my company has lost customers just because a small but vocal minority of users didn't like our web mail client. If the powers that be force the employees to use Outlook when they don't want to, there is likely to be trouble.
The people who need calendering services might want to consider alternatives to Exchange. We tried using Exchange specifically because of these features, and found it less that useful. We developed our own in-house solution that works over the web quite nicely, with or without having to see a piece of mail about the event. If you're interested, mail me off line and I'll show you the system.
Buy licenses for Lotus Domino for Solaris and be done with it. It's a perfectly viable piece of groupware that is more compatible with other clients, and at the same time doesn't force you to change the hardware and the OS. You can even add PC's running Linux with Domino for Linux to the fray, or just sendmail to do relaying.
Ok, Exchange Server does have its benefits - remote storage of email, a global address book, etc. Can't an IMAP/LDAP implementation solve this? I may be wrong, but I'm sure it can be done. Outlook can still be used on the desktop, and you can keep your existing servers.
The VP of my department defines a PHB, so lemme give you some insight:
It doesn't matter what you think. If the PHB wants XYZ feature, he is going to get it, no matter what you or a thousand Slashdot hackers and/or zealots and/or evangelists and/or regular people have to say about it. If your boss thinks C++ is necessary for a project when Perl will do, guess what language you'll be coding in? If your boss thinks that Flash will do the job when you really need a custom Java applet, you'll do it in Flash. It's the way business "works"...
(end comment) */ }
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Once upon a time I was a consultant and had to discuss this issue all the time. Before we give you a counter argument, let's deal with what they are usually _really_ asking for:
-A single address list (OpenLDAP anyone?)
-Consistent look and feel to messages (Make everyone use the same format.)
-Ability to directly use rich content in messages (See above. Pine users will probably take a beating on this one though. Sorry.)
-Group scheduling (There's freeware that can do this. If the company is anti-open source, use the iPlanet calendar. If you use an HTML based scheduler, you can tell them how you're aligning the company for e-biz through the Extranet/Internet/insert buzzword of day here.)
I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that they are probably pro M$ techies or on the business side. If they are on the biz side, they only know what they've experienced and/or heard. M$ eXchange is commonly credited with providing all of that functionality. Now on to the points that you can use to counter this force:
- Cost. I wouldn't make the typical free software
argument at all. Avoid it with PHBs, it's a black hole. Rather I'd talk about the increased administrative costs, the poor ROI on software that gobbles up resources and the cost of outages.
- Reliability. I've been forced to live in several environments where exchange was implemented. Even in the best of them, the mail servers went down on average twice a week. Sendmail in a HA config is great since you can migrate the storage and keep on trucking. Let's not forget the ease of adding upstream MX spoolers in the event of a link problem. Ever use exchange
as a spooler? Ick.
-Complexity. Depending on how much mail your typical user gets/sends/processes, the amount of storage and processing requirements vary wildly for exchange. Odd are you'll have more than two servers (I'm guessing five.) Shared storage and data volumes? Good luck implementing this under NT 4/Exchange 5.5; remember that exchange sticks every message in a database which makes it a major PITA to even consider shared volumes.
-Productivity. It costs time to use outlook. Outlook is slow and difficult to use in comparison to netscape mail or even outlook express. They'll go for the directory argument so be prepared to bring up LDAP.
I hope this helps you out.
You know what to remove for e-mail. Don't you?
The company I'm contracting at just migrated from Novell Groupwise to Outlook on an Exchange server. (This decision was made by our new parent company, who's busy hoovering up any decent hardware, office furniture, and employees before they close this location.) Now I'm getting a range of user complaints about Outlook. Specifically:
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the number of machines in which the registry was compromised by the outlook install. Or the stability issues of exchange compared to a unix solution. Or the wonders of opening your network to every VB-script-kiddie that wanders by. But user concerns and complaints are time and money for both the help desk and the effected workers. It's worth asking your Exchange partisans what benefits their solution offers that will outweigh both these costs and the cost of the changeover.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
Secondly, Exchange has *huge* hardware requirements. My girlfriend's company had to replace a single Unix server with 14 quad PPro Windows servers when they switched their European mail system to exchange about 3 years ago, just to support the same number of users.
Thirdly, Exchange is a complete pig without a very experienced administrator. I don't just mean a competant Exchange admin -- be prepared to spend significant money to get a decent one, if you want to have any hope of it being halfway reliable. Also, plan on downtime. Unlike Unix mail systems, Exchange seems to need to be taken down for maintenance every so often. I'm not an Exchange admin, so don't ask me why, but every Exchange site I've worked at has had to do this.
Finally, don't expect to find an exchange solution that comes close to a Sun HA solution in terms of reliability. The closest is probably a Data General Exchange cluster in a box, but if it were my money, I'd go for the Sun HA system. Since you've already paid for the Sun system, this should be a no-brainer, but I fully understand that management really are too dense to see that...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
For 16 hours Wednesday, over 400 of our users were without their email. We have three clustered Exchange servers. Together they serve around 1,400 users. The machine we lost had an eight gig message database that got corrupted. This is what I see in the daily report about the issue...
WEDNESDAY 11/15/2000 midnight-16:19 Problems still are experienced in the exchange database. Victor and Rui reported massive database corruption. @06:00 a restore was started. There is a estimated downtime from 06:00 approximately two hours. @07:02 Victor sent an Ad-Hoc to all support groups. Groups that will be affected are Tech Services, Systems, Operations (including Press), TI, Administration, and HR. (14:00) FYI - Ernie, Jim and Tim are aware of the situation. (16:19) Email was available again. Was advised by Alex that FYIs would be sent out by the Office group.
Exchange is putting way too many eggs in one basket if you ask me. For fractions of what we spend on Exchange, you could buy some hardcore sendmail action. A single database to corrupt instead of individual mbox files seems silly. (Yes, I know there are reasons why databases are cool. For mail, I feel more comfortable with old school tools.)
InitZero
Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop.
Doing some consulting work, I've seen this mysterous pro-Exchange political faction materialize in a dozen-or-so places, even in places that compete directly with Microsoft, it's always made me wonder what the heck is going on. (One place with a very tight IT operation even mysteriously got an "unlimited budget" for Exchange conversion, without any consultation from the IT manager.)
Is Microsoft sneaking around bribing people? Do they have some sort of subliminal mind-control ray built into Mr Clippy? (I can't imagine any other reason that the "VP of Marketing" would care what the mail server platform is, especially when the Outlook client is supported and he can send HTML mail to his heart's content.) I've been looking for more conspiricy theory data here, so if you have any, please post.
But, deal with this first by getting the log out of your own eye. "Calendering" is a critical application outside of the IT-hole, so if you aren't providing that on your network, you really are doing your users a disservice. Head them off at the pass and get something in there for shared calendars and appointment scheduling. Head them off again by making sure you have a standardized, support handheld calendar solution.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is a no brainer. Let 'em set up their system, run 'em parallel for a week duplicating all mail messages as the proxy and you'll soon see which hardware/software you want to toss.br
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
SUMMARY: Use HP OpenMail as a backend for Outlook Clients.
Your enterprise is probably primarily UNIX based on the server end (Sun, Linux, HPUX).
A good rule of thumb is, when dealing with large networks, to keep the server platforms as homogenous as possible. This makes administration, and training easier. This cuts down on the amount of specialized people you need on staff to deal with each platform. It also provides fewer problems when unifying many different systems. If you're an FDA regulated company having a millon different platforms to keep documentation on can also prove to be a pain in the neck.
Your fellow empolyees are probably asking for more exhange based messaging, but what they are really looking for is outlook. I find most non-development oriented employees here tend to favor outlook because it does everything for you. Outlook 2000, now, will even wipe it's own rear after it takes a crap with all your unsaved messages.
Now, here is where you can have you cake and eat it too.
What outlook really needs to act like outlook is the exchange server back end. Well, you can pass out the outlooks clients and use HP Openmail on the backend. This allows you to keep the backend solid and reliable while providing the gushy and easy to use (wink) outlook interface without lossing any functionality. Outlook/Exhchange has a lot of good features, but all the features come with a price: less realability. One of the main problems my IT department has with Microsoft products (exchange included) is realiabiltity. I have had to rebuild a corupt Jet database for exchange by hand one too many times. There are other things to deal with, memory leaks and bugs de' jour.
I recommend exchange for smaller outfits that don't have a very big staff to design and maintain complicated messaging systems, but I also urge the same people to keep their exchange implementation as maniala as possible, because the day will come when you are not small and you need to migrate to more robust system.
Outlook will work with POP3 and LDAP, and will allow you to exchange calendar and any folder sharing info using mail (which is easier because you don't have to do any admin on the server, and calendars can be shared between heterogenous mail systems). You don't need exchange.
BTW - it seems to lack IMAP, which is a shame. Outlook express does IMAP. Does anyone know if IMAP client is available for outlook?
Greg
I've been in your shoes, managing infrastructure for a company a touch bigger, and have some thoughts.
;-) ) For instance, if going to an Exchange solution hits the IT department with some stiff upfront expenses and say an ongoing 5% loss in IT productivity supporting the damn thing, but the company generally speaking gains an on-going productivity increase of 20% then in all likelihood the Exchange solution is the best way; no matter how much more elegant and functional the Ultra 2/sendmail solution is over the Exchange because what's important is the overall productivity gains. Sure there are arguments once user needs have been identified: Exchange vs. Lotus Notes, arguments about how the solution gets implemented (which is where the technology discussion begins: well after the goal is set.)
There are a lot of arguments that could be had about the technical merits of any given approach; I can't say that the Ultra 2s as described constitute a bad technical solution. Many of the responses I see to this issue focus on only the technology; I would argue that these arguments are secondary and irrelevant without the context of the business case... which, in the case of in-house email, really should focus on overall employee productivity. After the productivity arguments have been established then you can evaluate if your existing system can be bettered or if there are compelling arguments to adopt an Exchange or Notes solution. If your only argument is that the existing system runs extremely well, then you have no position other than a secondary one... which you will likely lose.
It really gets down to the single largest mistake many, very talented and skilled technical professionals make: they fail to realize that the technology is the means to a business driven end (unless the technology is the product, of course
My suggestions in your case are (in this order):
1. Get what you have implemented now out of your mind and find out why people want Exchange.
2. Project some numbers: not server costs, but likely impact to employee productivity in the short and long run. (Yes it's guesswork, but executive managers spend most of their time doing similar guesswork: earnings estimates, future market conditions, etc.) You may have to talk to non-IT managers to get a sense of this, but the PR couldn't be better (responsiveness, etc.)
3. Now look at what solutions are available, with 1 & 2 answers in mind, as well as what the IT impact is. Evaluate if your current solution meets this goal. Does the cost of implementation overshadow gains in productivity?
4. Be sure you evaluate after implementation and show how IT really helped; either by improving the existing system, or by implementing a new one. Without this reminder of what IT does in an organization, people will only every remember you when things are dead.
I don't care what is good or bad anymore. "My stuff is great, your stuff sucks the tailpipe?!" Honestly does anyone feel like like those guys in The Deerhunter who are forced to play Russian Roulette? Yeah yeah its great it sucks you suck I'm tired of this sucking........... meanwhile your blockhead management is getting away with jamming something stupid down your throats. Why do they suddenly need to move your whole company's mail system en masse? Do they not have enough real work to do? Is weeks or months of transition worth it to do ANYTHING this disruptive to an organization just because some shithead says so? Tell those pukes to go back to selling widgets or smalltalking the CEO's admin assistant counting paperclips or whatever the fuck they're supposed to be doing.
Tell them that if its so vitally important to move to anything new then maybe they should look at outsourcing their mail. If mail is a strategic asset of your company and there is a real reason to do something like this then they should just force it as a necessary requirement to the business. IF its just something your CEO read about on an airline magazine then told 3 or 4 layers of flunkies about, just ignore it.
I'm too old to listen to "because I'm the daddy that's why" bullshit.
Trust me, stay away from the datastore. If that becomes corrupted, you're screwed. Hopefully your backup is good, and you've got a hot swap available for the downtime your going to have to deal with while rebuilding the db. Geez. With a Unix system, you can just restore the indivudual user mail spool files from backup - something you can NEVER do on Exchange. Period. With Unix, you can do a live backup easily, without having to invest in new backup software and those little Agents that run on them to allow for such things on an Exchange server. Like I said in an earlier post - do some research regarding setting up a similar setup with Unix. Get an IMAP server going, make sure it's optimized to allow many connections, and see if there is an easy way to get an addressbook like feature going on for the clients at the desk. This way, if they choose to use Outlook, they can have the majority of the features. Just out of curiosity, has anybody checked into setting up an LDAP server for this purpose? I've never had the opportunity to do such a thing, but as I've learned from Unix in the past - the possibilities are endless. I hope this helps, --Michael
Subject: System Status: Exchange Server
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998
From: IS Support
Until further notice, please be aware the Exchange Server will be rebooted every Monday night at 6:00. The estimated down time is between 15 and 20 minutes.
Subject: System Info:
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000
From: [deleted]
Platform/Application/Network affected: Multiple system reboots Wednesday night 10/11/00 including [the name of the Exchange server plus three other NT based servers deleted]
Purpose: Each of these systems needs a reboot to regain system resources.
Date and Time: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 beginning at 7:00PM.
Estimated down time: Each system should be down for no longer than 30 minutes.
- To scan every message for viruses, you'll need a third party product, which will likely reduce performance and stability to the point that you have to turn it off
- Your unix users will realize that Exchange munges messages badly, for instance if it doesn't know what character set an 8-bit MIME encoded message is in (say it comes in as X-UNKNOWN) It will turn it into a message that says 'i have no idea what the character set is' and an attachment. This will nicely wreck any filtering they were doing, as the headers are gone, hidden in an attachment, and it makes it a pain to reply to the message, as hitting reply doesn't include the message.
- Your non-windows users will be happy to see that there's a web client, and then they'll use it. It will crash their copy of netscape. It will work, sort of. It will only allow them to add one person to a meeting request at a time, and will require them to psychically know what the person's exact Exchange name is. This will be harder for them than that ldap query script that the smart unix admin set up for the mutt users.
- It will be slower and less responsive than the old, cheaper unix mail server. One of the smart users will solve this problem by setting up a machine which does nothing but relay mail to the exchange server, thus making it so that the 'no more connections' message can be dealt with silently.
- It will offer great features that break annually. Even if you say, and this is being kind, that there will only be one day of unplanned downtime per year, which day will it be? Will it be the day that the contract with Rich VentureCapitalist was sent over?
- Somebody is likely to suggesting hiring an MCSE to run it. This person will get paid too much, not know RFC 821 or 822, or anything remotely technical, yet they'll drain the company of $80k/year, which could be better spent on more beer for the developers.
The Good--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Where I work, there's an implemantation of Novell GeoupWise for e-mail, calendar and remote e-mail use. I must say, that I was not impressed at first. The techies had a Debian box, going on 700+ days of uptime as a smtp/pop server and really disliked the idea of bringing it down for a comercial product.
We switched to GroupWise, and after som initial problems, the system was running just fine. At the moment I thought that it was hard to use and not very flexible. It seemed to work OK, with no downtime at all. But I still didn't like it.
That was before my experience with Microsoft products.
I had not the chance to tinker with MS products before I took on a temp job this summer at a company here in Oslo. They had the outsourced support deal for the systems of the second largest mobile telephone services company in Norway. The setup was _clean_ MS on multiple NT servers. The system was a total disaster. Exchange is a really unflexible, horrible system to begin with. And if you throw in a couple of techies that have NO clue to what they are doing the disaster is complete.
My point here is that the last mentioned company is the ones that really should have switched to *nix, because a NT system needs caring too. I don't know where people get the idea that it's so much easier to user NT/2000, the potential to fuck up is there too. There's no "Run perfectly and never screw up" check button in the setup, is there? -No! So at these companies, compare one large Debian box, more than 700 days of uptime to NT system with 2 hrs planned downtime in the week and 34 minutes unplanned downtime during buisness hours. What _could_ be cheaper? Add a nice script the makes administering the Debian box, what _could_ be the simplest to use?
The morale of the story, if you MUST drop *nix, use Novell. You won't regret it! As you will with you-know-who.
I don't know what kind of sysadmins you got in that company. I'm no sysadmin myself and I successfully installed an Exchange Server 5.5 a few months ago for 300 employees and works fine since 7600 hours haven't really touched the machine since then and I'm really not much of an expert.
Well, here is how the good ol US Air Force does it: I work at a base that has ~5500 users. We support them on 7 exchange servers -- this seems to handle the load reasonably well. However, an organization called AFCERT sends us security advisories on an almost daily basis -- patches and alerts to the newest holes that are discovered in both the exchange servers and the clients. This has been such an enormous task to keep up with that the AF went a step further and invested in a suite of SMS servers (in the old "throw more money at the problem until it disappears" mentality). This "enterprise solution" has caused nothing but repeated headaches for us here and I would personally like to see them give up on this system and start over with Solaris systems. However, the AF likes to have everything "standardized", which I guess means that if it's broken at one base, it should be broken at all bases. So we are forced to accept a standardized solution that is less than optimal. The costs are staggering:
7 Exchange servers -- $15,000 each
5 SMS servers -- $15,000 each
2 WINS servers -- $4,000 each
MS software licenses -- don't know but it's a lot -- 7 server licenses, 5500 client licenses
Norton Antivirus for exchange -- 7 licenses
Norton Antivirus for workstations -- 5500 licenses
We also have a few UNIX boxes that perform other functions around the base -- web servers and traffic analyzers, firewalls, etc. They are extremely reliable and give us no problems. M$ is an expensive, un-necessary solution. The problem is, no one knows UNIX (except for us, of course). Smart people are hard to find, and thus, the AF must accept a solution that the dummies can administer (and trust me, you'd be surprised at how poorly some of us do it). Anyhow, that's just my experience with exchange. Fight the schmucks that want it.
I apologize for how your tax dollars are being squandered. I am at the position where I have no say in the matter. Please write your congressman/woman and let them know how pissed you are.
Also, in the 4 years or so that I've been using Exchange, (which works fine in my current company of 5 people) I have noticed a couple of things:
1. The calendar/groupware stuff gets used for a couple of months, but weird things happen. For example, I had two conflicting events on my calendar for more than a year. Why? The Exchange client wouldn't let me delete either one of them. An "internal error" jinxed my delete, consequently, I was bugged every week by a meeting that had long since come and gone, but I could never de-schedule it. That's a bug.
2. What I also began to notice was that people stopped using all the fun calendar and schedule features after a while. By the time I left my last job, yeah, we were using Exchange, but essentially only as a mail system. People abandoned the other stuff, perhaps because it was never configured correctly, but more I think, due to it really doesn't work as advertised. Most of the non-technical folks were scared by all the manual config stuff you have to do to use the groupware features, and they'd wet their pants when anything weird happened.
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I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
I-Mail from Ipswitch is excellent for serving mail as well as easy to manage and at $1500 much cheaper than exchange. For the Unix folks good old sendmail works. Although it doesn't have the "spit and polish" account entry that Imail does.
But I do NOT suggest exchange, period.
Nate Spencer
System Administrator
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
We very recently (last few weeks) had our old mail servers upgraded, very smoothly I must admit, to MS Exchange and Outlook, exactly as you are planning. The guys that implemented the conversion knew their stuff, have all the qualifications you might expect them to have and so on, they are internal after all... We have our MX records set so that inbound mail from the Internet goes firstly to the Exchange server and then, if unavailable to two of the boxen on the ISP network. There are about 500 staff on the internal LAN, all using MS Outlook to send email through Exchange, and with the MX records as they are we should have no internal emails on the ISP boxen unless the Exchange box is down.
Since then, the Exchange box has never been down for more than a few minutes, with "down" meaning "off the Internet", so that includes all network outages, planned reboots and so on. It hasn't failed once, and indeed is romping along with its load monitor graphs at comfortably low levels.
Why then, have I been asked to monitor the number and total sizes of all the emails that are mounting up on the ISP platform because servers on the Internet, including our own, cannot deliver mail to Exchange? As an experiment I have kicked the queue in the early ours of a weekend morning and it still only managed to deliver a couple of the few hundred pending emails.
Exchange / Outlook is an excellent platform to run a corporate email system on; the collaboration and MS Office integration is superb and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for that. But don't dump the Unix box facing the big bad world, because as an Internet facing mail relay it sucks big time.
Happily we should shortly be implementing just that; and I am confident that when that mail queue gets kicked with the new Sun in place I'll be watching that mail queue counter drop like those guns in Aliens... Of course, that still leaves our services arm with the problem of getting those emails into Exchange, but at least we'll know that our users, including the Directors and Sales departments are respectively getting their pr0n and orders eventually.
And if that last sentence doesn't stop you from being completely assimilated, I don't know what will...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I have been a Lotus Notes user for 5 years at work, and a pop/smtp at home for more than that. There is much to be said for Nix mail systems, but there is much more to be said for Notes especially for use in a large corporation.
And as compared with Exchange, Notes is far better. Not only does it give you secure email, but also gives much more. We have hundreds of very useful databases across the company.
And what is great about Notes is the rock solid security, which extends down to the field level.
When Melissa, or 'I Love you' virii came out, though we have thousands of users, and the virus was unexpected, we were virutually unharmed by it. I'd guess we had not more than 50-100 actual PC's that got infected themselves, but it stopped there. The infection did not spread or affect our operation. And some simple filters placed a bit later stopped any virus from being sent at all by any user.
Meanwhile, other companies, including those very heavy with tech support were down completely for a week or more when the 'I love you' virus hit them. It was hardly a blip on our radar operationally. We did of course, have to search out and destroy it.
It is clear to me that the security model of Notes is very strong, and a properly administered system is safe and secure. And if my business was a *Bank* or securities firm, Notes would be the only choice.
For my 10k-something-employees employer (no, I won't name it) we have 12 Quad-Xeon Compaq Proliant 5500 servers, and they barely manage (we add a new one every about 3 months).
When I-love-you hit, our mail services were down for 3 days.
Seems bad, doesn't it?
The problem is, it is bad.
If you plan to use Exchange as an MTA only, think again. As an MTA, Exchange sucks big time. It is bloatware. And that is can be its strong point: where using it does make sense, is when somebody needs an integrated MTA+groupware+PIM+calendar. Which means, Exchange is good where Lotus Notes is good, not where Postfix is. Using Exchange as a MTA only means using at most 20% of its potential (and hitting on its weakest points: setting Exchange up as a MTA is terrible: it's at the same time cumbersome and restrictive). From this point of view it's not different from any other Microsoft product: 90% people won't use in their life more than 10% of the features in Word o Excel, yet everybody pays for it all.
So my suggestion is: sure, set an Exchange server up for those 10% of the people who might need the full deal, and just keep some lean and mean MTA (well, calling Sendmail "lean and mean" sounds strange, but in this context it is...) for the other 90% of the people.