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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?
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
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
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
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).
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
My mother (from Norwich) uses it all the time; my father (from London) much less often. Does that help?
Subject says it all... ":-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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
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.
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.
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?
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?"
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.
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.
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]
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 $80k/year, which could be better spent on more beer for the developers.
The RFC they certainly won't understand is number 974..
Effectivly an MSCE appears to be someone who knows more of the options than a regular user, but still does not really understand how the thing is ment to work in the first place.
You have got to be kidding me. Have you ever actually worked in an office that is predominantly MS? Suggesting some (in the opinion of your boss) cheap freebee calendar off a web site is just asking for trouble. Is there an 800 number for support.
Whilst it's possible Microsoft may have a freephone number in the USA, in other parts of the world it costs money to call them
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch is also a good alternative to HP OpenView and the like. VERY nice network monitoring software.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
AFAIK, Exchange works relatively well, considering that it's an M$ 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
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
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
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!
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...
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...
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
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?
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
-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.
> 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.
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.
-----
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.
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,
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
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
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 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.
--
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
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 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!
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.
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
Actually from some of the things I've heard this could be your best argument. Exchange 5.5 enterprise is becoming scarce quickly, Exchange 2000 has features that only work with Active directory. So to upgrade to a new Exchange server and use all the features you will have to update all your systems to Windows 2000 (or maybe just add Office 2000, hardly a cheaper option though.) Wave that bill under the bosses nose and give him the no extra cost solution of keeping the system that works now and they may see reason. I know why some people in your company may like Exchange, they got used to it somewhere else, if you can identify what they feel they are missing with the current system maybe you can get those functions for them.
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.
--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
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
...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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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."
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 *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 :)
.. 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.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
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
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
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
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
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
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
--
--
You want to play a fucken game?
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.
love bug
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.
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
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.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.
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.
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 don't know. My university is big on M$ and Exchange is one of the few nice programs M$ offers (I'd venture to say M$ Word and IE5 are the ONLY other apps I like of M$).
M$ Entourage just came out for Office 2001 and actually has most of the features that were missing in the old version. I haven't used this yet, as I still have most of my Exchange stuff sent to my Unix account to read from Pine. I boot into Exchange on my NT box when I need to schedule, and use the Web App when I need to check things or download attachments.
Having said that, if you are going to run Exchange, you better plan on devoting far more hardware than M$ says ya will need. If you plan this out with folks that had done the conversion before and can give you real world spec, Exchange is actually rather stable.
clif
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...
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.
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
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--
HA = High Availabilty. Two boxes; either load split, or one doing nothing, but if one goes down, the other takes over 'transparantly' and the users never notice.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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?"
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.
Hrm. Mine doesn't have that. Prehaps a different version for a corporate environment. *shrug*
Basic filters work ok here too. I can put things into a specific folder based on sender. What I haven't been able to figure out how to do is to permanently delete an incoming message. I would like to permanently delete messages from the IT group (they come a couple times a week and tell me which exchange servers they're going to reboot on Sunday morning) and anything with a .vbs attachemnt. If you have insight fill me in. I just look forward to 5:00 when I go home to Linux.
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I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.