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MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes
prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."
Does Exchange 07 do away with the 16Gb limit for the mail store? Unless you have the "Enterprise" version of Exchange 2003, the total of all your mailboxes can't exceed 16GB. I'm at a company which is small enough to not want or need the added expense of Enterprise, but is large enough to be able to easily store 16Gb of mail total. I have about 50 users, each of whom I try to limit to 250-500 MB of mail. You do the math. I'm always after people to clean up the mailboxes. And don't say use archiving. Archiving sucks. Most users don't know how to use it, and those who try it often lose their archives.
If MS would just get rid of the store limit, life would be happy.
load "windows7"
Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.
But they still force the use of Outlook? Does this decision come from the same people who banned cellphones with cameras but not cameras themselves? Only cluelessness is obvious about policies like that. Must be a Microsoft partner office.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
We currently get 100MBs on the Exchange server, which is about two months worth of mail. I have to aggressively delete delete delete to stay inside that limit. We also get 10gigs of server space to play with so I have another set of PST file over there and periodically move mail from one to the other. I can barely keep up with it.
But it does come in handy because the damn Exchange server regularly pukes its guts out and loses days, weeks, sometimes ALL mail stored on the system. Twice in four years it has totally lost every message in the system. Just gone.
It went down recently due to hardware failure and was out for four straight days because MS makes it impossible to migrate to different hardware or even run redundant servers. When it came back up, we found it had lost a day's worth of mail and this was just two days after we found out our company was being sold. Many of us were looking for internal news on the sale. We got nothing. Even our blackberries shutdown because of course those are run through the same servers. A lot of us wondered in the new owners had just fired everyone but our keys still worked.
This was also the same week new Federal rules went into effect mandating retention of emails, messages, IMs, etc, for eternity. That's a helluva job with hundreds of employees and 100mb mailboxes. I can't imagine what it will mean if we all get 2GB mailboxes. That's a terrabyte right there for our current employees, and we'll have to keep everything that gets deleted as well, forever, even when the employee is long gone. Wow. Just wow.
Thanks MS!
you should ask for your money back