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First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
Yeah, but you're not a large corporation. Exchange does all kinds of crazy shit that's nice to have in a very large environment. Calendaring, extreme scalability, integration with other systems, mobile messaging integration, spam filtering, encryption support, voicemail integration, auditing compliance. etc... and etc... and etc...
Exchange does a _whole_ lot of shit and integrates with other products that do a whole lot of other shit.
So if you have 50 employees and 40 computers, Exchange might be overkill. If you have 40,000 employees, it might be exactly what you need.
Because most companies dont want to hire competent EMail admins. Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it. You really do need a competent email admin staoff to use exchange, but it's not as daunting as the FOSS or other options out there to windows It staff.
I also dont understand the love affair with outlook, It's simply that some PHB's hate change and they used Exchange as the killing point to stop OSS infiltration.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People underestimate how important Exchange is.
The argument is always how Office is the real lynchpin and that if only a compatible document suite like Google docs or OpenOffice got a foothold Microsoft would be crushed but Outlook/Exchange is the REAL barrier to entry.
I work at a call center. EVERY corporate employee who calls me is using Outlook except the 1% of poor souls stuck with Lotus Notes and Domino.
Business relies on Outlook/Exchange.
if you have an iphone or winmo you can point your phone to a corporate email server and it will download all your email into the phone as long as you have a signal. and the IT department can manage all the phones remotely.
say your hippy marketing exec loses his or her iphone and it has all kinds of data on it. the IT people can just wipe it remotely not caring where it is.
say you have to keep all email for at least 7 years but you don't want it in anyone's mailbox. right now you have to buy a third party product. Exchange 2010 integrates it.
say you want failover to another city with all your company's email there. Exchange 2007 and later.
Even the FOSS Exhcange clones don't come close. For a medium to large business it's cheaper to buy Exchange with all the features than pay for add on software and more people to admin it
Exchange works with any IMAP email client, but the email admins need to manually enable IMAP on the Exchange server. The question I ask is, "Will Thunderbird 4 or SeaMonkey 3 support Exchange's default MAPI protocol?" That way, Mozilla email clients can work with any Exchange server. Then individual users can easily migrate away from Outlook without the prior consent of the email admins.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
support for mobile .. access
Bingo. This is the reason that we haven't moved away from Exchange. Windows Mobile connected to Exchange with DirectPUSH is a great combination for mobile users.. you can synchronise all your contacts, calendar, tasks and email with Exchange remotely. Email actually arrives on the mobiles a second or two before showing up in Outlook. Our Exchange server would be replaceable if it weren't for this. I almost replaced it with OpenExchange until I found out about this feature, which has now become essential to a lot of our sales team. If the blackberry network (and devices) weren't so shit then maybe I'd reconsider (the number of times I used to have our blackberry users blaming me for email not working when in fact it was the blackberry network, something which I have no control over.. eurghh..). There is a lot of room for a nice FOSS email client/server product on an open mobile platform..
which is totally what she said
Perhaps IMAP was not enabled in that Exchange setup...it definitely works, though.
However, to answer your original problem (Firefox and HTML mail), Exchange 2010 does support Firefox (and Safari) using all the features of OWA that IE does, including HTML mail compose.
You misread... That's for the REPLICATED copy. i.e. You keep your live database on RAID 1/0, but you keep the realtime replicated copy on JBOD. With EXCH 2007 microsoft began (for very good reasons) recomending DAS instead of SAN (due to application and database high availablility features of Exchange 2007). Now, half of your DAS modular array units don't require expensive controllers, further reducing your costs without detracting from availability. Since the server fron end no longer needs to be a microsoft Cluster as well, Enterprise Server is no longer a requirement either.
We recently deployed a 20K user solution under Exch2007. We lobied for a modular extensible DAS storage solution, but instead upper management insisted on big iron SAN chassis (2 of them). We spent $450K on disks where we could have spent less than 100K and had the same performance and reliability simply because upper management (and apparently you) have not read or do not understand the new database architecture proposed in Exchange 2007. 2010 improves upon that by removing some server side hurdles while maintaining the same data reliablity.
You're keeping 2-3 local, active, asynchronously replicated (with real time log rollback) copies of your exchange system, with 30 second or less automatic failover that does not disconnect users in the process. Why keep them all on RAID 10 if you can simply fail from one over to the other? The only reason to keep any 1 of them on RAID 10 is simply to keep from failing over the first time! (and you'll recover and be back on the RAID 10 in 24-48 hours and you still have redundancy in log shipping, offsite server replication, and traditional backups to supplement that, all without clusters!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
His first point is you can use it with FF and Safari. Nice, but not a really big deal to most admins.
For sysadmins who want their users to stick with Firefox or something else not named Internet Explorer, an improvement to OWA may not be a huge deal but it's still nice. OWA on alternative browsers blows pretty hard. It works, but it blows.
Yea, it would be REALLY NICE if MSFT would put Exchange inside of something other than a Jet engine database... Then maybe I could have a high performance database that wasn't capped at 200GB for performance reasons, and I could have one big database per server cluster instead of 12-16... and I could front end that with a half a dozen exchange servers and have all 20,000 users inside of a single database and eliminate all the wasted space from single indexing!
For Chrsits sake, can't the Exchange people and the SQL people work together, and combine the log shipping asynchronous non-cluster replciation features of exchange with a REAL F*ING DATABASE ENGINE!?!?!?!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
This kind of misses the point. In many cases of Microsoft products, you could weave and configure together a bunch of FOSS applications to do the same thing. But then you'd have a custom solution that only your now-very-valuable admin understands. On the other hand, Exchange is a one stop shop for all this stuff, and the admins are pretty much interchangeable, since the product is the same.
Mail servers for large corporations are not just, well, mail servers. For a 200 person shop, full Exchange is definitely overkill (which is why there's multiple versions you can buy). For a 300K person company, it worth the cost.
I agree with your point, but must say that your abrasive tone makes this AC understand why IT folks get such a bad rap. It's similar to why people dislike police so much. I consider myself a "competent" e-mail admin, but the several Exchange servers I administer only constitute about 3% of the servers I am responsible for, so I don't really have time to focus on them as much as I would like.
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
Not having to run a dozen different, barely interoperable end-user applications to achieve it.
Who is modding this guy up?
IMAP is enabled on ALL MAILBOXES in Exchange 2007 by default. You just have to configure a few settings and enable the service. You can also disable IMAP globally.
To answer your previous assertion that Thunderbird doesn't work - you're wrong again. Our user base uses Thunderbird extensively. Like many universities, we used to push Eudora, waaaay back before we moved to Exchange 5.5, and a lot of professors liked Eudora enough that they will never use Outlook. Thunderbird is the most suitable replacement for Eudora that we've been able to identify. It works great with or without SSL encryption, using POP or IMAP.
So seriously, you very obviously don't have a clue. Please stop with the misinformation.
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Exchange is pretty cheap compared to the competition. That's probably one of the reasons why it is so popular.