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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."
The invoice for this baby is pretty small compared to your normal MS Exchange Server, it's only 1. But that's not in dollars, that's in first born children. So I'm going to throw out a few strategies for coping with this.
So, like pretending you're a college student, starving African or university staff to get cheap editions of Exchange 2007, there are ways to acquired 2010 at a relatively low cost and I hope this helps you cope with the extreme cost of owning Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for your enterprise business.
... but that's just the unspoken rule.
Sure the costs don't stop there, you need to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 to use it and there are a few more things you'll need to upgrade if you want to keep the same functionality you have now
My work here is dung.
there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
2010 looks more like 2007 R2. Same engine but more features and support for it's new ActiveSync partners, Google and Apple.
the archiving and legal features look nice. right now you have to buy add on products from EMC and other companies. Integrating the SOX features into Exchange will save customers a lot of money.
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.
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
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.
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 was able to set up a working Exchange 2007 server in 2 days. I had never configured an e-mail server before. I'm not even an MCSA (well MCTS woudl be the new name for it)....really only about halfway to it.
So it's even easier than you say it is :-) But you are absolutely correct...you need a competent admin to do it right (I know I sure as hell didn't do it right...it was just a test box)...they don't necessarily have to be an "E-mail Admin" to do it right, they just need to be competent enough to follow best practice guidelines (and obviously have a basic understanding of how e-mail works...any of your 'MCSE monkeys' should have that).
And that is a big part of why Exchange predominates...it's easily administered, and it has features that nothing else offers on an equivalent level.
Also keep in mind that it's not just the PHB's being resistant to change that stops OSS...it's the fact that Microsoft does a good job of making sure that their stuff integrates with eachother very well (and they don't exactly go out of their way to make sure other stuff can integrate with their products). The reason Exchange was so easy to get up and running for me is due in large part to Active Directory integration, and ISA Server 2006 is basically preconfigured to allow an Exchange server the proper access just by telling it the IP address.
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Exchange database engine is also called "Jet", but it's a different kind of Jet: Access is Jet Red, Exchange is Jet Blue. The difference is explained here.
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)
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