I was a small part of an Exchange Installation of about 6,000 users. We gradually added users about 100 at a time migrating them from existing MS Mail servers. Most things said about Exchange here are true: It is a resource hog. It is expensive. It takes a lot of administrators. It also is tightly integrated with Outlook and of course NT. You would need a lot of servers to handle 25,000 clients and so a lot of NT and NT infrastructure. Where I worked this was used as an excuse to eliminate Novel as file and print servers and Sun as a web server. We had such a large commitment to NT to do Mail that it didn't make sense to train people in other OS's. We used 2 Linux machine for mail relays to the Internet and they worked flawlessly. That was what got me interested in Linux. They're gone now. The best thing I could say about Exchange was that it was better than what we had before which was a patchwork of outdated equipment, servers and creative network design. Regarding creating users: There is a command line program Adduser, if I remember. That creates an NT Account and also an Exchange account simultaneously. You could use this in a script but NT doesn't have a great scripting shell.
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I was a small part of an Exchange Installation of about 6,000 users. We gradually added users about 100 at a time migrating them from existing MS Mail servers. Most things said about Exchange here are true: It is a resource hog. It is expensive. It takes a lot of administrators. It also is tightly integrated with Outlook and of course NT. You would need a lot of servers to handle 25,000 clients and so a lot of NT and NT infrastructure. Where I worked this was used as an excuse to eliminate Novel as file and print servers and Sun as a web server. We had such a large commitment to NT to do Mail that it didn't make sense to train people in other OS's. We used 2 Linux machine for mail relays to the Internet and they worked flawlessly. That was what got me interested in Linux. They're gone now.
The best thing I could say about Exchange was that it was better than what we had before which was a patchwork of outdated equipment, servers and creative network design.
Regarding creating users: There is a command line program Adduser, if I remember. That creates an NT Account and also an Exchange account simultaneously. You could use this in a script but NT doesn't have a great scripting shell.