I've been using / administrating / doing consulting on Exchange since the RC1, I went through the first certification classes in Europe. I used to manage a 120 location setup with about 15.000 users and full replication, I've switched from x.400 over ip to smtp. And I've never hated a product more.
You can use exchange in 2 ways though...
The most evil is the directory... Especially the way it's working in for instance 5.5
Exchange is based on x.400, it's MTA has had loads of bugs, the various connectors are a constant source of new interesting bugs. Exchange is not really even a postoffice when you use RPC, your Outlook client is a database access client.
The binary databases are hard to maintain, grow out of proportion, the calendaring part is not really integrated - That you'll find out after the server has crashed and you loose all calendars.
It's had immense problems handling MIME as it converts things back and forth...
Are you to start replicating - Make sure you have a really strong network.... And with the nature of NT it's not a breeze to remote administrate it over slower links....
And you for sure will have immense fun when some dimwit admin steals your public folders or they just get lost in mid replication - never to appear again.....
I think the best any Large scale shop would want is a stable MTA like sendmail, qmail that can handle load is proven and you easily can manage and upgrade combined with LDAP for routing.
Then you can if you really wish use Exchange, still let unix people admin infrastructure and let the drag and droppers play with their expensive servers.
Just my 2 cents having done this on a large scale.... Today we basically have no problems and
transfer up to 300.000 mails every 24 hours in one of our main locations on a 266 pentium II with 128 meg ram;-)
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I've been using / administrating / doing consulting on Exchange since the RC1, I went through the first certification classes in Europe. I used to manage a 120 location setup with about 15.000 users and full replication, I've switched from x.400 over ip to smtp. And I've never hated a product more.
;-)
You can use exchange in 2 ways though...
The most evil is the directory... Especially the way it's working in for instance 5.5
Exchange is based on x.400, it's MTA has had loads of bugs, the various connectors are a constant source of new interesting bugs. Exchange is not really even a postoffice when you use RPC, your Outlook client is a database access client.
The binary databases are hard to maintain, grow out of proportion, the calendaring part is not really integrated - That you'll find out after the server has crashed and you loose all calendars.
It's had immense problems handling MIME as it converts things back and forth...
Are you to start replicating - Make sure you have a really strong network.... And with the nature of NT it's not a breeze to remote administrate it over slower links....
And you for sure will have immense fun when some dimwit admin steals your public folders or they just get lost in mid replication - never to appear again.....
I think the best any Large scale shop would want is a stable MTA like sendmail, qmail that can handle load is proven and you easily can manage and upgrade combined with LDAP for routing.
Then you can if you really wish use Exchange, still let unix people admin infrastructure and let the drag and droppers play with their expensive servers.
Just my 2 cents having done this on a large scale.... Today we basically have no problems and
transfer up to 300.000 mails every 24 hours in one of our main locations on a 266 pentium II with 128 meg ram