Vista ships with a PDF product built in... cant remember the name off the top of my head as that laptop isnt in front of me now.
But I've seen this on all the vista's I've seen recently, though admittely all HP builds, so it may be an HP thing.
Office 2007 also has the ability to Save to PDF natively, shows up in the Save As options. They were originally going to have it built into the product, but Adobe invoked some 'monopoly' nonsense to block them. So now you have to take 2 minutes to download and install it.
This is a case where the whole monopoly lawsuit business is actually helping one company (Adobe) and hurting the consumer, by not allowing windows to include this in the products by default.
Don't you think that more happy customers would mean more money to Microsoft's bottom line? Only if it actually does. It may not. It's entirely possible that more, happy customers, but at a lower price, would result in less net profits.
I'm sure the smart folks over at MS feel that they understand the numbers, and that their price point is the right one. They may be wrong, but its a more or less free market, and they can set their prices however they want. As they set them higher, fewer people buy.
Mind you, the OS market is less price elastic than some other markets, but its not completely inelastic.
Give me a break. We're talking about voluntary purchasing of software products here.
No one has to buy them. No one has to buy Microsoft versions of them.
Free market or lack of monopolies doesnt mean that people make the choices YOU think are smart. It doesnt even mean they make good choices (however you define good).
It just means other options are available.
Right now, for the majority of consumers and businesses, the perceived pain of switching is less than the perceived cost of staying.
Thats it... no swindling... no death and destruction.
A truly free market economy only lets a "country" which is run by "government" (be it of the people or not), flourish if those taking part in it pay all of their taxes. Where in the heck do you get that?
What do governments and taxes have to do with a free market?
I think you're mixing several subjects there inappropriately.
The government has too many shareholders and none of them have any alternative. Thank you!!!
Government is an example of an area where there is NOT a free market, and the competitors use violence to enforce their territories. I dont have a choice as to what government I pay for services, I'm forced to deal with the US government because of where I was born.
And this 'no competition within my territory' means that over time all the governments tend to look alike, as there is no competition, and they all tend to evolve towards maximum extraction of energy from the system that is sustainable.
Anyway, didnt mean to preach to the choir there, but I sometimes wish people would put a little more thought towards the biggest monopoly of all.
Microsoft doesnt have a dominant market position because of copyrights. It does so through lots of (legit) savvy business sense, along with some less than legitimate behavior (supply manipulation of OEMs).
Copyrights do not cause the market to be insensitive to price gouging.
Copyrights do not stop others from entering the market.
The only conceivable argument that copyrights stop effective competition is because of switching costs (ie, compatibility), as MS copyrights its protocols. But this falls short in a number of areas.
1. These protocols have all been reverse engineered successfully, without invoking copyright litigation.
2. People are still able to switch, even without having fully documented protocols and specs. It may be more inconvenient and costly, but there's no law that says businesses have to make it easy to switch away from them (at least in this market, in some markets there are such laws).
Now I'm not saying that copyright law is good. And I'm not saying that Microsoft has been good for every aspect of the industry. But tying the two together is not logical. You need to deal with the MS problems where they are, and it has nothing to do with copyright.
I realize that if you're a FOSS fan or zealot, you think that all information should be free. I would argue that all information will be free eventually, despite barriers such as proprietary protocols and specs.
If there's a market for them, then someone will provide a product.
It is absolutely not a requirement of a Free Market that there be large numbers of buyers and sellers.
You can have a free market with 2 suppliers, as long as the barriers to entry for new competitors are low. Then if the 2 form up to price fix or something similar, then new businesses will be formed to offers the product/service at a lower price or higher quality, and the market naturally re-balances.
I think what you mean is that markets are often more efficient with large numbers of sellers.
Even that is arguable, at least in some cases. Too many players dividing up the available potential income can dilute the market, such that no company has the income to re-invest or improve, because margins are so thin.
Even Thunderbird, with all of its rough edges, is an order of magnitude better than the Horde UI.
I understand there are some folks (must not do much email) who prefer web based clients, but I just dont get it. They're slow, keyboard shortcuts are slim to none (forced to use the mouse), do a crappy job of remembering non-addressbook emails, and have no offline capability.
Sorry, didnt mean to go on a rant there, but I just dont get the love of web-based emails. They're just, IMO, very primitive.
I'll miss the features of Exchange, I certainly won't miss the maintenance. Our Win2k3 server w/Exchange probably takes more maintenance love than our other 3 *nix bases servers combined. I know its slightly off topic to your main post, but I'm curious what the maintenance load you see is.
I've got a number of clients on Exchange whose Exchange installs dont require so much as a touch but once or twice a year.
I'm not trying to argue, seriously trying to get a sense of where this maintenance comes from. I see others post that, and I just dont see it, but you sound like a _very_ similar business to ours, so I was curious.
But I've received several from outside organizations (who are also using their own exchange installation and outlook).
I just did a test from my exchange account to an imap account I have through thunderbrid.
At least in this scenario, it delivers an email with a meeting.ics attachment in it.
I think why most people probably dont is most people choose their recipients in Outlook via pointy-clicky Global Address Book. You wont ever have the opportunity to send to outside accounts if you do that.
So basically, most folks probably dont know they can. *shrugs* a guess in any case.
I was surprised too the first time it ever happened.
For many of us out there, who live and die on our laptop, often out in the field, sometimes with connectivity, sometimes not (even with my sprint evdo card), having a rich client that works online and offline is just absolutely critical, a showstopper requirement.
Plus, for those of us who live and die by email, tasks and calendaring, rich clients are infinitely preferable to web-clients, no matter how flashy and ajax-y.
So all this is me saying thank you for recognizing this subset of the userbase, who would love another option, but also like Outlook.
As much as many people here hate it, web-based applications are going to become more and more prevalent. That means as long as your OS can run a browser with compatible tech (AJAX or whatever) than it won't matter what OS you have to access your web-based email, word proc., spread sheet, etc. Thats only relevant for the subset of the IT using population who have always-on, fast, ubiquitous connectivity, and who also can live with the inherent limitations, loss of control, and security/privacy issues for web-hosted apps.
MS Exchange is fine for up to about 50 users, beyond that, it runs into terrible scaling problems. An Exchange server database slows down once it reaches 30GB and becomes impossible once it reaches 100GB. I'm not sure where you're geting your info, but this is incorrect.
I've owned exchange installations in the half-terabyte to terabyte range, and it all works just fine. You're constantly disk bound at that size, so you need reasonably fast disk subsystem, but thats not hard.
Exchange's architecture IS less effecient than simple file-system storage of email text files and similar, and MAPI is harder on your edge servers than IM AP, but its just not that huge of a deal.
since Citadel is zero maintenance Exchange is fairly low maintenance as well, at least for competent admins.
Every repetitive task you need to do can be trivially automated. So there's some up front configuration, no question, but its not like it requires something done to it every day or anything.
In fact, its been my experience that if you properly size the hardware, and arent constantly fiddling with your production servers (ie, no amateurs), then exchange boxen are pretty bulletproof. They just sit and thrash the disks... like any mail server.
Do you know any features where Zimbra is inferior to Exchange that balances out the list of ways it is superior? I'm not the guy you're responding to, but...
Zimbra is pretty much a web-only client. That sucks. Web interfaces for email, calendering, tasks, etc are terrible.
Yes, they have Outlook plugins. They're crappy and unstable, and they dont work very well.
Yes, they have a 'Zimbra Desktop', but its pre-alpha stage, and not useful for those running a business.
Mind you... Zimbra when it grows up will probably be great. And it probably is great now from a system-administrators standpoint, and maybe the linux techie's standpoint.
But from the end-user standpoint, its not even close.
They need a quality rich client with offline capabilities before it can compete.
Any smartphone that can consume WebDav doesnt need a separate connector.
The only mobile clients that I'm aware of that need a separate product is blackberry, and thats a product from blackberry, not ms.
The windows smart phones work perfectly out of the box, no extra for-pay software, no muss, no fuss.
Also, keep an eye on those costs, you dont specify the time-frame they cover.
An exchange server will last you 5+ years, so that $4000 is amortized over 5+ years. Thats $800 per year per exchange box.
And the cal costs are 'per-generation'. Plus they cover ALL the covered products in your org.
So for example, if you're paying $100 per FTE for a Core CAL, that covers Windows Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, and SMS. And that $100 covers you until the next 'generation' of these products. So figure 3 years. Thats like $35 per year per employee for this licensing.
It's not as bad as it sounds, at least in the bigger picture.
Typical prices are something like $50-100 for office, and $50-75 for core cals.
So this is like $100-150 per employee, approx every 3-5 years, depending on your upgrade cycle. If you are on a subscription or SA, then you're paying a bit more, every year, but you can use whatever version you want whenever you want.
So lets say worst case $50 per employee per year. Thats not free, but its not terrible.
which is a heck of a lot more complex than Linux server administration and security Thats very questionable. It may be 'different' than what you're used to, but that doesnt make it more complex.
In fact, I would say that in the common case, Windows is simpler to use when you're using it in the typical, well documented scenarios.
It's when you hit the edge cases and have to start working with Windows in ways it wasnt designed to work that you have troubles. Whereas on open-source systems, the curve is much less steep on the edges, because someone has been there before.
In fact, what I've seen a ton of is when Unix guys have to work on windows systems, they'll tend to actively ignore the 'best practices' out there, because its different than what they're used to. So they're working way outside the norms. Not surprisingly, they run into problems, and they blame windows, rather than their not just doing it the 'blessed' way. They then complain about how its so complex and hard to use.
Perhaps some exchange expert can help us out by explaining why it's hard to add storage. Disks are cheap --- especially if you're in the corporate world that can afford exchange and quality hardware to run it on. Just because disks are cheap doesnt make storage cheap.
First, in large organizations, the mailbox sizes scale faster than most people expect. If you have 10k people, and want to give them all 2GB of space, thats 20TB.
Now 20TB in low end JBOD sata disks is cheap, but that wont work well for an exchange environment.
The ideal is to have the exchange mailbox stores backed by a SAN. This is because you often end up re-balancing mailboxes from one server to another, or some store servers (that handle some fixed subset of users) grow faster than the others.
Also, the mailbox stores in large orgs are often run as clusters. Not load balanced, shared-nothing boxes, but real live, expensive clusters. That means shared disk storage, heartbeat monitors, all that stuff.
And then there's backups. Backups are what really kills you in enterprise storage. As an example, a company I've dealt with did the analysis with a consultant, and they determined that their tier-1 san storage costs ~$1.25 per gigabyte per year. But full staged tape rotation backups cost almost $4.00 per gigabyte per year. That puts total storage costs at ~$5.00 per gigabyte per year.
(BTW, I think these numbers were per year, but they could have been per-month... I dont remember for sure.)
That adds up to $100k per year just in storage costs, just for the email servers.
Now there are some things you can do... most businesses dont really want long-term storage of email stores, they just want disaster-recovery backups. You can do this with san replication, or other forms of simpler backup. That brings the backup price way down.
You can also mount your mailbox stores over iSCSI and use not-so-insanely-expensive high-end san storage.
But the bottom line is that storage is much more expensive that disc, and Exchange storage is more expensive than typical file-server storage, because of its particular needs.
Exchange is also hard on disk subsystems, and large Exchange stores are almost always permanently disk-bound, and constantly, always, 24-hours a day, thrashing the disks.
My free/busy information only tells you whether I have a specific appointment scheduled, but it doesn't actually give you any clue as to whether I'm busy. That exact reason is why so many people mark off their calendars with blocks of time for things like 'reserved for coding' or 'project prep' or 'working from starbucks' or whatever, so that when people are scheduling meetings, they dont put them over time you dont want a meeting.
The problem with the whole 'call to ask' is that it doesnt scale. It only works when you have a relatively low number of meetings or things on your calendar. Eventually, you get to the point where you dont have the time, energy, or attention to manage it all anymore, and these systems help. A secretary/admin/assistant would also help, but these tend to cost alot more.
You'll probably think I'm being silly, but let's look at some things Outlook doesn't do. AFAIK, you can't send a real "meeting request", for example. Unless you just send a normal e-mail asking this, Outlook won't send a non-time-specific calendar event saying, "I'd like to meet with you. Can you set a time that's convenient for you?" Yes, you can. Set a time, mark the meeting request as tentative. In the request text, ask the person to suggest the best time.
That person then responds to the message with a tenative acceptance and alternate time. Outlook then presents to you the opportunity to accept this.
All of these are first-class concepts in Outlook, and the UI supports them (ie, makes 'tentative' requests look different, offers you a response choice of 'propose an alternate time', etc).
Also, Outlook doesn't present you with an automatically generated list of who hasn't responded to your invitations. So unless you're paying attention or you check the meeting, you won't know that I neither accepted nor declined your meeting invite. This leads many people to assume that you've accepted until you specifically decline. Yes, it does. Click on the 'responses' or 'scheduling' button. The responses view lets you see everyone who has and hasnt responded, and for those who have, how they've responded (accept, deny, propose a different time, etc). The scheduling view shows you everyone's free/busy times (if you have the perms), and what their response has been.
Because of all this, I'd generally prefer that someone sends me an e-mail saying, "Do you want to meet? If so, when is good for you?" Now, I might respond, "Yeah, let's meet. Schedule it and send me an invite." If that's not the general order of things, then I think a meeting invite presents itself as an order, "APPEAR AT MY MEETING!" Thats just your reading wayyyy too much into it. The mechanism reflects a pragmatic reality. Meetings are often scheduled for a number of people, by an admin or secretary, who wont even be attending. Having one-on-one conversations with everyone is just insane. Go talk to the admin of a director or VP sometime, and ask them what it's like to schedule time for 5 different busy Directors, VP, AVPs, etc. Without a centralized schedule, which can show free/busy time, its something they would spend an hour talking on the phone to do. Thats just wasteful.
I think this sort of thing is all just depending on the kinds of companies you've worked in. If you work in one where some classes of people are extraordinarily busy, and tend to have packed schedules, and they are in different buildings or campuses, you see the value of these systems.
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Vista ships with a PDF product built in ... cant remember the name off the top of my head as that laptop isnt in front of me now.
But I've seen this on all the vista's I've seen recently, though admittely all HP builds, so it may be an HP thing.
Office 2007 also has the ability to Save to PDF natively, shows up in the Save As options. They were originally going to have it built into the product, but Adobe invoked some 'monopoly' nonsense to block them. So now you have to take 2 minutes to download and install it.
This is a case where the whole monopoly lawsuit business is actually helping one company (Adobe) and hurting the consumer, by not allowing windows to include this in the products by default.
I'm sure the smart folks over at MS feel that they understand the numbers, and that their price point is the right one. They may be wrong, but its a more or less free market, and they can set their prices however they want. As they set them higher, fewer people buy.
Mind you, the OS market is less price elastic than some other markets, but its not completely inelastic.
Give me a break. We're talking about voluntary purchasing of software products here.
... no swindling ... no death and destruction.
No one has to buy them. No one has to buy Microsoft versions of them.
Free market or lack of monopolies doesnt mean that people make the choices YOU think are smart. It doesnt even mean they make good choices (however you define good).
It just means other options are available.
Right now, for the majority of consumers and businesses, the perceived pain of switching is less than the perceived cost of staying.
Thats it
What do governments and taxes have to do with a free market?
I think you're mixing several subjects there inappropriately.
Government is an example of an area where there is NOT a free market, and the competitors use violence to enforce their territories. I dont have a choice as to what government I pay for services, I'm forced to deal with the US government because of where I was born.
And this 'no competition within my territory' means that over time all the governments tend to look alike, as there is no competition, and they all tend to evolve towards maximum extraction of energy from the system that is sustainable.
Anyway, didnt mean to preach to the choir there, but I sometimes wish people would put a little more thought towards the biggest monopoly of all.
Huh? How does copyright law support Microsoft?
Microsoft doesnt have a dominant market position because of copyrights. It does so through lots of (legit) savvy business sense, along with some less than legitimate behavior (supply manipulation of OEMs).
Copyrights do not cause the market to be insensitive to price gouging.
Copyrights do not stop others from entering the market.
The only conceivable argument that copyrights stop effective competition is because of switching costs (ie, compatibility), as MS copyrights its protocols. But this falls short in a number of areas.
1. These protocols have all been reverse engineered successfully, without invoking copyright litigation.
2. People are still able to switch, even without having fully documented protocols and specs. It may be more inconvenient and costly, but there's no law that says businesses have to make it easy to switch away from them (at least in this market, in some markets there are such laws).
Now I'm not saying that copyright law is good. And I'm not saying that Microsoft has been good for every aspect of the industry. But tying the two together is not logical. You need to deal with the MS problems where they are, and it has nothing to do with copyright.
I realize that if you're a FOSS fan or zealot, you think that all information should be free. I would argue that all information will be free eventually, despite barriers such as proprietary protocols and specs.
If there's a market for them, then someone will provide a product.
It is absolutely not a requirement of a Free Market that there be large numbers of buyers and sellers.
You can have a free market with 2 suppliers, as long as the barriers to entry for new competitors are low. Then if the 2 form up to price fix or something similar, then new businesses will be formed to offers the product/service at a lower price or higher quality, and the market naturally re-balances.
I think what you mean is that markets are often more efficient with large numbers of sellers.
Even that is arguable, at least in some cases. Too many players dividing up the available potential income can dilute the market, such that no company has the income to re-invest or improve, because margins are so thin.
Horde's web UI is pretty terrible.
Even Thunderbird, with all of its rough edges, is an order of magnitude better than the Horde UI.
I understand there are some folks (must not do much email) who prefer web based clients, but I just dont get it. They're slow, keyboard shortcuts are slim to none (forced to use the mouse), do a crappy job of remembering non-addressbook emails, and have no offline capability.
Sorry, didnt mean to go on a rant there, but I just dont get the love of web-based emails. They're just, IMO, very primitive.
I've got a number of clients on Exchange whose Exchange installs dont require so much as a touch but once or twice a year.
I'm not trying to argue, seriously trying to get a sense of where this maintenance comes from. I see others post that, and I just dont see it, but you sound like a _very_ similar business to ours, so I was curious.
I'm not sure, to be honest.
But I've received several from outside organizations (who are also using their own exchange installation and outlook).
I just did a test from my exchange account to an imap account I have through thunderbrid.
At least in this scenario, it delivers an email with a meeting.ics attachment in it.
I think why most people probably dont is most people choose their recipients in Outlook via pointy-clicky Global Address Book. You wont ever have the opportunity to send to outside accounts if you do that.
So basically, most folks probably dont know they can. *shrugs* a guess in any case.
I was surprised too the first time it ever happened.
Thanks for posting this.
For many of us out there, who live and die on our laptop, often out in the field, sometimes with connectivity, sometimes not (even with my sprint evdo card), having a rich client that works online and offline is just absolutely critical, a showstopper requirement.
Plus, for those of us who live and die by email, tasks and calendaring, rich clients are infinitely preferable to web-clients, no matter how flashy and ajax-y.
So all this is me saying thank you for recognizing this subset of the userbase, who would love another option, but also like Outlook.
Oh thanks for the correction. I was just about to comment on how anyone could trust their email to a PHP based app when I saw your clarification.
Thanks!
I've owned exchange installations in the half-terabyte to terabyte range, and it all works just fine. You're constantly disk bound at that size, so you need reasonably fast disk subsystem, but thats not hard.
Exchange's architecture IS less effecient than simple file-system storage of email text files and similar, and MAPI is harder on your edge servers than IM
AP, but its just not that huge of a deal. since Citadel is zero maintenance Exchange is fairly low maintenance as well, at least for competent admins.
Every repetitive task you need to do can be trivially automated. So there's some up front configuration, no question, but its not like it requires something done to it every day or anything.
In fact, its been my experience that if you properly size the hardware, and arent constantly fiddling with your production servers (ie, no amateurs), then exchange boxen are pretty bulletproof. They just sit and thrash the disks
Zimbra is pretty much a web-only client. That sucks. Web interfaces for email, calendering, tasks, etc are terrible.
Yes, they have Outlook plugins. They're crappy and unstable, and they dont work very well.
Yes, they have a 'Zimbra Desktop', but its pre-alpha stage, and not useful for those running a business.
Mind you
But from the end-user standpoint, its not even close.
They need a quality rich client with offline capabilities before it can compete.
A couple notes ...
Any smartphone that can consume WebDav doesnt need a separate connector.
The only mobile clients that I'm aware of that need a separate product is blackberry, and thats a product from blackberry, not ms.
The windows smart phones work perfectly out of the box, no extra for-pay software, no muss, no fuss.
Also, keep an eye on those costs, you dont specify the time-frame they cover.
An exchange server will last you 5+ years, so that $4000 is amortized over 5+ years. Thats $800 per year per exchange box.
And the cal costs are 'per-generation'. Plus they cover ALL the covered products in your org.
So for example, if you're paying $100 per FTE for a Core CAL, that covers Windows Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, and SMS. And that $100 covers you until the next 'generation' of these products. So figure 3 years. Thats like $35 per year per employee for this licensing.
Even for startups, the cost is not material.
Startups, unless their core competency is in windows server administration, probably shouldnt be doing their own exchange server anyway.
You can get hosted, high quality exchange 2007 for as low as $7 per user per month. Thats $84 per year, per employee.
For any reasonable sized startup, less than 50 people, thats just not a material cost, and it'll work adequately.
It's not as bad as it sounds, at least in the bigger picture.
Typical prices are something like $50-100 for office, and $50-75 for core cals.
So this is like $100-150 per employee, approx every 3-5 years, depending on your upgrade cycle. If you are on a subscription or SA, then you're paying a bit more, every year, but you can use whatever version you want whenever you want.
So lets say worst case $50 per employee per year. Thats not free, but its not terrible.
In fact, I would say that in the common case, Windows is simpler to use when you're using it in the typical, well documented scenarios.
It's when you hit the edge cases and have to start working with Windows in ways it wasnt designed to work that you have troubles. Whereas on open-source systems, the curve is much less steep on the edges, because someone has been there before.
In fact, what I've seen a ton of is when Unix guys have to work on windows systems, they'll tend to actively ignore the 'best practices' out there, because its different than what they're used to. So they're working way outside the norms. Not surprisingly, they run into problems, and they blame windows, rather than their not just doing it the 'blessed' way. They then complain about how its so complex and hard to use.
First, in large organizations, the mailbox sizes scale faster than most people expect. If you have 10k people, and want to give them all 2GB of space, thats 20TB.
Now 20TB in low end JBOD sata disks is cheap, but that wont work well for an exchange environment.
The ideal is to have the exchange mailbox stores backed by a SAN. This is because you often end up re-balancing mailboxes from one server to another, or some store servers (that handle some fixed subset of users) grow faster than the others.
Also, the mailbox stores in large orgs are often run as clusters. Not load balanced, shared-nothing boxes, but real live, expensive clusters. That means shared disk storage, heartbeat monitors, all that stuff.
And then there's backups. Backups are what really kills you in enterprise storage. As an example, a company I've dealt with did the analysis with a consultant, and they determined that their tier-1 san storage costs ~$1.25 per gigabyte per year. But full staged tape rotation backups cost almost $4.00 per gigabyte per year. That puts total storage costs at ~$5.00 per gigabyte per year.
(BTW, I think these numbers were per year, but they could have been per-month
That adds up to $100k per year just in storage costs, just for the email servers.
Now there are some things you can do
You can also mount your mailbox stores over iSCSI and use not-so-insanely-expensive high-end san storage.
But the bottom line is that storage is much more expensive that disc, and Exchange storage is more expensive than typical file-server storage, because of its particular needs.
Exchange is also hard on disk subsystems, and large Exchange stores are almost always permanently disk-bound, and constantly, always, 24-hours a day, thrashing the disks.
The problem with the whole 'call to ask' is that it doesnt scale. It only works when you have a relatively low number of meetings or things on your calendar. Eventually, you get to the point where you dont have the time, energy, or attention to manage it all anymore, and these systems help. A secretary/admin/assistant would also help, but these tend to cost alot more.
That person then responds to the message with a tenative acceptance and alternate time. Outlook then presents to you the opportunity to accept this.
All of these are first-class concepts in Outlook, and the UI supports them (ie, makes 'tentative' requests look different, offers you a response choice of 'propose an alternate time', etc). Also, Outlook doesn't present you with an automatically generated list of who hasn't responded to your invitations. So unless you're paying attention or you check the meeting, you won't know that I neither accepted nor declined your meeting invite. This leads many people to assume that you've accepted until you specifically decline. Yes, it does. Click on the 'responses' or 'scheduling' button. The responses view lets you see everyone who has and hasnt responded, and for those who have, how they've responded (accept, deny, propose a different time, etc). The scheduling view shows you everyone's free/busy times (if you have the perms), and what their response has been. Because of all this, I'd generally prefer that someone sends me an e-mail saying, "Do you want to meet? If so, when is good for you?" Now, I might respond, "Yeah, let's meet. Schedule it and send me an invite." If that's not the general order of things, then I think a meeting invite presents itself as an order, "APPEAR AT MY MEETING!" Thats just your reading wayyyy too much into it. The mechanism reflects a pragmatic reality. Meetings are often scheduled for a number of people, by an admin or secretary, who wont even be attending. Having one-on-one conversations with everyone is just insane. Go talk to the admin of a director or VP sometime, and ask them what it's like to schedule time for 5 different busy Directors, VP, AVPs, etc. Without a centralized schedule, which can show free/busy time, its something they would spend an hour talking on the phone to do. Thats just wasteful.
I think this sort of thing is all just depending on the kinds of companies you've worked in. If you work in one where some classes of people are extraordinarily busy, and tend to have packed schedules, and they are in different buildings or campuses, you see the value of these systems.
It works just fine, I've had it happen many times.
It's possible you've got a configuration or filter at edge that is stripping the attachments.
Okay, I know this is going to come across as crazy talk ... but have you considered just ... not updating?
Considering that MS server products will continue to get security updates for 10 years after release, I dont think it'll be a big burden on you.
Is it doing a bugcheck (ie, BSOD)? Or is it just instantly rebooting.
If the latter then the OS isnt even involved, and you've got some broken hardware in there.
Laptops are particularly bad with this as they get older, and things like inserting/removing USB drivers or PC-card objects will reboot the machine.
No bugcheck, no BSOD, just instant reboot. Much like what happens if your power browns out, or the power supply chokes for a second.