When Is Exchange Inappropriate For The Enterprise? 621
malice95 asks "At my company (approx 1000 users) we currently run Dual Sun Ultra 2's (Solaris) in an HA configuration for our mail system. It runs Sendmail with pop, imap, web-based e-mail, web-based e-mail archives, and approximatly 150 Majordomo mailing lists. The system has been working great for months. Our users use a mix of Netscape, Outlook, and Pine to read their e-mail. Lately there seems to be a small but politically forceful faction in the company that wants us to move to MS Exchange for our entire e-mail system and standardize on MS Outlook for the desktop. I have seen many exchange setups crash and burn at other companies, and become management nightmares. Can you help me come up with opinions/facts/experiences why exchange sucks as an enterprise e-mail solution versus a nice solid Unix solution to present to management?" There are times when standardizing on Outlook and Exchange may be desirable for a company and times when it is not. Is this one of those times, considering that it looks like this company has a perfectly working mail system already in place? Why or why not?
Re:On Outlook: Remember. Even MICROSOFT got screwe (Score:2)
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Scheduling is what they really want (Score:2)
If you standardize on Outlook, your mail server (and admins) will be spending a lot of time scanning for viruses.
What outlook does do well is scheduling - perhaps if you could find some good option for scheduling the outlook people would quiet down (as that's what alomst everyone really wants when they push for an outlook server - otherwise why not just use Outlook to read your mail?).
I'm unfortunatley not aware of a good standalone scheduler.
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
HP OpenMail. More details at:
http://www.openmail.com/cyc/om/00/i nde x.html [openmail.com]
V7 is in beta now (for Linux).
And no, I don't work for HP. I just like this product (extremely scalable - it's unreal how much it can handle).
Re:Give them what they want (Score:2)
I'm sorry, I did get the two mixed up. However, the place that runs thousands of clients, has Exchange as their mail server.
Security Nightmares (Score:2)
If you do know what you're doing, the high port can be locked down to a single port. But then you've put an cap on the number of sessions the server can handle. So now you need a high port *range*, which also sucks from a network perimeter protection point of view.
Exchange calendars, global address list, and public folders *only* work over RPC protocols, which suffer the same problems as MAPI. All these RPC protocols are cleartext, or trivially obfuscated, so are subject to all the passive attacks you can conceive.
So if the boss wants email from home, he's either got to have a VPN, with all the risks that involves (i.e., hijack the exposed remote client and ride the tunnel inside), or he's got to give up some of Exchange's features.
Exchange can do IMAP, and even IMAP/SSL-- but if you're going to do that, why bother with Exchange at all? If you're reading Exchange over IMAP, you lose the calendar, GAL, and public folders. Outlook can handle LDAP (and LDAP/SSL) directories and Exchange can provide the GAL over LDAP, but you *will* lose the calendar any time you use any kind of securable protocol.
Of course, if you decide to go with Exchange providing IMAP/SSL and LDAP/SSL, why bother with Exchange at all? Both are easily served by other means, with better security-- for instance, Exchange does IMAP/SSL, but will *not* do a client certificate check (nor will Outlook respond to one). So if your organization is deploying any kind of PKI, you can't take advantage of it. iPlanet Messaging Server, Critical Path's IMAP server, and Netscape Messanger, on the other hand, do both. And they support SSL authentication (a.k.a. X.509 certificate authentication a.k.a. PKI authentication)-- no passwords!
There's always Outlook Web Access for remote email, but OWA (or any web-based email system) cannot deal with encrypted messaging, so S/MIME is right out, should you have any plans in that regard. Further, OWA runs only on IIS, and *must* have extensive domain rights (to get at all those mail stores). Feel free to read the log of IIS holes big enough to fly a starship through on your own for why this is a Bad Idea(tm).
Further, any Exchange system has a built-in inefficiency. Each and every message that transits the system must be converted from RFC822 format to "Exchange format", and possibly back again (such as when serving it over IMAP). Other systems, particularly UNIX based systems, do not; the message remains in RFC822 format. This has implications for sizing large mail sites appropriately, particularly with high-volume mailing lists.
Speaking of mailing lists, if you want to establish an Exchange list with members *not* in your Exchange domain you must add them as custom contacts, which rapidly gets to be a bear to administrate. Many sites I know run Exchange for SMTP mail and a parallel UNIX server to handle mailing lists for this reason alone.
But is always comes down to that damn calendar. It's the groupware functions that seem to drive the Exchange migrations I've seen. Find them another way that will make them happy, and you might get to keep a more capable and flexible back end. I recommend a good web-based calendar (iPlanet's new version looks good, if they managed to release it, though it still needs the SSL and SSL authentication support) and shared workspace (a la BSCW).
But selling it when you're up against all those MCS guys with the fat expense accounts is always a problem.
-- Cerebus
Management's IT Rule #0 (Score:5)
Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:5)
Exchange has the potential to introduce a number of new headaches into a system that works very well. Why change?
If they want to standardize on Outlook for the desktop, go ahead and do that. But that doesn't mean they need to get you to change your entire backend to run Exchange.
When is Exchange Appropriate (Score:2)
how about crashing and burning? (Score:2)
1. Crashing and burning.
2. introducing a new virus into the whole company
3. Reducing compatibility
If youre interested in any of the above options, pick it... it's great!!!
Nothing wrong with running Outlook/Exchange (Score:2)
On Outlook: Remember. Even MICROSOFT got screwed (Score:3)
Remember, with Outlook as the desktop client, you have the patented Microsoft Insecurity Inside(tm) design school.
Even Microsoft has been directly and successfully attacked, in a rather significant and spectacular manner (enough that the intruder could go browsing around and make new accounts) through the use of email trojans.
I think there is enough fodder, between the attacks on Microsoft and the various email worms, to ban outlook altogether.
Nicholas C Weaver
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
why? (Score:2)
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? - Lotus (Score:2)
Multiple clients: Notes, POP3, IMAP, Web Access - out of the box.
Domino R5 complies to internet standards: SMTP for mail, LDAP for address books.
Replication for mobile users is really good.
Special address book format can squeeze a lot of users in minimal space. One of their favourite demos is importing the entire US phone book in the address book - 100MB disk space.
Server runs on a multitude of platforms: WinNT, Linux, Sun/Solaris, AS400/OS400 (very good scaleability here - if you have AS400 admins in house), AIX, HPUX - it even runs native on S/390 mainframes.
The Lotus Domino security model is imho one of the best out there: authentication is PKI based, Lotusccript needs to be signed before it can be executed. You DO need competent admins to do the install right (as you would with every setup).
Only thing which isn't too good is that the notes clients are currently only for Wintel/MacOS - but in most corporate environments that really isn't a problem. Besides: the die-hard linux/*BSD/[whatever] fanatics can always access Domino using their favorite mail program/web browser. :-)
And it's ofcourse way more than just mail and calendaring
disclaimer: I do Notes development and Administration
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Re:Exchange v. other MTA/Delivery systems (Score:2)
Notes has huge strengths and weaknesses, namely, it is only worth it if you are going to commit to doing everything there way, as otherwise the bulky client (which I have seen used in all the Notes shops I have been in) isn't worth it.
Re:Two Reasons: (Score:2)
RE: No, *you* have another "think" coming! (-8 (Score:2)
The expression migrated to the U.S. from England; I know this because I am English but moved to the U.S. when I was 5 (almost 45 years ago, now!). My mother and father used this expression ALL THE TIME -- it's meant to be somewhat humorous, of course. (Wry anger, or anger mixed with British wit.) It's an English idiom (as in "fix dinner" versus "make dinner" versus the more literal "cook dinner").
Some months ago, somebody in an otherwise authoritative source (something like a national "news" magazine) wrote a column musing about how his mother used to say "you've got another 'thing' coming". I knew then that we were in for a long period of petty squabling over this. All I can say is, the columnist's mother was speaking from the west coast of the U.S., something like California -- they speak weird out there, and are not renowned for their diction! (-8
Re:hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
Re:Just look at Hotmail (Score:2)
Re:Exchange versus UNIX based solutions (Score:2)
So, is this about the University of Missouri Email Wars, or is this Yet Another University Email War (YAUEW!)? I ask, because your whole message sounds eerily familiar. :-)
At Mizzou, we have thousands and thousands of users who have either "missouri.edu" addresses (faculty and staff) or "mizzou.edu" addresses (lowly students). Our system is unstable, slow, and almost certainly not worth it despite an IT squad that is generally smart, responsive, and eager to please. Frankly, I would never have thought I could care less what the email server was that I was using, but now, alas, I know better. :-(
Re: No, *you* have another "think" coming! (-8 (Score:2)
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
I'll take never for $100, Alex... (Score:2)
Subject says it all... ":-)
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Re:Why Screw up a good thing? - Lotus (Score:2)
It's one of those products that you just can't explain how cool it is and why...people have to see for themselves.
Regards,
Re:Why you should actually unify (Score:2)
The typical mail server (where I'm at now) is a Quad Xeon, 4G RAM, 100G RAID, running Lotus Notes, and supporting up to 3,000 people (per server), with 50,000 people worldwide using email (and calendaring). At this level of use, we do have to have multiple servers, but we're trying to keep all metrics below 50% use (esp CPU and I/O). We could buy one herking big box, but bandwidth to overseas is expensive and unreliable, so we've got positioned, local mail servers. I should point out that all email going in and out, and that the mail gateways, are all running Linux on Penguin boxes.
I guess there could be a speed differene in the I/O channel when writing to a single file (SQL server style) versus writing to seperate files (spooled mail style, and also what Notes does), but I can't imagine it'd be more than a couple of percentage points, and largely negligible. You either have to write the information to a big file with some sort of To: information attached, or you have to look up some file path information, then write to a specific file. Is it faster to write it to a particular spot in a file, or to a particular spot in a particular file? I'll leave that argument for the folks who know, invent, and engineer hardware.
I'll concede that backups is a moot argument, since there are so many products that are able to back up a file even if a process has it locked.
With multiple files, you could span not only disks (at the low end), but RAID systems. Maybe do something clever like putting your email freaks on an expensive high-performance RAID, and everyone else on a slower RAID. (Users here do mail 20-80MB file attachments around quite often.) But that's getting at the extreme end. More likely, if you can use different directory paths, you can add disk space as needed, and quickly, without having to grow files, or file systems.
Oh, and before someone takes the obligatory dig at Lotus Notes, say what you want. It's the only system I've seen that can encrypt email so that the user can read it, but not the mail admin. Incredibly secure.
Re:Outlook binary files (Score:2)
Exchange's single instance store works really well, and is a compelling argument to maintain all data on the server. Last time I had my exchange admin cook off it for me, the private store (mailboxes) was 8.7 gig, and yet a comma delimited file of all users' mailboxes indicated total summed mailbox size was 10.2 gig. If you are serious about exchange, be serious about keeping all data on the server, as PST do not scale, and have never been touted as such. In a production environment, all they can offer is a method from which a restore server can dump a mailbox to in order to move into a production mailbox.
Your problem is simple an implementation issue
Re:Exchange would probably be a bad move (Score:2)
This was the solution that was used at one of the companies I worked at when management realised that those of us without a PC on our desks couldn't read email. Yes, it works OK, but it has one critical flaw. Either you have the citrix client visible at all times, or you don't get notification of new mail. That single fault made it effectively unusable, and we all resorted to having inbox rules that autoforwarded all mail directly to our Unix boxes. Even that wasn't ideal, 'coz Exchange won't forward the SMTP address of the original sender, only their screen name. A bit of sed trickery in my .procmailrc let me guess the
address from the name, with about 80% accuracy, but
it's a far from ideal solution.
Re:Exchange v. other MTA/Delivery systems (Score:2)
2. Consistent look and feel/ Rich content. Netscape probably isn't the answer.
3. Group Scheduling. iPlanet does it. When I sync my BlackBerry pager, will iPlanet include items so my pager alerts me 15 minutes before a meeting?
4. Reliability. E2k will do 2 way active-active clusters with Win2k Advanced Server, and 4 way with datacenter. E2k native supports up to 4 storage groups, each of which can support 4 private (mailbox) stores.
5. Your email into a database complaint. Last check, we had 10.2 gig summed mailboxes, yet 8.7 gig database due to single instance store. Functionally, I have not seen or heard of any fundamental issues with enormous exchange databases, but for the restore time should something happen. There does not seem to be any fundamental issues with sizes of databases.
6. Productivity with Outlook. Palms, RIMS, etc integrate seemlessly. Where is the loss?
Look, I am a MCSE, I run OpenBSD on my firewall, FreeBSD on my laptop. But you are talking ROI, and yet you seem to propose a mish mash of OpenLPAP, iPlanet, and Netscape Mail or Outlook Express. Who is buying into that? I am not a MS zealot, but I have yet to see something that does everything that Exchange and Outlook do. And that includes third party support (like RIMS, etc). Even if OpenMail cures cancer, what PDA's seemlessly sync with it?
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
I can always tell when there's a company-wide email being sent out, ~120 people on a PIII 500 Xeon will bring the box to its knees for about 5 minutes as everyone responds to the agency-wide message.
I like the end-user functionality, but the backend is still too much like it was. I'd prefer non-encrypted message stores or at least a tool that could help sort out the database when it got hosed..
Re:Here Comes the MS Bashing... (Score:2)
1000 users is NOTHING in comparison to a decent SMTP/POP3 server. I run a small free email service that has 250,000 <b>active</b> users on a <b>single twin-CPU machine that is over 4 years old</b>. Performance is reasonable and CPU usage averages about 15%.
Exchange has difficulty reaching these levels of scalability without serious hardware, but having said that, I still think it is a very good server for people that require the scheduling features. No open-source product comes close to Exchange in this respect. Products that use the open-standards protocols for calendaring and scheduling have been slow to arise.
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
whooops...
Re:Add, don't subtract (Score:2)
Well, you can just fribble my frog. After all, if the sink's not attached to the giraffe, how can the car start? Friglar strapfan nibble scot, sud bugger nut prit-prang fitang.
'Could care less' is wrong--and dumb. The correct statement is 'couldn't care less.' Words means things. The full expression under argument is: `You think <erroneous expr.>; well, you've another think coming!' `You've another thing coming' makes no sense--it does not parse. Only a mind with a tenuous grasp on reality--one for which the world is not a real thing, but merely a series of ethereal perceptions, would say such a thing. The mind which is used to the concept of the real, the concrete, the abstract, the philosophical, says what it means and means what it says.
If a thousand thousand slimy things cannot speak their own language, they're still wrong.
But this is all hopelessly off-topic. The original post was quite correct--the Exchange/Outlook combination is full of problems. It has some nice capabilities, but it is troublesome and buggy. Does anyone know of open-source clients for Exchange, or open-source servers for Outlook?
Re:More strengths/weaknesses (Score:2)
You're absolutely correct, the MCSE is an entry level cert, which is pathetic, since the MCP is supposed to be the entry level cert.
As to my argument being a red herring, I disagree, All of the unix admins I know get paid very well, but they also do useful things. Most NT admins I've seen use up space. The sad result of MCSE mills.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Re:My .02 on running outlook (Score:2)
KMail is a stand alone program. I believe that it can be setup to share its address book with some other programs. KOrganizer was a pretty decent program in KDE 1.1.2 I haven't played with it yet in my new install, KNode the KDE 2.0 newsreader is excellent. Only trouble I've had with it is that it doesn't support multipart messages. It is however a vast improvement over KRN which came with KDE 1.1.2.
Overall I'm just as happy having these programs be standalone. I usually don't want to download news headers when I open up my calendar.
_____________
Re:Outlook binary files (Score:2)
Or you could have each message in a separate file (possibly messages with attachments as a directory/folder). Not only is this a better analogy of the way paper mail works it also uses the filesystem, rather having a big file emulate some kind of filesystem.
Re:Exchange v. other MTA/Delivery systems (Score:2)
I agree that it probably won't help to create something by throwing a number of different elements together, and hoping that it will work OK - but stating that there is no software that has the functionality of Outlook/Exchange is complete and utter nonsense.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Re:More strengths/weaknesses (Score:2)
The RFC they certainly won't understand is number 974..
Effectivly an MSCE appears to be someone who knows more of the options than a regular user, but still does not really understand how the thing is ment to work in the first place.
Re:PHB's like calendars (Score:2)
Whilst it's possible Microsoft may have a freephone number in the USA, in other parts of the world it costs money to call them
Re:One word -- maintenance (Score:2)
Re:Oh geez how could I forget... (Score:2)
Re:Imail on NT/2K (Score:2)
Outlook should be banned, not standardized (Score:2)
Try to list the terrible vulnerabilities that ONLY outlook has - I'd make a case to BAN outlook, not standardize on it.
Short of banning outlook, at least SOME people at your office can have relatively secure (from scripting) email, if they don't use outlook...
so I think the standardization on outlook is the REASON not to standardize on Exchange.
I know I laugh constantly at everyone who gets a new M$ virus, because I'm completely immune.
On a similar note, any time you can avoid castrating yourself to a single vendor like M$, it is always a good thing. And you'd be spending money to change.
Re:why? (Score:2)
It's a little bit more complex than that... (Score:2)
Exchange is really an ERP solution in disguise, and it's being agressively expanded in that direction. It is extremely easy for people to set up various forms and business processes (purchase orders, expense reports and HR forms etc), and is therefore very attractive for exactly those kinds of people that don't read slashdot
Of course exchange has a huge set of drawbacks, but they are in many ways comparable to the drawbacks of a sendmail based system:
1) It requires experts to set up securely and
properly (it's not impossible, though).
2) It suffers from the usual 4gl trap, that is
everything that is slightly outside of the
scope of the default objects suddenly becomes
very very hard to implement (similarly hard
to writing perl XS modules, for example).
3) Parallel development and good change control
is nearly impossible. This problem is similar
to the problem of versioning and merging
database schemas, as every change you do is
"live".
Re:Two Reasons: (Score:2)
Walt
Re:A few words. (Score:2)
Identify what features the people in power want from Exchange, and find a Unix alternative. Groupware calendaring? Shared addressbooks? If the benefits of a solution under Exchange outweighs the cost of converting to NT (hardware AND retraining AND licences), the security implications, and the support headaches that Exchange tends to bring, then go with Exchange. If the Unix alternative (MailOne [openone.com] or HP's OpenMail [openmail.com] are a couple) will cause fewer problems and cost less, go with that.
Don't forget that your job is to pick the right tool for the job.
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Re:two words (Score:2)
Well, I'm sure some PHB will still be glad he spent the money on Exchange... because it looks prettier.
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Forcing a single client is always bad (Score:2)
How can forcing everyone onto a single interface be a good thing? The email client should be completely user-selected, so long as it (1) supports standards, and (2) doesn't open security risks.
My site went through a similar nightmare, but instead of Exchange/Outlook, they went to Lotus Notes. Previously, different divisions used differnt email systems. I work in a unix (Solaris) division and everyone used whatever clients they wanted (I use exmh). Eventually, my division replaced all the NCDs with NT machines. I now use Exceed and my desktop is still 100% unix. I run exactly two NT applications: Exceed and Winamp. I can't stay logged on for 6 months at a time anymore, but I like the music.
The other divisions used CC:mail. CC:mail is evil incarnate. Mime attachments generally didn't work very well between us and the CC:mail folks because CC:mail wasn't a real RFC-822 mail package and had some kludgey gateway to talk to real mail servers. CC:mail also had Y2K problems, so management decided to ditch CC:mail once and for all.
Unfortunately, management never realized that all the attachment woes were 100% CC:mail's fault. So they decided that they would force everyone to use the same client. The search went on, and the Lotus Notes group put on the most impressive sales presentation. Marketing won.
Fortunately, Notes does support IMAP and I use fetchmail and continue to read my email with exmh, though this is against the policy. F the policy, I say. I've got work to do.
BTW: Lotus Notes was later determined to have a Y2K bug...
Having been a Field Tech/Net Admin (Score:2)
I think that basic email works fine with a properly set up sendmail config, and IMAP services provides enough directory support that more isn't needed. People just don't use the capabilities that Exchange does offer enough to justify the administrative headaches.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Interoperablity (Score:2)
How about tackling the question from the other side? What can one do if they do work primarily on a unix workstation but there is the push to go to Exchange?
Does anyone outside of Microsoft understand the MS Exchange protocol? Are there e-mail clients out there that can get mail from an Exchange server? If the clients don't support Exchange well then how about manipulating a server to mimic a pop server while handling Exchange data?
Of course one very obvious soultion is to keep another machine that has Windows installed just to handle e-mail but I really don't relish that idea. What a waste...
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:2)
That's right. If this small faction of fat pointy haired people want the full functionality of MS Outlook (i.e. shared calendars), they can set up net folders. They work great, plus the fact that I don't have to worry about opening up an Exchange server to other servers in other departments/offices because Joe Blow Big Wig wants to see Suzy Q's calendar, but their accounts are on different servers.
I don't like MS Exchange. I like the features it provides, but I hate the fact that it's protocol are hidden/proprietary and having to set up and configure 'Profiles' for every bloody user on the server. Then there's the whole virus/worm thing!
Also, we used to run the Exchange server on a dual PPro box with 1Gig of memory. This couldn't handle the load (of approx 100 users)!!! Users were complaining about very slow response times. We upgraded to a dual PIII 733MHz w/ 1.5Gig RAM. I'm more than confident a UNIX box running sendmail/pop/imap/webmail/etc. would be able to handle the load just fine, and then some.
Re:Exchange would probably be a bad move (Score:3)
exchange will run on a mac without troubles. There may even be a version of Lookout for the mac as well...
You are pretty much out of luck for unix stations though
Yeah! (Score:3)
In addition, you'll definitely want to set up some filtering software. Ideally you'll just eat executables and Word documents on the server. You should already be doing this anyway, but when you upgrade you have a good excuse to implement a draconian security policy, because everyone knows how insecure Microsoft products are.
You're probably need more IT staff to maintain all those new servers. Now Microsoft HAS got it down to the point where a trained monkey can handle day to day situations, but you'll want a couple of really experienced admins as well to fix things when the inevitable mail worm hits. Those guys don't come cheap.
And don't forget licensing on 4x your current machines for exchange, NT (or 2K) and your scanning software. And the manpower it'll take to set all this up and make sure everyone's desktop is running the right software. Since you'll be visiting everyone's desktop anyway, it'd be a great time to do a licensing audit to make sure you won't have any trouble if the BSA ever comes a knocking.
Re: Here Comes the MS Bashing... (Score:2)
1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself.
I'm sorry, but in my experience that simply isn't true. I've worked on a 500 user site running Exchange 5.0 on a quad-processor PPro with 512MB RAM, and it was completely bogged down. Normal end-user work wasn't particualarly slow, but trying to do *anything* on the server was painful. Any window activity regularly took several minutes between screen refreshes, and rebooting the server guarenteed an hour of downtime (30 min waiting for Exchange to shut down, 30 min waiting for it to start back up).
Also, don't forget that you'll have to back up the server. This means that you'll have to purchase a $X,000 client license, plus a spare server to restore in the event of a failure. At least with Legato Network backing up Exchange 5.0, the *only* way to do a restore was to restore the entire database at once.
are they high? (Score:2)
-Dare I say "backup"? (it's a pain in the ass - there is NO good solution)
-Email Virus and security vulnerabilities
-Lack of scalable hardware choice
-Lack of cross-platform support (Yes, exchange server supports POP3, etc, but where else can you run MAPI clients - MAPI is required to use any of the nifty features that make Exchange appear attractive, and then you're stuck with Windows only.)
-With Exchange, you don't get that warm fuzzy feeling that you're supporting an industry underdog, in fact, you are propping up a monopolist and proving to Capitalism's detractors that the free-market is broken. (ie. I'm saying if you choose Exchange, you are supporting COMMUNISM!)
-No trust - are you really going to trust that Microsoft doesn't have secret back doors for the NSA (IE's NSAKey anyone?) - or that the hackers that broke into Microsoft didn't insert their own back doors? You can't trust closed-source software. Period.
Re:Exchange would probably be a bad move (Score:2)
No it doesn't. Exchange servers can talk IMAP & there's also a web-based interface that works nicely in Netscape on Linux.
Sendmail is not comparable with Exchange (Score:2)
Exchange is a groupware server. It handles calendaring, discussion groups, boards, forums, surveys, forms, and many other things. Like most MS software it is heavily integrated with other MS software such as NT and Outlook, although some of its functions will work in a more open way.
There is no comparison of Exchange and any mail server. If management want groupware (and there ARE good reasons for using it) then Lotus Notes, Exchange, and maybe some of the iPlanet stuff is about all that's available.
My experience of running a trivial (50 user) Exchange setup is that it's a pain in the arse to manage. In particular, its logging is very poor, and the whole architecture is very counterintuitive if you are coming from a Unix background. However, it does seem stable and secure, and has many nice features, and a good API (if you want to control it programmatically).
Outlook, is another pain in the arse, being insecure (open to macro virus abuse), and in my experience it is confusing for users.
If what you need is fully functional groupware, Exchange is probably your best bet. If all you need is email, I'd steer well clear for many many reasons. If, in fact, all management want is to have shared calendars, there ARE some standalone solutions to that, and iPlanet (Netscape...) over some integrated mail/calendar stuff.
Re:A few words. (Score:2)
Like any groupware function, it's only as useful as the culture makes it. If you boss's boss started scheduling meetings, your boss's calendar would start getting used.
This is nothing new. I remember when I would send my boss e-mail in "cc:Mail" and he would reply two weeks later. Meanwhile, he would send out 5 broadcast voice mails a day. And this was in the IT group. E-mail might seem natural now, but it wasn't always.
Still, a modern corporate network has calendar support. IT either picks the solution, or a motivated group of users picks Outlook/Exchange.
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A good time for compromise (Score:2)
I've been in shops that Threw The Switch and mail service was at best flaky while they got the Exchange system working. You can probably sell a dual system as a fail-safe compromise.
Exchange actually is better suited as a departmental mail server than as a corporate mail host. So by all means the people who want to use Exchange should have an Exchange server hanging off of the main mail system, and those who don't want to use it can continue to use the Sendmail hosts.
What a concept.
Stick with sendmail (Score:2)
This entire argument might be due to moronic executives:
PointyHaired Boss: "I want you to order an SQL Server."
Dilbert (thinks to self):Hmm, does he know what he's talking about or has he been reading those IT magazines again?
(asks PHBoss a question): In what color would you like that server?
PointyHaired Boss: "I think that mauve has the most RAM."
Re:This isn't what you want to hear...... (Score:2)
"heck of a lot of hardware" no kidding . . . We went form a single Sun box for e-mail and News to friggen wall of NT machines. In fact they recently installed exchange at a small detachement with serveral hundred uses and it required 2 $20K servers to handle the load.
Group ware. bla. The future to Groupware is http not some propietary protocol/solution. Our group used a Linux box together with Apache and Perl to provide a wide range of groupware functions that far surpass what Exchange provides. Things like Corporate memo document logs, Drawing repository, Corporate photo album, Online Operational logs, Resource schedulers, Phone books, System FAQs, etc.
Hey, perhaps you remember the I Love You virus and the copy cats after that. What did that cost . . .
Also, what about the others who like Macs, or Unix ?
Hey do you remember "I love U" was that a lot of fun.
Exchange/Outlook has its uses... (Score:2)
Let me preface this by saying that I am a UNIX bigot.
That said, a properly implemented MS Exchange system, in conjunction with Outlook, can provide a lot of features not found in your standard Sendmail/IMAP setup.
Outlook provides a lot of features of those do-all office systems that have been tried many times (and mostly failed, Notes being the biggest exception), including a well-integrated calendar system (users can schedule meetings by e-mail that can automatically be inserted into calendars and acknowledged by receipients). It requires Exchange for the back end, however (using Outlook as an IMAP client apparently breaks this).
It is used quite extensively at my current client, but isn't required. I had to opt for an IMAP solution for flexibility (long live Pine!)
Give them what they want (Score:2)
In the end the users should use what they want and MS does a great job on UI. Yeah, it probably needs more care, but that's what techies are for. As far as scalability, I believe I have heard of corporations that have over ten thousand users on it and it works just fine.
Re:Exchange would probably be a bad move (Score:2)
Exchange's Strengths And Weaknesses For The Masses (Score:5)
The Good
- Unified message storage makes backing up everyone's mail a breeze
- Outlook MAPI clients get instant new message notification without having to check every 10 minutes - A HUGE PLUS. I have yet to see a POP/IMAP solution that does this reliably.
- Connects with pretty much every mail system out there
- Supports Outlook as a MAPI client, and all POP3 and IMAP mail clients running on any OS
- Fairly easy administration and all message system recipients are shown in the "Global Address List"
- Exchange performs quite well on a single processor system with 256MB RAM
- Installation is pretty easy
- Mail server clustering (failover) is supported, although at a cost
- If your users gripe enough, you can enable the web-based messaging at a performance cost
- Messages to multiple receipients are stored only once (with multiple pointers) to reduce information store usage
The BadIn short - I like Exchange for it's features. It definitely has an advantage over sendmail/pop/imap. BUT - The need for a dedicated server (difficult for smaller installations) and astronomical costs make the decision more difficult.
Hope this helps.
what does yahoo use, and WHY DON'T they SELL it??? (Score:2)
Why don't they see that thing? Are they crazy, or is the code that much of a mess?
It seems to me they could bundle apache with their software and sell it as one big easy to install deal. they could even make a bsd or linux distro specifically for this purpose.
--
Re:how about crashing and burning? (Score:2)
Re:Using Outlook in a scaling UNIX enviroment (Score:5)
You probally did Openmail Internals just like I did.
This boils down to the following. Before outlook came out MS had there crappy exchange and MS mail clients/servers. At that point HP was years ahead of MS. HP released a NT version of Openmail. The word directly from HP was MS hit the fucking ceiling. They told HP that if Openmail wasn't pulled from the NT platform that they'd drop them from the NT VAR/OEM program. They would no longer get advanced releases. This would screw HP because they need to write drivers for NT for the custom hardware they make.
Openmail NT was pulled from the product lineup and is a footnote in history.
HP was really hoping that OS/2 would take a better hold of the market. At one point IBM sold a branded version of Openmail. When OS/2 crapped out that left HP out of the intel platform. And thus could never hold the costs down.
As far as cost reductions I can chip in the following. It was never the software it self that created the high cost for us as a HP Openmail customer. It was the cost of hardware and Unix support. Implimenting UNIX upgrades cost far more than NT service packs. Buying K series servers sucks big time.
This is where Linux comes in. If Linux becomes workable to the high end business customer this opens the door for large scale Intel boxes that would run openmail. Hardware costs would be reduced greatly, and the OS would be free.
That's my $.02
Here's a reason to hate Exchange: (Score:2)
These log files are where things are stored before they are committed to the permanent database, and they go away when the Exchange Agent is notified of a successful system backup. (Follow all that? Lots of pieces have to work together here...)
Now, if something (like a locked file) prevents your backup from completing fully (or it even reports the right (wrong?) errors...) Exchange will just leave those log files there. They pile up at a steady rate -- I saw 20 MB/day for a ~40 person college department.
Now, here's the kicker: When the drive where the log files are stored gets to the point where there is less than 10 MB available, Exchange is hard-wired to crash! There's nothing you can do about it, your only option is to free up more space.
Now, I understand that you're in a much larger situation than this. However, in this instance, I was dealing with about 60 GB of total drive space for the Exchange machine. There were users that had 500 MB email files, and they just had to have all their data available to them wherever they logged on!! (Sheesh.) They hadn't had a successful backup in 2 months, and called my company when the email was 'broken.' Fun.
Still, if it isn't your server to administer, and you end up with a Minesweeper Certified & Solitaire Expert (MC&SE) type running things... you can expect reboots about every 4 days, and panic backups about every 2 weeks.
Also, Exchange depends on about a half-dozen different services being turned on and running. Most should start at boot, but don't bet on it. There could be some reason one doesn't start (couldn't lock a file, or some silliness...), and then: No email!
Running an Exchange Server is a full-time job, especially for 1000 people.
- <sarcasm> Remember it's
- GroupWare not just email! </sarcasm>
I'd wager that your current system allows you more flexibility, keeps your users happier, and costs you less manpower than Exchange will.Good luck.
Anti-virus software != Outlook security (Score:3)
Managers may love whatever scheduling capabilities that Exchange/Outlook by them, but they are deluding themselves if they think anti-virus software solves all of the security woes that Outlook will bring them. The gain from the features must be weighed against the VERY real security flaws of Exchange/Outlook that will not be solved by any amount of anti-virus software.
Any realistic cost assessment should account for the possibility of all desktop machines getting wiped clean by the next generation of Outlook viri (that delete everything in sight, and don't even have to be opened or read to be triggered). The Lovebug was just the tip of the iceberg. Scheduling meetings at the click of the button may not be worth this.
Time to die. (Score:2)
I have been frustrated over the years with the way that politics plays in spreading the Microsoft dis-ease. Let's face it, with all the money in the industry these days we have become flooded with thieves, liars, and charlatans.
Now while it is possible to fake it with Microsoft products, that just isn't going to happen with UNIX. Lesser talent can try and point and click their way to a solution, but hand them a command line and they are screwed!
Microsoft is very, very, good at selling their products to management and lesser skilled or naive technical people. Don't get me wrong I know some Microsoft techies that are quite talented but they just haven't used other platforms and don't realize that computers are supposed to actually work!
As for management, they often follow the adage of "Nobody, gets fired for recommending Microsoft." Well, if the email crashes & burns perhaps they should be fired.
In my experiences Exchange has been a total nightmare and frequent target of jabs against the Microsoft groups. At one company the UNIX group pulled ourselves off the Exchange server and ran our own mail system. At one point the Exchange server was blue screening multiple times per hour! They eventually discovered it to be a bug in MIME attachments or something. How can you possibly take any mail server seriously that causes the OS to crash whenever a user makes an email attachment?!?
Sure all the vaporware sounds great. Seamless calendaring, address books, attachments, and all that good stuff. Just remember, it mostly doesn't work. If you have a clean install of NT, all the latest service packs and patches and you don't do anything "unusual" then Exchange may work out for you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is that management won't get behind open source solutions because of their lack of support. I don't know if you have ever tried to get support from Microsoft or not, but in my experience they have been worthless. You would do better to troll the net for information!
I would suggest that you yell as loudly as is politically feasible to against Exchange. At least when it crashes & burns you will be able to say I told you so, as your pager goes off for the hundreth time that week.
good luck!
Re:PHB's like calendars--alternatives (Score:4)
If Novell's still selling it, look into Groupwise. It's got all the email, all the calendaring, and all the sharing of outlook. I don't think its got the security problems, and it works pretty nicely. It may be a pain to administer tho. It's also got a decent API that lets you interface other programs with it. In my case I tied in the medical campus event calendar on the web into groupwise to let people post events to their own calendars. The work was straight forward. I'd also look into open source solutions for this same feature. There's something out there called "V Card" if I have the name right--probably don't.
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:4)
Exchange servers and outlook are excellent choices for business organizations for their internal mail needs. It is easy to setup, easy to maintain, allows easy setup and maintenance of distribution groups, allows easy setup of multiple smtp addressess for the same mailbox, only maintains one copy of a message in the message database for multiple distributions to save space, is generally quite bullet proof and runs forever without a reboot if you don't try and put several apps on the same box, havae the coreect patches on it,etc, allows for distributed e-mail servers with very little work or maintenance, allows user mailboxes to be moved between distributed servers easily. My mail system admins are pretty much entry level and require very little training. There is a lot of control over distribution lists and addresses in terms of who is allowed to send mail to those addresses (good for pager email addresses for the IT and executive staff and "everyone" distributions). Exchange server allows for the easy integration of things link the RIM Blackberry wireless PDA's (what the execs prefer here) on a server level instead of a workstation level. How 'bout when upgrading/adding a new mail server with exchange. Bring it online, move the users mailboxes to it by selecting the user and picking a different home server for them. Next time the user logs in, Outlook will automatically detect the mailbox was moved and reconfig transparently. Really simple, really painless.
Of course there are the shared schedules that make it easy for execs to have their admins keep their appointment books for them, and allows all changes to be merged. There is granting "send as" privs to exec admins. The really big thing for everyone is the GAL (global address list). Since the Microsoft solutions are very expensive compared to other solutions, Execs are willing to hear proposals for just about any kind of replacement mail system that has a decent web mail interface and all the other scheduling features, etc, but if it doesn't have a GAL, it won't get heard.
--JB--
Exchange doesn't, but OpenMail does run on Sun (Score:2)
dmp
Re:Exchange on Sun (Score:3)
Re:Numbers (Score:2)
I can point out that Seimens used to use Unix system for everyone world wide, which was a single Sun server- they replaced the whole thing with an Exchange farm and have had many, many headaches from the process.
Any process will have hidden costs, downtime, and lost productivity - for what? What feature does Exchange have over what they are currectly using?
And, I am not saying that Exchange is a bad thing either. If it is used as the default from the beginning, or if there are statigic reason to change then by all means, change.
As for me being disgruntled? ha. I don't work as a consultant, 'cause I know how to do the work.
Re:Two Reasons: (Score:2)
The Exchange in Office Mac, IIRC, is actually a rewritten version of another popular Mac email program that got discontinued (the name escapes me), and the guys who wrote that got hired by Microsoft's Mac software division.
Exchange versus UNIX based solutions (Score:5)
For nearly two solid years, there was a large push by some in upper management to migrate our entire user base (some 80K students, faculty, and staff) to Exchange, regardless of the number of technical staff and managers informing said upper management of the large downsides, not the least of which forcing a client (MS 9X/NT) platform on the faculty.
That being said, we settled down to have a modest Exchange environment with about 5000 users across two campuses, and about 80000 users across two campuses using the freely available and open-source Cyrus IMAP server from CMU.
In the past year, there have been more serious security incidents involving executable content with the Exchange servers, forcing the University to purchase a Sybari license to prevent being overrun with virii. The Sybari stuff is not inexpensive.
My current position with the University is as a senior software/systems engineer. For the most part, I design mail systems. In my professional opinion, unless the features that Exchange gives you (basically calendaring and integration with MSOffice -- everything else, including folder sharing and collaberation are available in more secure products) are worth the amount of time and money that will need to be spent to secure the environment, it would be a bad idea for folks to migrate from an IMAP environment to Exchange.
Exchange in all our tests proved to be less scalable than a UNIX based IMAP solution. More people are required to support fewer users on Exchange. On top of that, individual servers crash often enough that it is not really an event when it happens. Admittedly, an individual Exchange server crashing only affects a couple thousand individual mailboxes, but they crash enough that spreading out load in necessary to maintain the illusion of continuous service. This is not a knock against the people running th Exchange servers. The Exchange admins I work with are bright, talented people. The server software crashes all on their own. Microsoft's own consulting people have not found a flaw in the Exchange system design here. The software just crashes often.
That is the security and performance part of my analysis. Beyond that, Exchange generally does not like working with the outside world. Mail routing can be an issue unless you have a very simple network design. Features in Exchange can be fairly confusing to even experienced users. My personal favorite in that vein forwarding. If a user wants to forward their mail another system (say a personal workstation) Exchange will munge the headers so that the original recipients of the message are not entirely clear. This has led to some embarrassing incidents where people have replied to messages that they thought were to them personally, but were actually to a distribution list. The reply went to the reply-to, which ended up distributing to everyone on the original list.
Even beyond that was the arrogant attitude displayed by Microsoft when bugs were reported. At one point, we discovered a bug that would crash the storage server when accessed via IMAP. Once a check was signed, their interest in working on problems with our existing implementation was gone. I know this should not be unexpected (Reboot, Re-install, Upgrade being the MS Tech Support Mantra), but when Microsoft representatives are in a room with the University officials and actually say words to the effect of, "Who are you to tell us what is wrong with our software", it at least validates the anecdotal opinion of Microsoft.
Much of this may not apply to your situation, but this might. When we did our studies of cost per user of a UNIX based IMAP solution as opposed Exchange, it ended up being an order of magnitude cheaper to use UNIX for the bulk of our email serving.
Add, don't subtract (Score:4)
PHB's like calendars (Score:4)
Has anybody had any experience with that *NIX MAPI product? What was it called? MailOne? I'd be interested in playing with that sometime I think.
Not just an email client (Score:3)
Exchange w/ Outlook is much more than just an email client. In my office I don't plan a single meeting without it. Its nice to be able to plan a meeting while know everyones availablity. Its always a pain scheduling a meeting only to find out everyone is in another.
Forms are another Good Thing. I do all of my OT, Sick time, expense reports and purchasing through Outlook's forms. Forget the stupid paper trail.
Allof tasks are scheduled through outlook. If my boss wants me to do something, instead of telling me at the water cooler he sends me a task. I then have them all located in one central area so when I have idle moments I can quickly check off a few quick tasks.
Put this into a conduit with my PalmVx and I'm a travelling warrior ready to dish it out with the big boys.
Why not to use Outlook (Score:5)
Shared folders / Calendaring Works OK w/Sendmail (Score:3)
Oh crap, Outlook 2000 just cratered on me again. Excuse me while I reboot before I blue-screen....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:3)
Personal Experiance (Score:5)
On a related subject, we dropped Russell Calander Manager. Calander Manager imediately showed conflicts in schedules (vs waiting someone reading mail and replying) With Outlook, those checking the calander at the beginning of shift go to cancelled meetings or miss changed or recently scheduled meetings because there wasn't time to sift thru all the stuff in the inbox. With Outlook you have to open any mail that may contain a schedule event to update your calander. Same thing applies for cancelled meetings. I have found out about meetings after the fact. I have attended cancelled meetings. In Russell Calander Manager, some of the users were confrence rooms, vacations and the like. I could schedule a meeting and include the confrence room as an attendee. I could schedule Easter off and include the apropiate vacation slot as an attendee. It works first come first served. No arguements over who was first. Anyone else later would be get a conflict as the confrence room or vacation slot was unavaliable to attend. This made confrence room use a breeze. If you really needed a room, you could e-mail the person who scheduled the room to negotiate and they could re-schedule freeing up the room so it could attend your meeting. (the room auto accepted the first requester). With Outlook sometimes two groups arrive to use the same room. A person has to read all the mail for the room and reply to it later (not real time by someone not working 24/7). Therefore several people can get unconfirmed dates and times for a room. What a mess.
A few words. (Score:3)
What do they want, though.. find out. THey obviously don't want exchange.. that's just a server. They probably want to use Outlook + appointment sharing. That's a big one. What else do they want?
On the bright side.. Exchange WILL support imap, and pop3, and has a web interface, and if you use any active directory stuff, it makes it even easier to use.. but wait.
If you are primarily a unix shop... there is a unix program (MailOne?) that supports exchange & exchange scheduling. Maybe check that out.
I think the issue is that, we say 'it's an internet email system; it's fine how it is now' but what they want is much more than that.
Show them the price of doing it properly (including such things as: all mail must be stored on server, redundant servers, single point of failure, etc). Draw it all up, and present it as a cost, because that's the bottom line.
Also look at notes.
Business Reasons (Score:5)
a) what the costs are to implement said functionality with exchange
b) what the costs are to implement said
functionality without exchange
Include all costs - hardware, software, licensing, support, man-hours of work, user training, sysadmin time on installation of outlook on all machines, server maintenance, scalability costs, etc.
The problem with most decisions is that the full costs are hidden. It's your job to bring them to light, and to show what the actual costs are. If they are willing to take those costs for the functionality they want, fine. Its your job to give it to them. However, if they don't know all of the options and their true costs, then that's your fault. If the have the knowledge an make bad decisions, there's nothing you can do.
Some advice (Score:3)
Exchange keeps everyone's mail messages in one huge database in a single file, which it then locks everyone else out of. And I mean *all* mail messages, unread and saved alike. So if you don't have a backup program which works with Exchange, to back up this file you have to take the server down (manually, no scripting here), back the file up, and bring the server back up. During the weekend or after hours, naturally- people don't like it when they don't have access to email during normal buisness hours.
Not backing the mail up is not an option. A single bad block can corrupt the whole mail DB, and trash everyone's mail. And we all keep mail around for one reason or another- often critical information is kept in the form of saved mail messages- all of which can vanish because of a single bad block.
This isn't Microsoft bashing. I've had this happen to a company I was working at (fortunately, I wasn't responsible for the mail server at that point). Save yourself the pain.
The one big file also accounts for the scalability problems of Exchange. Remember, this is running (by definition) on a 32-bit x86 machine, which gives you a maximum process size of about 3 gig. Mapping files larger than this so you can treat them as a data structure is impossible. This is why, as of a year or so ago, Exchange couldn't handle more than about 400 people per machine. They may have fixed this since then (I doubt it, but anything is possible). Don't take assurances- ask to talk to someone who is running 1000 people on a machine before simply beleiving that it can be done.
The old adage .... (Score:3)
Nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft, AIN"T quite true.
The company I work for is a Microsoft shop currently because of a certain person who is no longer employed here.
Now for the reasons NOT to go with Exchange:
This is to say nothing of the pains of going back to a *nix based system when your management realizes their mistake.
It has always been my opinion that management should not make IT decisions, based on the facts that; they (typically) have no IT experience, will not ultimately carry the burden of failure on an IT project, and are impressed by buzzwords. Anyone who is impressed by a word, should be taken out back and beaten/shot/hanged.
Given the choice between migrating to Exchange or damnation, I really can't see much difference. However, I would probably pick damnation cause I assume the reboots would be shorter.
Feature Set (Score:4)
You also need to consider how big your IT staff is and what kind of skills they have. If your IT staff consists of a few very few knowledgeable people, then a Unix-based system can be installed and maintained through sometimes complex, but less often maintenance procedures. If you have an IT staff of scattered skillsets, then you might consider having a consulting firm install Exchange 5.5 or 2000 and have them document it all, then your staff maintain it. This latter option would provide easier maintenance with a lower knowledge-level requirement for staff members.
The point is, that if you're looking for a reason to hate Exchange, then I am sure you will find people posting here to commiserate with you; but you will also find just as easily people willing to commiserate over unix-based mail systems.
While not a popular stance with the younder slashdot readers, software isn't a religion, it's a tool. Good software meets a need with a minimized amount of cost- sometimes that cost is in software price, sometimes in staff salaries, downtime, etc. If you would like to talk about this more offline, send me an e-mail.
Here Comes the MS Bashing... (Score:4)
OutLook has security problems. But step 1 is to put in a GOOD anti-virus app at your entry point to Exchange, and all other mailbox servers if you really want to cover yourself. Make sure and get a backup software with a good Exchange interface. I've used both ArcServe and Backup Exec, and prefer Backup Exec. An option is to do a brick by brick backup where you can restore an individual mailbox, but be careful as this is much slower than a database backup. Microsoft has a number of whitepapers on their site about the care and feeding of the Exchange database. With v5.5 most of that is no longer needed. You don't need to repack the database every few months like you used to.
They also offer some excellent whitepapers on optimizing the server. This mainly has to do with memory and how to set up the drives for performance and fault tolerance.
The appeal of Exchange over things such as pine and sendmail is integration of the calender and task scheduling. That is a HUGE feature for the management types.
The real question is to look at the reason to change. It will be effort to move mailbox info over to Exchange so make sure it's worth it. I do mostly Unix work now, but still use Exchange/Outlook for email. I just think it's one thing that Microsoft really got right. There are a number of companies with over 100K users on Exchange.
Exchange: okay to start with, dumb to switch to (Score:3)
The first isn't an issue for you since you already have Solaris et al. set up.
As for the second, there's no particular functionality that Exchange/Outlook provides that isn't handled by other, separate programs. That's just a matter of user education. You can run Netscape/CS&T's calendar server on the Solaris machine, if it's calendaring you want. There are some weird hooks into Outlook from some other MS products (DevStudio, for example) that can be replicated pretty easily with CVS and a shell script.
You're probably aware of the disadvantages. HA isn't an option: it WILL crash. You'll need a dedicated NT sysadmin if you don't already have one. Preferrably one who's had to rebuild an Exchange server after it's crashed (which can be a brutal, time consuming job) and not a fresh "I just got my MCSE so I must be smart" type. Expect to have planned outages weekly to reboot "just in case", because otherwise the monthly crashes will be unscheduled and will take significantly loger to recover from. The exchange box should be a really really beefy single CPU machine with as much memory and disk as can be managed (as in, it'll cost as much as a Sun), and nothing except Exchange should run on it, to reduce the frequency of crashes.
--
Exchange stuff: (Score:4)
1: There are 2 choices with exchange right now, 5.5 and exchange 2000.
I'll give some 5.5 background.
1: If you are using this in an enterprise, you will need Exchange Enterprise server. This will let you have a message store greater than 16GB's. (Unlimited)
2: If you want things like clustering etc. beware with exchange 5.5. it does not do it very well at all. Its an active, standby config. (1 is active, the other is standby). When the first one fails, the second pops up and has to start the services. So you may have between 30seconds - 5 minutes of downtime for "clustered failover". Also, for your clustered servers to work, you need shared disk. (They need to share the same array). This would mean you would need to buy a pretty massive compaq or something.
3: 5.5 offers ldap/pop3 and webmail.
The downsides of webmail. It is recommended (by microsoft) that you move webmail to different servers and have your users connect to that. They recommend you do 2 (IIS 4.0)web servers for every exchange 5.5 server.
If you run IMAP/POP3, your users must connect to the server they are homed on. They cannot connect to 1 server and in the backend be connected to the server their files are on. So if you migrate servers with pop/imap users, you need to change each clients PC.
4: If you want resources like conference rooms, that do automatic accepts etc. in my experience you need to devote a dedicated conference server to do accepts for this. This requires that the machine is always logged in running outlook. Ok well there are technotes saying you dont need this. Too bad I couldnt get it to work.
5: Exchange will NOT install without a true domain controller. That means you need a PDC installed on your net and your exchange server as a member server. (Samba will not cut it) (at least not 2.0.7)
6: Now lets analyze the cost, assuming this is an enterprise.
You have:
2 Big main servers
1 Shared disk array
1 Tape backup server
1 Tape backup software
1 Exchange plugin for the backup software
2-4 Pc's for webmail
1-2 Conference room servers.
2 NT Enterprise server softwares.
1 NT Server software (backup server)
4 NT Server software (webmail)
2 NT Server software (conf rooms)
Now there is also the licensing for every user you need to pay for. EVEN for your pop users etc. The rule is "if they have a password, they need a license".
Now it is not all doom and gloom. You do get some cool calendaring and stuff that people like. Is it worth it? Depends on how important things like calendaring and reliability are to upper management.
There are also some weird bugs with 5.5 SP3. (Sp4 was released this week, but I havent tested it yet)
a: When you migrate users from 1 server to another, mail to the user during this migration gets bounced (User does not exist). Moving large mailboxes can take up to an hour (or longer).
b: You cannot migrate users from 1 site to another. (You have to copy to PST, and then import to the other site). (If you didnt appreciate rsync, this will make you wish you had it.)
Now lets go to Exchange 2000.
Note: This is infromation gained from speeches, and grilling MS reps, not from practical experience!
1: You need an active directory server. That means you need to be running a MS Active Directory server for your network. This could potentially become a win if you had your unix servers authenticate against it via ldap. But then again, it could also be a nightmare. Just a hypothetical.
2: It now supports active/active clustering. (So if 1 fails you still keep chugging along.) The bad thing is to get 2 way clusters you need 2000 Advanced server. To get 4 way clusters you need 2000 Datacenter server. (not cheap) Again these machines need to be connected to the same array. So that would mean some big hardware (compaq etc.)
3: As part of AD, you can move users across sites now.
4: You need less frontend IIS servers (according to MS its now 1 for 2 (as opposed to 2 for 1)). However now every frontend IIS server needs to have a license for Exchange 2000 server. (did not in 5.5)
5: Improved ways for backup. (You can now have multiple backup types for your server, so that different types of users, can be backed up with different frequency.)
6: If you have pop3/imap users on different servers, they can get to them by going through 1 server.
The plus for 2k would be the active/active clustering and the fixes. But then again, you have a lot of changes to make to fit it in.
Conclusion
Depending on what your internal architecture consists of, you may have a lot more to change than just adding an exchange server. You might have to add in a PDC, or AD server. You will have to put all your users in there for authentication.
Be careful with trusts, sometimes they are not your friend.
Make sure you set up a new account to be the exchange server manager.
If you run 5.5, run the Mailbox Manager. It allows you to clean up mailboxes over time.
If you have legal or compliance issues, you can have exchange be like big brother and copy all mail (to anyone) to an account for review. This is called message journaling.
The costs will mount up quick. Depending how much you have in your existing infrastructure, a figure with costs for a reliable solution, with certain uptime requirements may be prohibitive.
That may be something to ask of management. "what are the uptime requirements for the e-mail system".
Oh and last and final: Whatever you do, frontend your exchange servers with dedicated unix servers for outgoing and incoming smtp mail. That way you have things like support for things like the RBL/DUL/RSS, as well as aliases, redirection to things like mailman lists, and many more.
Hope this helps
-- C
Re:Why Screw up a good thing? (Score:3)
Re:PHB's like calendars (Score:3)
Another thing to look at is HP's OpenMail. To an Outlook client, it's just like talking to an Exchange server.
Exchange v. other MTA/Delivery systems (Score:5)
-A single address list (OpenLDAP anyone?)
-Consistent look and feel to messages (Make everyone use the same format.)
-Ability to directly use rich content in messages (See above. Pine users will probably take a beating on this one though. Sorry.)
-Group scheduling (There's freeware that can do this. If the company is anti-open source, use the iPlanet calendar. If you use an HTML based scheduler, you can tell them how you're aligning the company for e-biz through the Extranet/Internet/insert buzzword of day here.)
I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that they are probably pro M$ techies or on the business side. If they are on the biz side, they only know what they've experienced and/or heard. M$ eXchange is commonly credited with providing all of that functionality. Now on to the points that you can use to counter this force:
- Cost. I wouldn't make the typical free software
argument at all. Avoid it with PHBs, it's a black hole. Rather I'd talk about the increased administrative costs, the poor ROI on software that gobbles up resources and the cost of outages.
- Reliability. I've been forced to live in several environments where exchange was implemented. Even in the best of them, the mail servers went down on average twice a week. Sendmail in a HA config is great since you can migrate the storage and keep on trucking. Let's not forget the ease of adding upstream MX spoolers in the event of a link problem. Ever use exchange
as a spooler? Ick.
-Complexity. Depending on how much mail your typical user gets/sends/processes, the amount of storage and processing requirements vary wildly for exchange. Odd are you'll have more than two servers (I'm guessing five.) Shared storage and data volumes? Good luck implementing this under NT 4/Exchange 5.5; remember that exchange sticks every message in a database which makes it a major PITA to even consider shared volumes.
-Productivity. It costs time to use outlook. Outlook is slow and difficult to use in comparison to netscape mail or even outlook express. They'll go for the directory argument so be prepared to bring up LDAP.
I hope this helps you out.
Exchange would probably be a bad move (Score:3)
Secondly, Exchange has *huge* hardware requirements. My girlfriend's company had to replace a single Unix server with 14 quad PPro Windows servers when they switched their European mail system to exchange about 3 years ago, just to support the same number of users.
Thirdly, Exchange is a complete pig without a very experienced administrator. I don't just mean a competant Exchange admin -- be prepared to spend significant money to get a decent one, if you want to have any hope of it being halfway reliable. Also, plan on downtime. Unlike Unix mail systems, Exchange seems to need to be taken down for maintenance every so often. I'm not an Exchange admin, so don't ask me why, but every Exchange site I've worked at has had to do this.
Finally, don't expect to find an exchange solution that comes close to a Sun HA solution in terms of reliability. The closest is probably a Data General Exchange cluster in a box, but if it were my money, I'd go for the Sun HA system. Since you've already paid for the Sun system, this should be a no-brainer, but I fully understand that management really are too dense to see that...
Run'em side by side. Compare for a week then... (Score:3)
More strengths/weaknesses (Score:3)
- To scan every message for viruses, you'll need a third party product, which will likely reduce performance and stability to the point that you have to turn it off
- Your unix users will realize that Exchange munges messages badly, for instance if it doesn't know what character set an 8-bit MIME encoded message is in (say it comes in as X-UNKNOWN) It will turn it into a message that says 'i have no idea what the character set is' and an attachment. This will nicely wreck any filtering they were doing, as the headers are gone, hidden in an attachment, and it makes it a pain to reply to the message, as hitting reply doesn't include the message.
- Your non-windows users will be happy to see that there's a web client, and then they'll use it. It will crash their copy of netscape. It will work, sort of. It will only allow them to add one person to a meeting request at a time, and will require them to psychically know what the person's exact Exchange name is. This will be harder for them than that ldap query script that the smart unix admin set up for the mutt users.
- It will be slower and less responsive than the old, cheaper unix mail server. One of the smart users will solve this problem by setting up a machine which does nothing but relay mail to the exchange server, thus making it so that the 'no more connections' message can be dealt with silently.
- It will offer great features that break annually. Even if you say, and this is being kind, that there will only be one day of unplanned downtime per year, which day will it be? Will it be the day that the contract with Rich VentureCapitalist was sent over?
- Somebody is likely to suggesting hiring an MCSE to run it. This person will get paid too much, not know RFC 821 or 822, or anything remotely technical, yet they'll drain the company of $80k/year, which could be better spent on more beer for the developers.
The Good--
"Don't trolls get tired?"