Help me avoid Exchange
Thomas Charron
twaffle at gmail.com
Thu Dec 29 18:36:01 EST 2005
Below are devils advocate responses. Becouse while I agree on many of
them, there comes a point when 'D00d, Exhang3 1z sux0rs!' may need a little
check.. ;-)
On 12/23/05, Dan Jenkins <dan at rastech.com> wrote:
>
> Issues with Exchange I can think of, off the top of my head:
> a) The aforementioned backups - media usage, time, etc. If Engineering
> gets lots of large documents, which most business folk typically don't
> get, then the backup window shrinks and media costs & manage costs for
> said backups could skyrocket. (At one client of mine, email disk space
> used for a dozen business users was a 500 MB a year. The three engineer
> accounts added 2 GB a week.)
If they're not backing up the engineering email server, then someone isn't
taking the time to think about the email servers, which is what IT is for.
It's real easy to not be diligent when it's not your job, and when that evil
day comes, and you have to explain that those three engineers just lost 3
days worth of work becouse a server disk crashed.. You'll cry. I've been
there, trust me.. ;-)
If the backups are being done, then the backup is really not that much
harder. You're already backing up 'X' amount of data.
> b) The additional licensing costs for Exchange for the additional
> engineering seats
Possibly. It depends on the license, and how many are available. The
real base buy it at BestBuy Exchange 2003 comes with only 5 CAL licences.
In this case, you'd definatly have purchased some CAL upgrades. If not, it
depends on how much of a 100k a year engineers time is being paid to do a
job someone else is already paid to do.
> c) Additional load on the Exchange server. Again, if engineering handles
> skads of large attachments, that could kill the Exchange server, if it's
> not capable enough. So factor in Exchange server upgrades, if needed.
... Again, one would assume that this scanning is already taking place.
I mean, from a price perspective, you could just backup the existing user
data, format the machine, and carry into the IT room and install exchange
and have that very machine serving as a backup server, running exchange.
d) If Exchange is running antivirus too, there could be additional
> licensing costs. The same load issues as in (c) (Virus scanning a 150 MB
> email attachment can be a bit burdensome. ;-)
Yes, it can be. See above. It's should already be being done.
> e) Same load & licensing issues for antispam measures running on
> Exchange. Ditto for content filtering, compliance enforcement and other
> email services.
*cough* And we all know that all of these aren't needed when using an
IMAP server and just downloading them directly from the mail server onto...
Wait a sec, now I'm talking out of my ass.. ;-) See above. Hell, I'd dare
say many exchange spam scanners are faster them spamassasin can be if you've
got some madass rules like Brian Chabot used to have on his boxes.
f) If the Exchange server is also providing other services, the extra
> load might impact those services. If they are business critical
> services...well...
Engineers aren't critital? ;-)
g) If the load issue is enough to justify a separate Exchange server,
> then add another Windows Server licensing cost.
Unless, of course, someone has an MSDN subscription..
h) Depending on the version of Exchange, the default for converting MAPI
> messages to MIME format is HTML. While this can be changed on a
> user-by-user basis, if your clients don't do HTML, then they won't be
> able to read MAPI messages.
.... *blink* I missed some contextual data here. If you're using IMAP
and SMTP, what's MAPI have to do with anything? You can configure exchange
to do pretty much whatever you want with em anyway..
> i) I've heard of, though not encountered, about some IMAP client
> incompatibilities with Exchange.
That, my friend, is what we call FUD when Microsoft says it.
j) Only MAPI email clients are Outlook and OWC, as far as I know. So,
> Outlook or webmail via Internet Explorer. (I have had incompatibilities
> with OWC and non-IE browsers.) This isn't an issue for IMAP-only usage,
> of course, but no calendaring/workflow/etc. in that case.
True, but they don't have calendaring anyway right now. The only way to
get that feature is WITH something like exchange. If you don't like that,
then you can use Ximian to interface with OWC.
iCal sucks balls, it's just a way to store cals in a file, with no real
way to interface or plan with them.
k) Directory (as in LDAP vs. Active Directory) additional maintenance.
> This raises any authentication issues as well. This may be moot in your
> case.
*blinkblink*
You do know that AD is basically LDAP.. Right?
> Hope this helps.
I don't think it would, since all of these are moot points for the most
part, for someone that doesn't care. And the higher up the manager tends to
be.. The less he will really care. It doesn't really affect him. Tell him
how it will save HIM money, and help HIM do his job better, and now you're
cooking with gas. But say 'Well, exchange sux0rs, and IT is idiots', you're
not going to get anywhere.
Sorry if this post sounds more direct, I'm not arguing, I'm just saying
that none of what was listed answered real world things Paul asked. 'Why
drive the hotrod, for 3 guys to go to the store' is the real question..
:-) If they already paid 100k for a god damned bus, 'becouse that bus cost
too much' isn't going to fly.. ;-)
Thomas
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