[nylug-talk] The future of Zimbra after Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!

[Chris Knadle]

On Monday 04 February 2008, Ruben Safir wrote:
> That is mostly a mistake.  Getting the job done is not what is discussed
> in the room when decisions are made, and I've been in those rooms.  What
> they do is whip out sale brouchures, and run what they believe are the
> numbers, which in the case of exchange and outlook is almost free....minus 
> the millions of needless dollars spent on unecessary maintence buy personel
> with little functional background...not to mention the cost in virus,
> spyware and dozens of other malware problems directly linked to Outlook
> Express.

   The last place I worked as an email admin at decided to switch over to 
Exchange.  They replaced three LDAP mail routers that ran Netware and the 
mail stores in various locations, some of which ran Sendmail and some of 
which were Exchange.  Now it's combined it all into a big multi-box Exchange 
solution in a datacenter with a SAN.  Cost: $1.5M, *not* counting upkeep.  
And my understanding is they're less happy with it than what they had before; 
so much so that a few departments in the corporate office refuse to be 
switched off of the box running Sendmail.  Oh by the way most of the prior 
email admins that were left quit the company during the process.

...
> Exchange really just sucks.... 

   I've never had to run it myself (thank goodness) but from working with mail 
admins that had to and walking through issue after issue over the phone with 
them, the complaints I remember (I think which were for Exhange 5, 5.5, and 
2000) were:

   - Difficulty in searching the email logs due to the limits of the GUI
   - Several difficulties with Active Directory
   - Easy to misconfigure/break the system [Fail!] and not know it
   - Patch Tuesday, a thing to be greatly feared
   - Seemed to require occasional reboots

   ...and a bunch of other things I can't remember.  I have a daily log of 
what I did during that time, so I suppose I could go through two years worth 
of notes and glean more about what problems I had to help with concerning 
Exchange malfuntions.

   If anybody would like to lament about what's wrong with Exchange *these* 
days, I'm all ears.

   -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us