First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta 274
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
Now Let's Talk Pricing (Score:5, Funny)
The invoice for this baby is pretty small compared to your normal MS Exchange Server, it's only 1. But that's not in dollars, that's in first born children. So I'm going to throw out a few strategies for coping with this.
So, like pretending you're a college student, starving African or university staff to get cheap editions of Exchange 2007, there are ways to acquired 2010 at a relatively low cost and I hope this helps you cope with the extreme cost of owning Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for your enterprise business.
... but that's just the unspoken rule.
Sure the costs don't stop there, you need to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 to use it and there are a few more things you'll need to upgrade if you want to keep the same functionality you have now
Re:Now Let's Talk Pricing (Score:5, Funny)
Great. Thanks. Now I have to RTFA to find out if your serious or not.
Why do you hate /.?
Re:Now Let's Talk Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Exchange is pretty cheap compared to the competition. That's probably one of the reasons why it is so popular.
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Well...that depends on what you consider competition. If you're talking Exchange-look-a-likes, sure. But if your company is OK with a Good Reliable mail server with a separate calendaring app that integrates well with the mail app your company uses, you can get solutions dirt cheap or free.
I've configured a heck of a lot of unix mail servers, and I can't pretend any are as easy to setup and configure as Exchange. But every Exchange+Outlook solution I've used at a half dozen companies has been painfully s
Now let's talk licensing (Score:5, Funny)
Not only the pricing, but this part is intriguing too:
Outlook protection rules
Automatically triggers Outlook to apply an RMS template to a message before it is sent
I suppose that means that a GPL V3 notice is attached whenever it notices that a user is attempting to email source code.
Take that! you GNU/Linux weenies!
And all the admins ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
What database engine is it using, and can we access it via SQL?
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Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Funny)
Nope.
MSFT is still retarded that way.
i would KILL to be able to data-mine the email in the company with a SQL script.
"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Informative)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa142634(EXCHG.65).aspx [microsoft.com]
it isn't exactly normal SQL but it is alot closer than most things - and it does work.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, it would be REALLY NICE if MSFT would put Exchange inside of something other than a Jet engine database... Then maybe I could have a high performance database that wasn't capped at 200GB for performance reasons, and I could have one big database per server cluster instead of 12-16... and I could front end that with a half a dozen exchange servers and have all 20,000 users inside of a single database and eliminate all the wasted space from single indexing!
For Chrsits sake, can't the Exchange people and the SQL people work together, and combine the log shipping asynchronous non-cluster replciation features of exchange with a REAL F*ING DATABASE ENGINE!?!?!?!
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Informative)
Exchange database engine is also called "Jet", but it's a different kind of Jet: Access is Jet Red, Exchange is Jet Blue. The difference is explained here [msmvps.com].
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Personally, I like SQL Server 2005. It may not have the scalability or performance that Oracle has, but it makes up for it in simplicity and ease of use. I have several customers with SQL Server databases in the 40-60 GB range accessed almost constan
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Funny)
"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."
"Don't worry - I've already told the cleaners to give special attention to your desk, chair, phone, scanner, shredder, and your little wooden dinosaur sculptures with the very long necks."
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Informative)
I've never used Microsoft Exchange Server in my life. Mostly because I'm more from a hippy FOSS type company.
Having read the Microsoft marketing crap, then the wikipedia article for a more neutral POV, I don't get it.
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
I often hear exchange server quoted as THE reason why some companies can't diversify their software from Microsoft, but that lot doesn't sound too compelling to me.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most companies dont want to hire competent EMail admins. Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it. You really do need a competent email admin staoff to use exchange, but it's not as daunting as the FOSS or other options out there to windows It staff.
I also dont understand the love affair with outlook, It's simply that some PHB's hate change and they used Exchange as the killing point to stop OSS infiltration.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with your point, but must say that your abrasive tone makes this AC understand why IT folks get such a bad rap. It's similar to why people dislike police so much. I consider myself a "competent" e-mail admin, but the several Exchange servers I administer only constitute about 3% of the servers I am responsible for, so I don't really have time to focus on them as much as I would like.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was able to set up a working Exchange 2007 server in 2 days. I had never configured an e-mail server before. I'm not even an MCSA (well MCTS woudl be the new name for it)....really only about halfway to it.
So it's even easier than you say it is :-) But you are absolutely correct...you need a competent admin to do it right (I know I sure as hell didn't do it right...it was just a test box)...they don't necessarily have to be an "E-mail Admin" to do it right, they just need to be competent enough to follow best practice guidelines (and obviously have a basic understanding of how e-mail works...any of your 'MCSE monkeys' should have that).
And that is a big part of why Exchange predominates...it's easily administered, and it has features that nothing else offers on an equivalent level.
Also keep in mind that it's not just the PHB's being resistant to change that stops OSS...it's the fact that Microsoft does a good job of making sure that their stuff integrates with eachother very well (and they don't exactly go out of their way to make sure other stuff can integrate with their products). The reason Exchange was so easy to get up and running for me is due in large part to Active Directory integration, and ISA Server 2006 is basically preconfigured to allow an Exchange server the proper access just by telling it the IP address.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Interesting)
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With Darwin Calendar Server, can I enter appointments on Outlook or similar on the desktop, and have them automatically update on my phone?
Can I get push email on my phone, or do I have to have the added bandwidth and battery overhead of polling an IMAP server every few minutes?
As for setup time, from my perspective, I installed Small Business Server, and Exchange and Sharepoint came already set up. That was a lot less than two days. Windows 2003 itself is slightly more difficult to install than Ubuntu, b
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, with Calendar Server you can enter appointments somewhere and it will automatically update on every device you got connected to the calendar. There are also implementations that keep Calendars in IMAP folders although you would have to use the same (or at least compatible) software on desktop and mobile devices.
You can get push e-mail with IMAP, it's called IMAP IDLE. A lot of "push" services work in a similar way. Somehow the connection is kept open and the server sends a small packet when there's new mail. Bandwidth usage is minimal and implementation cheap and simple. I wouldn't be surprised if Exchange uses the same protocol but somehow encapsulates it into a proprietary layer (like they do with Kerberos and LDAP for AD)
Windows SBS is not the same as a dedicated Exchange box. Although the implementation depends largely on the administrator I think. Either way it can be done, Ubuntu doesn't have to pay CAL's though.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
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You are spot on. We recently evaluated Zimbra; it's good, but a) it's not all OSS (the fucking Outlook connector, dammit, is a must have) and b) it's a bit fiddly sometimes.
I've tested a stack of different calendaring apps and have found them all inferior to Outlook in almost every respect. It's just so easy to use. I'm trying really, really hard to prevent us going to Exchange, but I'm running out of reasons.
I'm really, really hoping Thunderbird 3.0 / Sunbird 1.0 will make an impact here. If there's one ma
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
if you have an iphone or winmo you can point your phone to a corporate email server and it will download all your email into the phone as long as you have a signal. and the IT department can manage all the phones remotely.
say your hippy marketing exec loses his or her iphone and it has all kinds of data on it. the IT people can just wipe it remotely not caring where it is.
say you have to keep all email for at least 7 years but you don't want it in anyone's mailbox. right now you have to buy a third party product. Exchange 2010 integrates it.
say you want failover to another city with all your company's email there. Exchange 2007 and later.
Even the FOSS Exhcange clones don't come close. For a medium to large business it's cheaper to buy Exchange with all the features than pay for add on software and more people to admin it
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
support for mobile .. access
Bingo. This is the reason that we haven't moved away from Exchange. Windows Mobile connected to Exchange with DirectPUSH is a great combination for mobile users.. you can synchronise all your contacts, calendar, tasks and email with Exchange remotely. Email actually arrives on the mobiles a second or two before showing up in Outlook. Our Exchange server would be replaceable if it weren't for this. I almost replaced it with OpenExchange until I found out about this feature, which has now become essential to a lot of our sales team. If the blackberry network (and devices) weren't so shit then maybe I'd reconsider (the number of times I used to have our blackberry users blaming me for email not working when in fact it was the blackberry network, something which I have no control over.. eurghh..). There is a lot of room for a nice FOSS email client/server product on an open mobile platform..
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Z-push will connect to almost any IMAP mail server and provide pushmail for all supported devices.
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Email and calendaring are hard when you get down to the nitty-gritty.
Re:And all the admins ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
Not having to run a dozen different, barely interoperable end-user applications to achieve it.
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I've always wondered why email servers don't use database servers to store the email.
They do. They just don't expose their inner database.
Also, with SQL access, the could be many plugins for your mail client that would increase the value of the product.
And this is why. Your email server vendor does not want to hear from you when your 3rd party plugin has made your email database FUBAR. Or when some hotshot admin unleashes a cascade of table scans and no one can get their email.
Seriously. Have y
striped? (Score:2)
Both of these options seem like terrible ideas to me if you care at all about your data.
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since exchange 2000 - it has replaced part of the file system i/o handeling in windows (for preformance reasons) i can only assume it is getting worse.
Re:striped? (Score:4, Funny)
Am I missing something, or has Exchange started to gobble up OS functions now?
You must be new to Microsoft products.
Re:striped? (Score:5, Funny)
A philosophical question, then: what's coming first - Exchange running in Emacs, or Emacs running in Exchange?
My money would be on Emacs running a virtual machine on which you could install Exchange.
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Blah (Score:3, Insightful)
I kind of like it when my mail server is, you know, just a mail server. Call me a nut but SMTP + IMAP do everything I need.
Re:Blah (Score:5, Informative)
there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
2010 looks more like 2007 R2. Same engine but more features and support for it's new ActiveSync partners, Google and Apple.
the archiving and legal features look nice. right now you have to buy add on products from EMC and other companies. Integrating the SOX features into Exchange will save customers a lot of money.
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The archiving feature alone really fixes a gap in Exchange server. Say what you will, but it's ridiculous that it doesn't have any archiving abilities (and no, localto workstation archiving doesn't count) that even remotely compare to notes.
Re:Blah (Score:4, Informative)
Exchange has had support for mailbox journaling for a while now. It's not a new feature. Maybe in 2010, they just prettied up the process.
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Mailbox journaling is not archiving.
Here is what most people mean by archiving. On notes (and now exchange) there's a server side policy/program that runs and moves mail that meets a defined criteria (say.. mail that is over 6 months old) and copies them to a new mail file. The user's can then access their archive from inside the client or via the web by clicking on a link or something and it takes them right to it.
It's really nice from a system administration perspective as it keeps mail file sizes down (i
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there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
So does a server with SMTP+POP+IMAP+Jabber.
SOX requires you to disclose certain things, and to have policies in place to allow you to disclose certain other things on demand. In terms of SOX compliance, there are no serious barriers in your way when rolling a solution from FoSS; indeed, such a solution is provided for you turnkey if you like, by purchasing it from Red Hat or perhaps from IBM.
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do the FOSS solutions include failover, replication, archiving, integration with your company's telephone system and a long list of other features?
say you are a 5000 person company and NYC loses electricity again and you have 3000 people in other states that still need to work. with exchange 2007 and later you replicate your mail to a standby server.
It's like the IPhone. the basic parts of a phone are mature like calling, address book, voice mail, etc. it's the apps that make the iphone a killer phone
same t
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do the FOSS solutions include failover, replication, archiving, integration with your company's telephone system and a long list of other features?
Yes.
if there is a disaster than POP and IMAP are useless and can result in lost data.
If there is a disaster, you're fucked, because you're stupid. POP and IMAP are protocols. Bad implementations lead to lost data.
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so which FOSS solution includes all the legal features, DR, and mobile functionality? with Exchange you just point your phone or blackberry to your mailbox and you've got mail. someone loses his phone, you just wipe it remotely over the cell phone network
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Because using the web on a cell phone is SO EASY compared to a built in messaging/calendaring application.
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Re:Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of misses the point. In many cases of Microsoft products, you could weave and configure together a bunch of FOSS applications to do the same thing. But then you'd have a custom solution that only your now-very-valuable admin understands. On the other hand, Exchange is a one stop shop for all this stuff, and the admins are pretty much interchangeable, since the product is the same.
Mail servers for large corporations are not just, well, mail servers. For a 200 person shop, full Exchange is definitely overkill (which is why there's multiple versions you can buy). For a 300K person company, it worth the cost.
Re:Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but you're not a large corporation. Exchange does all kinds of crazy shit that's nice to have in a very large environment. Calendaring, extreme scalability, integration with other systems, mobile messaging integration, spam filtering, encryption support, voicemail integration, auditing compliance. etc... and etc... and etc...
Exchange does a _whole_ lot of shit and integrates with other products that do a whole lot of other shit.
So if you have 50 employees and 40 computers, Exchange might be overkill. If you have 40,000 employees, it might be exactly what you need.
Re:Blah (Score:4, Insightful)
People underestimate how important Exchange is.
The argument is always how Office is the real lynchpin and that if only a compatible document suite like Google docs or OpenOffice got a foothold Microsoft would be crushed but Outlook/Exchange is the REAL barrier to entry.
I work at a call center. EVERY corporate employee who calls me is using Outlook except the 1% of poor souls stuck with Lotus Notes and Domino.
Business relies on Outlook/Exchange.
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ever used a calender? (Score:2)
Most big corporations will pump their outgoing mail through a real SMTP server before letting it loose on the net, and use a real SMTP to filter the incomming turdstream before it is allowed to hit Exchange though. And as far as standard complience goes, well I can send and receive VCards and VCals in
Re:ever used a calender? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Exchange has evolved a lot. Take Exchange 2007 for example. On an internet-facing server, it is quite easy to enable anti-spam rules. Even better, they get updated weekly directly from MS. You can also add your favorite antivirus utility (you will end up paying "enterprise prices for it) to scan incoming and outgoing mail for CYA reasons. You also can add server to server connectors between companies so E-mail between your company and a customer never touches the Internet in the clear.
There is one thin
But does it run... (Score:3, Funny)
Spam To Be Canned By 2006 (Score:2, Funny)
No mention of junk mail in the article. I'm still waiting for Bill to deliver on his promise of a 'spam free world.'
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Yup, they're great. Email to my editor with my latest article? Clearly spam - in the bin with it. Another email from a journal telling me a paper had been accepted? Spam, throw it away.
If your recipient is using Barracuda, send them an IM to let them know you've got an email, just to be on the safe side.
Worthless review... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then his second favorite feature is that you can do database level real time replication - you know, without having to know about all that REALLY hard stuff, like RAID, or what this SCSI crap is, or backups.
Re:Worthless review... (Score:5, Insightful)
For sysadmins who want their users to stick with Firefox or something else not named Internet Explorer, an improvement to OWA may not be a huge deal but it's still nice. OWA on alternative browsers blows pretty hard. It works, but it blows.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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If you want what Microsoft offers, you have to play by their rules. If the product is good and the rules are not onerous, then there's no problem. Proprietary software, despite its drawbacks, has been a useful and successful means for delivering value for over 50 years.
On the other hand, if the product is lacking and/or the rules are onerous, then you need to go with another vendor.
As much as I love a chance to bash Microsoft, I really don't see this as being an "onerous" requirement, especially since it
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I imagine dropping another thousand (or whatever a Windows Server license costs these days) to upgrade the OS is pocket change in comparison to the Exchange licensing and dedicated hardware and support personnel you need to run the thing.
Sure, if training your employees on the new OS were free.
OWA Support for Firefox and Safari (Score:2)
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I saw OWA when it first came out. It was built with ActiveX. So there couldn't be FF or Safari support until it was completely rewritten. And then I'm sure there were compatibility issues as they focused on IE 6 support and less on standards.
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Finally. Sheesh. No reason why this couldn't have been implemented years ago instead of relegating them to OWA Lite.
Yeah, no reason except that it's just one more reason why your desktops don't have to run Windows...
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Its not all that rich but it works just fine. Don't know what this is all about.
Are they going to make the experience the same for both IE and FireFox?
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Decent OWA?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, it's kind of hard to believe, but there's actually something in this update that sounds like it'd be helpful. I think it's the first update to a Microsoft product in... I don't know... about 8-9 years where the update actually offers me something new that would actually be useful for me.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application. The only problem is that it has only ever really supported IE, and if you use any other browser, it reverted to a crappy version which was... ok. Not really very good, but yes, it worked.
Anyway, it's possible that I may consider buying an upgrade someday!
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For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application.
I think OWA (or whatever it was called at the time) was actually the first AJAX application. A while back, I was talking with someone from the Exchange team, and he said the team developed the XmlHttpRequest object that makes AJAX possible for the purposes of making OWA.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one really noticed until Google made GMail.
Re:Decent OWA?! (Score:5, Informative)
..., and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application.
More aptly, is was THE first AJAX application. It doesn't get earlier than that.
This was years before it got its spiffy name. XmlHttpRequest (the linchpin in AJAX) was invented by Microsofts email client team to support Outlook Web Access. Being invented for IE it was (and still is AFAIK) a COM object which could be created from JavaScript in the browser. Mozilla later copied the idea and made XmlHttpRequest a first class citizen, but kept the name. The rest is history.
Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exchange Server 2007 gave the bird to Thunderbird. Will Server 2010 support Thunderbird or Seamonkey? Or will Linux desktops be second class citizens in an Exchange Server corporate setup?
That's the only feature of interest to me...
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Exchange works great with IMAP, even if it doesn't exactly follow the delete/expunge model of deletion (but then again, neither does Gmail).
I've used Thunderbird with Exchange 2007 with no problems.
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I've used Thunderbird with Exchange 2007 with no problems.
I don't believe this. With Thunderbird, Exchange 2007 simply refuses to work at all. The reason I tried using Thunderbird was to compose HTML mail on Linux desktops, and it was a miserable failure. OWA Lite is a very poor buggy cousin of OWA which works even on IE6, but not on FF3!
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps IMAP was not enabled in that Exchange setup...it definitely works, though.
However, to answer your original problem (Firefox and HTML mail), Exchange 2010 does support Firefox (and Safari) using all the features of OWA that IE does, including HTML mail compose.
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
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When MS publishes the whole MAPI spec in a useful way they will.
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maybe the old MAPI versions. every product cycle MS improves MAPI and adds more features
Re:Will it work nicely with Thunderbird? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who is modding this guy up?
IMAP is enabled on ALL MAILBOXES in Exchange 2007 by default. You just have to configure a few settings and enable the service. You can also disable IMAP globally.
To answer your previous assertion that Thunderbird doesn't work - you're wrong again. Our user base uses Thunderbird extensively. Like many universities, we used to push Eudora, waaaay back before we moved to Exchange 5.5, and a lot of professors liked Eudora enough that they will never use Outlook. Thunderbird is the most suitable replacement for Eudora that we've been able to identify. It works great with or without SSL encryption, using POP or IMAP.
So seriously, you very obviously don't have a clue. Please stop with the misinformation.
Concatenation a feature?!?! (Score:2)
JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array
Uh, WHAT!? Seriously, Microsoft? You're selling concatenation as a feature?
Anyone who thinks concatenation is a good thing, much less better than striping, needs to have whatever certifications they bought revoked.
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Anyone who thinks concatenation is a good thing, much less better than striping...
Concatenation, by itself, would certainly be unwise. I'll give Exchange admins the benefit of the doubt and assume this "concatenation" is in addition to whatever redundancy features are provided.
From the story:
JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array
I find that statement confusing. Why is Exchange, a mail server/collaboration platform/etc., managing storage devices? Is the story conflating Windows Server 2008 features with Exchange, or is Exchange directly responsible for storage devices (like Oracle ASM)?
Re:Concatenation a feature?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You misread... That's for the REPLICATED copy. i.e. You keep your live database on RAID 1/0, but you keep the realtime replicated copy on JBOD. With EXCH 2007 microsoft began (for very good reasons) recomending DAS instead of SAN (due to application and database high availablility features of Exchange 2007). Now, half of your DAS modular array units don't require expensive controllers, further reducing your costs without detracting from availability. Since the server fron end no longer needs to be a microsoft Cluster as well, Enterprise Server is no longer a requirement either.
We recently deployed a 20K user solution under Exch2007. We lobied for a modular extensible DAS storage solution, but instead upper management insisted on big iron SAN chassis (2 of them). We spent $450K on disks where we could have spent less than 100K and had the same performance and reliability simply because upper management (and apparently you) have not read or do not understand the new database architecture proposed in Exchange 2007. 2010 improves upon that by removing some server side hurdles while maintaining the same data reliablity.
You're keeping 2-3 local, active, asynchronously replicated (with real time log rollback) copies of your exchange system, with 30 second or less automatic failover that does not disconnect users in the process. Why keep them all on RAID 10 if you can simply fail from one over to the other? The only reason to keep any 1 of them on RAID 10 is simply to keep from failing over the first time! (and you'll recover and be back on the RAID 10 in 24-48 hours and you still have redundancy in log shipping, offsite server replication, and traditional backups to supplement that, all without clusters!
Cool feature: Phone call rules (Score:4, Funny)
You can setup rules for phone calls. Freaking awesome.
if (Status == b0rking_hot_secretary)
{
if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.wife.phonenumber)
call.redirect("/dev/null");
else if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.otherHotSecretary.phoneumber)
Send3WayInvite(caller);
}
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
Horrible Application Platform (Score:3, Interesting)
I joined an MS consultancy in 1998 because they were supposedly the foremost developers in NYC of MS Exchange applications. Once I settled in, they told me they were expert enough in Exchange as a platform to know never to develop any apps on it, because it was so awful to develop for and to support. A piece of crap. I've never seen any evidence since then that Exchange got any better as an app platform.
Any clue as to whether the 2010 version will be any better? If it were, I'd expect Outlook/Exchange to take over the Internet. But that was possible over a decade ago, and MS totally blew it since then.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Big difference between Exchange 5 and Exchange of today. I've had issues with Exchange 5.5 servers and their quirkiness. I've also been running Exchange 2003 clusters that have been absolutely rock solid and almost completely bulletproof.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not talking about their stability in their "out of the box" featureset operation. I'm talking about APIs, programmability, etc, as an app platform. I don't see many Exchange apps built on an Exchange platform, so I'm guessing everyone realized it wasn't really an app platform, despite MS pitching it to developers that way.
MAPI/CDO (Score:3, Interesting)
These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated, but not altogether gone (in 07 you had to install them manually).
There's still a lot (okay, well, some) that depends on MAPI and CDO being available in Exchange.
Depreciation (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, I hear MAPI and CDO lose 40% of their value the first time you use them. Never treat them as an investment.
Re:MAPI/CDO (Score:4, Informative)
Really MS?? How about fixing 2007 first? (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly. The adoption rate of Exchange 2007 was LOW and slow. Even when SP1 was released (after almost a year delay, btw), we're still stuck with this shitty command line interface that USED to be GUI to do all sorts of fun admin things in. It's a royal PITA to administer. How about an SP2 that will fix seemingly dead issues like OWA support for other browsers, etc? If MS thinks we and other companies that just spent thousands of dollars on the "bleeding edge" 2007 are going to pony up for 2010, they've got a surprise waiting. This is incrtedibly insulting.
I guess Ballmer realized how shitty everything was the company has done over the past 2-3 years since he took over and decided to move on.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Moving to command line sounds like doing it right, someone at MS must have wised up. Try automating stuff like real admins do.
Message store size limits? (Score:3, Informative)
Why pay megabucks for that limitation when others give you 256 TB or more? [hutman.net]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exmerge has been depreciated for years, primarily due to it not supporting the new PST formats.
In keeping with Exchange 2007's newfound love of PowerShell, you should use the Export-Mailbox [microsoft.com] and Import-Mailbox [microsoft.com] cmdlets to replace Exmerge.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You could even script the two together, to identify mailboxes larger than, say, 1 GB and then export items older than 180 days...
Re:non-outbreak client support? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When all your salesforce wants Their blackberry email and calenders seamlessly synchronized with multiple desktops or notebooks, and when you need to be able to wipe a blackberry remotely when it's lost or stolen, then exchange starts to buy something for you.
Particularly the mobile support and the ability to create meeting notices with people not even on your network is very valuable
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
with exchange all email is in the database
for Exchange 2003 you had to restore the db and there were ontrack powertools you bought to search the database file.
with 2007 and with 2010 they either have the ability to do this or it's coming in 2010. you just restore the database and search it. want to find all the emails that joe sent to jeff, just put in the search parameters and it will find it all.
no need for imap for mobile clients. if you don't have BES than winmo and iphones just sync the mailbox over th