Apple, Android Devices Swamp NYC Schools' ActiveSync Server 205
longacre writes "Just a few months after the New York City Dept. of Education shelled out over $1 million on iPads for teachers, the agency has stopped accepting new users on its Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync server as it is 'operating near its resource limits' due to an influx of iOS and Android devices. A memo from the deputy CTO warned, 'Our Exchange system is currently operating near its resource limits and in order to prevent Exchange from exceeding these limits, we need to take action to prevent any more of these devices from being configured to receive email. As of Thursday, November 10th no additional users will be allowed to receive email via NYCDOE's Exchange ActiveSync.' Existing setups will continue to operate, and students will not be affected."
Best use of money? (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.
Bought a decent mail server?
My thoughts exactly! The devices aren't the problem, their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem. Nice to watch people eat crow when they tout the charms of commercial software and its scalability advantages and it epically fails and costs more money than a FOSS solution. Best quote I ever heard was from a guy talking about AD, "It's got to be complicated, it has to scale." Face-palm!!!
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Informative)
Currently trying to find any kind of Open Source collaboration Server - I can assure you that the software costs alone are within 5% on any of the decently known and supported alternatives such as Zimbra, Zafura, eGroupware, open-Xchange etc. Zafura is the closest in terms of quality, but based on my testing, I have noticed that with my 15-user test groups (all users using at least three devices to sync continuously) Zimbra is the closest to Exchange in terms of efficiency, and if you remove OS resource usage I have noticed that the Exchange daemon is the most efficient. I hadn't gone through any kind of upgrade testing to see how easy that is (which could alone still sway me away from my current direction of updating Exchange) but when compared to how much easier it is to tie Exchange into Active Directory and properly apply any domain-controlled policies to clients, Exchange wins hands-down in any system that isn't wholly unix from the ground-up.
In conclusion, you are misinformed if you think any kind of FOSS system can compete with Exchange. If you want any kind of collaboration utilities (Calendar or Contact sync and grouping, etc) then you discard the F part and usually the OS part too - and the supposed knights of FOSS are even more greedy than Moneyholesoft from Redmond. At least Redmond allowed us a 3-month trial with 60 users to test out compared to the others. VMWare let us try Zimbra with 30 users for 30 days before they wanted to charge us - nobody else would even let us trial their packages at all.
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Apple themselves make a really nice integrated packet of Postfix, Dovecot, CalDAV, CardDAV, Apache, OpenLDAP and a Policy Manager for iOS.
Zimbra and some of the others are indeed greedy but they just are because they take all the work out of your hands and make a single package but again, they rely on the same technologies as Apple.
Exchange integration in those packages is only done for backwards compatibility with Windows clients, it was never intended to be used progressively as iOS and Android has a nice
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't bother with this crowd. These guys clearly have no practical experience with Exchange and are the same people who have been yelling "ZOMG POSTFIX AND EVOLUTION/CHANDLER/THUNDERBIRD WILL KILL OUTLOOK" 10+ years ago.
As much as I dislike defending my vendors, I have to say the Exchange is surprisingly nimble and the number of devices I can support with a very modest server is pretty surprising. The idea that you're getting 10x the number of users on similiar hardware with a similiar featureset is the same bullshit these FOSS guys have been peddling for years. I just with the FOSS crew could write a usable, supported, efficient Exchange/Activesync replacement. That product doesn't exist and the current crop are all nightmares. Heh, there's a reason why they won't let you test this junk.
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Informative)
You really think so? Microsoft sell Exchange to some of the largest organizations on the planet. It might not be my choice of mail server, but I don't think blaming the software is the right think to do here. There's plenty of evidence that Exchange can scale - it might need powerful hardware, or specialized configuration but it's clearly possible and widely implemented.
The real trouble here was not not the choice of software. Rather it was a failure to anticipate the growth and react to it before it became an issue. That's a very basic SysAdmin issue for any software, proprietary or otherwise.
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their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem.
You really think so? Microsoft sell Exchange to some of the largest organizations on the planet. It might not be my choice of mail server, but I don't think blaming the software is the right think to do here. There's plenty of evidence that Exchange can scale - it might need powerful hardware, or specialized configuration but it's clearly possible and widely implemented.
I'm fairly sure Exchange could scale up to more users. The problem is most likely twofold, they don't have the hardware resources and they don't have enough client licenses. Both can be solved with money, but the latter is only a problem on a proprietary commercial platform that makes you pay per user.
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem could just be a lack of capacity planning. When management says we are going to add $1 million worth of iPads on to our mail system plus let users use iPhones and droids the mail admins should be evaluating their infrastructure.
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The problem could just be a lack of capacity planning. When management says we are going to add $1 million worth of iPads on to our mail system plus let users use iPhones and droids the mail admins should be evaluating their infrastructure.
Of course this assumes that management bothered to tell them the scale of what they were planning to begin with. If their project management workflow has holes, these sorts of things can come as a really uncool surprise. Then again, unless it was a mass migration they should have seen the usage ramping up on their servers and wondered WTF?
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I agree whole-heartedly with you that AD is overcomplicated and, for perhaps 99% of users, a solution to a non-existent problem, but don't go bashing Exchange just because it's MS. It's a lot more than just a mail server, it is a collaboration suite, and the people who buy it, buy it for all those non-mail extras that are very tightly integrated.
To recreate the same with open-source, most of us are forced to use webmail, as there is no standardized mail client that can handle all the extra stuff. You coul
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The proprietary hardware and software devices aren't the problem, their proprietary commercial mail system that they didn't build out sufficiently is the problem.
FTFY
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Not exactly correct...
Exchange (esp 2010) can be configured fine.
The ActiveSync clients occasionally ramp up zombie connections or uncleanly close connections after their timeout. Apple have a couple of KBs (KB3398 comes to mind) on the very subject.
An example is one of our Hosted Exchange clients. iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.3.3 currently holds 125 connections to w3wp.exe (web service) our average is 2, or next highest is 6. That's not a bad email system, it's poorly written client code - to which Exchange C
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I don't see what's specifically insulting Microsoft with, "Bought a decent mail server?" as a comment... It could be insulting the juggernaut from Redmond, or it could be insulting the hardware. It's a supposition on your part that the OS/daemon is being insulted.
Mind you, I would not be surprised if the software was the target, but that's mainly because I don't think that the service was originally designed for the kind of usage that it's now seeing. We also don't know from the summary what versions of
IMAP vs Active Sync? (Score:2)
Rather than simply saying use a different mail-server, does anyone know whether limiting access to the Exchange server via IMAP would provide less impact?
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What's more ridiculous is that you insist on using terns that contain the word "fuck" and then use the substitution "fsck". If "fuck" is so impolite for you to use, then why not express yourself differently?
Re:Best use of money? (Score:4, Funny)
What's more ridiculous is that you insist on using terns that contain the word "fuck" and then use the substitution "fsck". If "fuck" is so impolite for you to use, then why not express yourself differently?
I'm screwing with the Pakistani forbidden word IM filter. :-)
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CAS == Client Access System
"Too many secrets."
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Funny)
Then the headline would have read 'NYC Schools waste Millions on tablets no one uses'
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Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
He was saying that if they chose tablets significantly cheaper than the iPad, as the parent suggested, no one would use them. It's probably true.
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best use of money? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad."
The iPad is under $500, so it costs the same or less than any other decent tablet. Are you saying that there's a tablet that costs $150 that's comparable to the iPad? That is pretty hard to imagine. Don't forget to include the management costs - iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.). Android doesn't do this properly yet. That leaves the RIM Playbook, which aside from sucking has the same list price as the iPad. I guess you could save some money buying discontinued products that are being dumped, but that's not a great enterprise hardware strategy. :-)
If you want to complain about the project, complain that they didn't plan for adding one more ActiveSynch server so they had capacity to support their users. Given educational pricing, the software is nearly free, and even an overpriced server would have been a trivial percentage of the project budget.
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The playbook would also require a blackberry phone for everyone to check their email via.
iDevice enterprise mgmt != easy (Score:5, Informative)
iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.).
We're not finding iPad/iPhone easy to manage at our business. The available management policies are very meager compared to BlackBerry handhelds. Too many things require iTunes, and iTunes is a bear to deploy, update, and manage. When the iDevice malfunctions, diagnostics and repair attempts are very limited. And if we need to do a service/warranty exchange, pain results. They won't ship an FRU; you have to go to a store. And apparently Apple's corporate policy forbids stores from telling customers if they have stock of FRUs, so the only way to find out is to drive to each store and try.
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
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My Galaxy Tab seems to respect our exchange policies.
But it's pretty much the exact same price as a comparable iPad.
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Use it to buy iPads after everyone complains they bought junk nobody uses.
Triple the load =/= triple the servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what you get with golf course deals (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what you get with golf course deals people out side of IT makes deals like this and tell IT to make it work with out giving them the funds to make it work.
This why IT needs unions so they can stand up and say NO! we can't do it with the funds that we have. I hope that they don't place the blame on IT for something that is not there fault.
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This is what you get with golf course deals people out side of IT makes deals like this and tell IT to make it work with out giving them the funds to make it work.
This why IT needs unions so they can stand up and say NO! we can't do it with the funds that we have. I hope that they don't place the blame on IT for something that is not there fault.
I hate to tell you this, but cronyism, kickbacks, and side deals exist just as much (if not more) in union shops as they do outside them.
The fault could lie with the architect being dumb enough to fall of the marketing "specs", or in not doing what every sysadmin does when speccing out an Exchange system: pad the resource demand to at least 150% of whatever Microsoft's Capacity Planner whitepaper says you should.
You see, here's the thing - while yes, there are instances of dumbassed CTO/CIOs running out and
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The point of unions isn't that they render everyone angels, it's that it creates an organization that can negotiate in favor of worker's interests to balance the organization that already exists to support management's interests. So an IT workers' union could impose checkpoints in a process such that the workers could make sure that adaquate resources, training, tools, etc., were provided to allow the workers to be successful without working insane hours compensating for poor planning or resourcing. Yes, a
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Unions are obsolete. They have destroyed our automotive sector, they are destroying our healthcare sector, and they have no business in IT.
Unions are the mafia of business. If you don't like the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/MAFIAA then you should stand up to the unions that are the mafia as well.
I'm sure it was great to claim that Unions saved kids from working in coal mines... but that's just mythology. Unions cause higher expense to
companies, greater waste, all of which is passed on to us, the customers.
Unions: go sc
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So fine go tell the boss that you can't do it and then they say we can fine some that will and then who they get messes things up even more and you take all the blame and maybe even have to go to court after being sued / maybe even jailed for messing the system up.
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So fine go tell the boss that you can't do it and then they say we can [find] [someone] that will and then who they get messes things up even more and you take all the blame and maybe even have to go to court after being sued / maybe even jailed for messing the system up.
See my .sig
You tell the boss you can't do it, means you've informed them that their assumptions are flawed and unreasonable.
They pull someone in to do it anyway, and they can't make it work, just like you said it wouldn't work.
How is it that you then get blamed for it not working? That "someone"'s failure proves you were correct and the boss was wrong.
Eh?!?
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Unions are obsolete. They have destroyed our automotive sector, they are destroying our healthcare sector, and they have no business in IT.
Like everything else, there is a balance. Too much power to unions is a very bad thing, too little power gives an extremely one sided relationship. As for destructive power, unions are strong in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.... both of which are doing pretty well.
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> Northern Europe and Scandinavia.... both of which are doing pretty well
Scandinavia isn't a county, it's the northern European section which includes Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia [wikipedia.org]
So to translate what you said into English:
"Northern Europe and Northern Europe.... both of which are doing pretty well."
There are two automobile manufacturers in "Northern Europe" aka Scandinavia, both Swedish.
Saab is shut down.
Volvo is Chinese.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/dri [usatoday.com]
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Healthy workers are going to do a better job. Do you want your life to depend on parts made by a non-union machinist running a 104F fever who can't afford to take time off? Or cops who are even more on the take than they are now? Or non-union truckers using fake log books to run 100 hours a week and falling asleep at the wheel, taking your car out in the ensuing accident? Or a non-union food worker who can't
Re:This is what you get with golf course deals (Score:5, Insightful)
"Unions work best for the health and safety of their workers. Anything beyond that is mob rule."
Add in "and are properly equipped and trained and resourced to do their job successfully". For example, air traffic control unions negotiated limits on how many hours controllers could be forced to work, and when they unions were broken and controllers were forced to work so many hours, with no breaks for even going to the bathroom or eating meals, endangering passenger's lives. And when teachers' unions negotiate limits on the numbers of students in classes, so teachers can actually teach students effectively.
Or do you think that the MBA who runs a company knows how best to do people's jobs, not the people who actually do the jobs?
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So, what we're talking about here is the question of who can be trusted with power, workers or management?
The answer is simple: neither. All the horror stories you've heard about unions? True for some union somewhere. All the horror stories you've heard about management? Also true for some managers somewhere. It'd be a different world if we could just assume people would cooperate when it was in their obvious common interest, but we can't. Good faith is such a fragile thing.
If there were one quality which
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wait, what i read of that was OT for IT workers salaried with a base rate over X.
What kind of salaried workers get OT... That is part of the deal with being salary. The flip side of that is that you don't usually have a punch card, or "we see you were 5 minutes 3 times last month, here is your box"
Now if it is hourly employees I'm right there with you, but with a salary all you get to do when you work OT is increase the base hours and lower your $/Hour you get paid.
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Go ahead and form a union, lots of people will keep making it work and getting your management's money.
FWIW, I have Exchange 2010 running in VMware. The host is only a Q6600 quad 2.4Ghz with 8 gigs of RAM. The Exchange VM is 3 cores + 3 GB RAM. Tiny. But it seems to serve 4 iOS devices and 2-4 Outlook clients simultaneously without any issues. The host itself runs 4-5 other VMs.
It's admittedly dog-slow to startup and even console logins are slow to process and launching the Exchange GUI is agonizing, b
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maybe they could ask everyone to just configure them work as fetch instead of push?
I mean, it's the same amount of people as they used to have. they just now have a mail client in the pocket.
or perhaps they got a connection limit somewhere they could just up, if the problem is that the transfers take more time and connections drop far more often than from their wired desktops.
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If I had to guess, the issue isn't the specific protocol, it's that the number of mail clients doubled. That is, if they have 1,000 employees, each reading mail from a desktop computer, and each employee gets an iPad that they use in addition, they went from 1,000 mail clients to 2,000 mail clients, which would require them to scale the mail server to support it. If I had to guess, the iPads turned out to be much more popular than expected, greating demand that they were unprepared for.
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Depends. Usually, even for a school, allowing every employee to latch on their personal gear to the school network isn't exactly a good idea - if not for security reasons, then for liability reasons.
I should clarify the liability part: I know that schools are a bit more open (and less prone to having trade secrets), but there are still privacy issues (discussions of student behavior tends to stand out) that would demand a school limit just how far and wide (and on whose devices) their internal emails should
Personal devices in schools (Score:2)
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Issues like this are the reason you need to fully flesh out costs before flipping the switch on a large organization like this. almost every teacher I know has a smartphone of some kind and a lot of them are starting to get tablets. Why offer the service when you cannot fully offer it?
Well, for one you have managers in municipalities that are the stereotypical promoted because they can't do shit. Two, you have a mantra of "doing more with less". Three, the devices were probably bought with one-time monies, so there was no continuing source of funds to draw from to deal with problems like this. Four, ... Oh you get the idea!
No better CAS topology experts? (Score:4, Interesting)
Given the resources, is there any reason they couldn't scale this right? I only pretend to know anything about Exchange, but this seems kind of strange.
I'm sure that resource limitations -- server CPU, disk, etc -- are the source of this, but you'd think a high profile customer like this would be able to get MS involved before the story becomes "iPads crash Exchange" or "consumer tablet bests high dollar PC server."
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part of the problem is that Exchange is not an email server (many people think that because they only use it for email). It's a "groupware" server that does email, calendars, notes, journals, todo lists, integrated MSN status, etc.
Now admittedly, all those things shouldn't be particularly resource intensive, but the Exchange systems that have been around for years always struggled to to simple things. I think that they made it better at resource usage, but then probably made it much worse by bundling in cra
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Now admittedly, all those things shouldn't be particularly resource intensive, but the Exchange systems that have been around for years always struggled to to simple things. I think that they made it better at resource usage, but then probably made it much worse by bundling in crap like MSN status updates and probably facebook integration by now too.
It's actually been really simplified. Instant Messaging is handled by seperate product called Lync (If you are staying Microsoft). Exchange is simply Email/Calendar/Contacts/Notes/Tasks. Facebook intergration is Outlook driven and Exchange server doesn't do any of that for client.
If they replaced Exchange with a straightforward mail server like Dovecot, they'd handle a hundred times those users with ease. Sure, they wouldn't have an integrated calendar... but which of those users uses the exchange calendar anyway, using some preferred iOS or Google calendar.
Spoken like true Linux Zealot who has no clue what Exchange does or how big companies rely on Email/Calendar/Contact side of it. Not to mention ActiveSync has basic security features like... remote wiping of devices and forcing pas
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Linux zealot, lol.
I've used Outlook for many years in corporate life, and I don't know *anyone* who uses it for more than calendar and email. I tried to use tasks and notes, but somehow no-one could be bothered with those. Even my last MS-only company used sharepoint for contacts, not exchange! (and a spreadsheet for non-company contacts).
There are alternatives for remote wiping of devices. I use a security software that allows me to wipe my Android device (lookout) so it's not like you need your email serv
Re:No better CAS topology experts? (Score:5, Informative)
I am not a Microsoft fanboi by any stretch and those were all valid criticisms of Exchange 2003 and prior, however Exchange 2007 and later have a pretty clean architecture and good support for open standards. The only real argument against is that, it is very expensive and you might really only need mail in which case you can get carrier class mail handling with FOSS.
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I'm dealing with an Exchange 2007 server with a busted OWA, and what I've found out is that the links between Exchange and IIS are so deep that a full recreation of OWA from scratch means reinstalling Exchange 2007.
I've come to loathe Exchange.
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Wait, you're silly enough to run OWA on the same server as your email data? Way back when I was doing exchange 5.5 administration I knew enough not to put OWA on the same box as the user's email. If something goes wrong with OWA you can then either restore from backup or reinstall it without affecting anything else. I believe that in exchange 2007 this called a front-end server.
In my opinion, 99% of the issues that occur with microsoft server products are due to administrator inexperience and poor plann
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First of all, I didn't put the server or network together, I've been asked to do a bit of contracting.
Second of all, this is a small outfit that doesn't have the money to throw at a second Exchange server to run OWA.
Thirdly, no matter what way you toss it, the architecture is idiotic.
Fourth, I still hate Exchange. I tolerate it in my own shop simply because nothing else comes close, but it's still a gawdawful monstrous beast.
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someone recommended Zimbra. With the proprietary extensions (activesysnc, outlook connector etc) you get a lot of functionality you have with Exchange. (I think those extensions need to be paid for as they use licenced software themselves).
The basic edition is open source though, you might like to give it a go and see where the weak points are.
Exchange is one of those 'enterprise' systems that is just broken. It epitomises some of the MS tech we have nowadays where everything is intertwined in a truly awful
It is painful for small orgs (Score:2)
One of my complaints about Exchange (and indeed, Microsoft's products in general) is that they're full of bad interactions like that.
(My personal favorite is that installing Outlook (the Exchange client) on the same box as Exchange server causes the server to stop working. (For 2000 and 2003. Not sure on 2007+.) Not that I plan on reading email on the server, but for trouble-shooting it would be useful.)
You're pretty much forced to keep everything on separate servers if you want everything to work as des
Removing tools makes no sense (Score:2)
That is the dumbest way of troubleshooting I have ever heard. You're troubleshooting a client issue on a server os, use a VM of windows 7, vista, xp whatever the client is running...
Not everything divides cleanly into "client" and "server", even in the best designs. Sometimes it's a network or transport issue. Being able to run the client on the server would make it easier to determine where things are going wrong. This is especially the case with MAPI, since before 2007 it's basically just a set of RPC calls into the Information Store structure.
I never understood the desire to remove tools from one's arsenal.
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I believe that in exchange 2007 this called a front-end server.
In my opinion, 99% of the issues that occur with microsoft server products are due to administrator inexperience and poor planning.
Really? Based on what you just said here I think the issue is down to Exchange needing double the amount of servers to do the same thing many other packages can do.
The real issue here is not Exchange itself, but rather that Microsoft pushes Exchange as a solution to every problem. The number of times I've seen Exchange or windows Small Business Server rolled out to a client of 5-10 users is incredible. The problem with these outfits is that ultimately if they are successful then their userbase grows, and as
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I'd bet every conference room in the building has an account. You invite to you meeting and it auto accepts if it doesn't have a conflict. Anyone that should be able to schedule meetings can also view the details of the rooms "events".
Want to go to lunch? send out a meeting invite. To be honest the thing that has always seemed to get the most real use is the calender system.
Know of a host-able calendar that integrates with LDAP, allows "bot" type accounts, has an easy to use(at close to OWA as it can be) we
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Kerio can do all those things you're asking.
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Yes, provided we are talking about an Exchange 2007 or later environment you can scale as big as need, Provided:
1. You have adequate hardware resources
2. You have selected an appropriate deployment strategy for your organizations size, and anticipated growth. If you expect to grow big but currently are not you do need to make some architectural decisions which will raise upfront costs.
*Modern* Exchange is among Microsoft's products that really can be considered carrier grade. Like all MS products through
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LoB
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Exchange CALs are licensed per user and not per device. Each user can have any number of devices hooked up. If they are already properly licensed for each of their users, then all devices that any of those users brings are already licensed.
Also, even if they had met their limit on CALs, they are so cheap for the education market, Microsoft practically gives them away.
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Yes, but only basic management can be done with mobile devices on a standard license. An enterprise license allows more control over mobile devices.
Something else to keep in mind...
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If the people at the New york School system were stupid enough to go with per device CAL's, they deserve what they get. User CAL's are almost always going to be more economical. The only exception is in a shared PC (call center) structure.
If they have per use CAL's, the activesync devices are free (assuming they have CAL's for the users to begin with).
As for this article, it is probably being blown way out of proportion. This is just a memo by the IT dept to let the management know they need to buy extra se
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In all fairness, it is often very hard to estimate load on a system of this sort. You can estimate the number of devices you will need (if you are even told), and ammount of traffic across them, but without actual piloting and load testing in your produciton environment the estimates can miss factors (like users deciding to ONLY use their tablet or phone for connections.
Get ready for the headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a pretty standard situation in New York City: lots and lots of money is spent, with poor planning, sweetheart deals with incompetent firms, and then a bunch of fallout.
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This is a pretty standard situation in __any_large_organization__: lots and lots of money is spent, with poor planning, sweetheart deals with incompetent firms, and then a bunch of fallout.
*There fixed that for you.
So wait a minute... (Score:2)
$1m spent on iPads only comes to ~2,000 iPads at most (assuming the cheapest model at around $500 each). According to Microsoft's handy little Capacity Planner [microsoft.com] (Exch 2010), it shouldn't take but perhaps (very rough calc here) 5 or 10 servers at most to handle that, unless they're also allowing every school employee to latch on their personal gear as well.
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
Something's missing from the story (Score:2, Flamebait)
Just that their IT staff is incompetent..
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I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
Just that their IT staff is incompetent..
It's a school system. That's a given.
Add to that, any IT staff they have are *way* less (in numbers) than they need. Also a given.
Have I mentioned my sister's a teacher? Or that we here appear to have three times as many school trustees (28 for a population of ca .7 million) as are necessary, and they are more busy spending funds on lavish head office buildings than on funding schooling?
Run for school trustee. What a cushy gig.
Re:So wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
They were probably near capacity before the tablets were deployed. NYC has a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and administrators checking their email. The fact that tablets are involved is secondary; if 2000 additional desktops had been deployed, the systems would probably have been overwhelmed as well. My guess is that the email system was deployed years ago, possibly by a consulting firm that is now out of business, and that some poor IT guy has been trying to keep everything together on a shoestring budget all this time. The tablet deployment probably occurred without anyone actually consulting the IT staff to see if the system could handle the extra load, and probably by the same group of decision makers who ignored IT's requests for additional servers prior to the deployment.
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Clearly the IT guy should be fired.
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They don't need 5-10 servers.
Keep in mind that they're not talking about adding 2,000 mailboxes, just adding 2,000 devices to access existing mailboxes. So they don't need more storage, just more server compute capacity. If I had to guess, it might be as simple as them running ActiveSynch on a single, under-resourced server (or VM) as a POC, and they didn't expect (or prepare for) the increased demand of 2,000 more tablets. Should be easy to fix. Though inevitably they're trying to do a dozen other things,
Re: (Score:2)
They don't need 5-10 servers.
Keep in mind that they're not talking about adding 2,000 mailboxes, just adding 2,000 devices to access existing mailboxes. So they don't need more storage, just more server compute capacity. If I had to guess, it might be as simple as them running ActiveSynch on a single, under-resourced server (or VM) as a POC, and they didn't expect (or prepare for) the increased demand of 2,000 more tablets. Should be easy to fix. Though inevitably they're trying to do a dozen other things, and it'll take three months to do the paperwork to get the approval to buy a new server and get it deployed. Remember,
Except they specifically said that their servers can't handle the load.... so it sounds like the *do* need more servers.
Which is not a big deal, all it takes is money for licenses and hardware. I don't know why this even made the news, it should read "School bought iPads without appropriate backend infrastructure to support them". It's not like Exchange can't scale to handle a few thousand Activesync devices.
Go figure (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of resource forecasting/planning will get you every time. Its not like they didn't know how many would be deployed and on what schedule.. geesh
Probably Apple's fault (Score:2)
Right?
Predicting the future (Score:2)
It's great when a prediction is both public and quantifiable.
Typical... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the same IT group that closes its employee payroll information site on nights and weekends. Yup, you read that right -- the NYC DoE "Payroll Portal" where 80,000+ employees check their pay stubs is only open during business hours. It's never been clear why that is -- they couldn't possibly have people pulling the data manually for each request, could they? So you teach all day, go home, apply for an apartment, and can't get your pay stubs at 8 p.m. from a system that is touted as convenient and accessible over the public internet.
Point being, this is a function that is probably short on resources, but also fails to make the most of the funding and systems they do have.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe they're....y'know.... doing a pay run. or maintenance....
Then I'd accept 15min - 1h daily in the middle of the night as reasonable downtime for that kind of system. God our system at work handles 30k clients and is down for 20min a week to perform this task. Extensive maintenance sometimes brings it down for an hour on the weekend. Usually after 7pm on a Saturday.
Virtualization, Anyone? (Score:2)
Deploy another host, deploy another template VM to distribute load? Surely it's a plug-in, click/drag fix once they add a new host, right? +1 Scalability.
Re: (Score:2)
And deploy it on what? The assumption here is the hardware can't handle the load. Deploying a new VM on the same hardware isn't going to make it faster.. quite the opposite. Virtualization doesn't solve all problems, especially when it's probably running on underpowered hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget the licensing.. In some government areas, it can take weeks to get a purchase through the purchasing dept..
Overblown (Score:2)
$1MM of iPads represents about 2500-3000 users depending on the discount they received. First, I'm presuming that these users already had mailboxes and it's just the additional load of ActiveSync that is causing the trouble. If that's the case, with the types of discounts that government and education receive from microsoft and hardware vendors this is like a $15,000 problem at best. In the scope of a million-dollar project a 1.5% budget problem represents poor planning, but I've seen much much worse.
Server Space (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cloud (Score:2)
Switch to the Google Apps GovCloud or Microsoft Live 365. Oh, it isn't secure!!! Do you think the current admins have Exchange set up securely? You also get spam blocking and Postini with Google.
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Spoken like someone who knows nothing about email systems.
I am guessing that there are strict restrictions on using external email to relay school information.
After all do you want your information on your childs health, disciplinary issues, grades, concerns over abuse, etc etc. to be stored on googles mail server? I sure as hell dont.
Re:Teachers should just switch to gmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about email systems.
I am guessing that there are strict restrictions on using external email to relay school information.
After all do you want your information on your childs health, disciplinary issues, grades, concerns over abuse, etc etc. to be stored on googles mail server? I sure as hell dont.
I trust my anonymity with Google more than with a B-grade IT worker at a school district. Imagine 2 possible scenarios:
1. Google does something with my email data i don't like.
2. A disgruntled IT worker at the school district sells my email data for drug money.
#2 is far more likely.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Are Americans really that uptight, or are you just assuming that school divisions are as paranoid as corporations?
Re: (Score:2)
yea for sladot. A few corrections
1) Exchange 2010 has a perfectly good MTA. I would argue that MTA's are the least of what a modern email system does.
2) Activesync utilizes 80/443 for connections, not port 25.
3) They are not adding 2000 new accounts, they are adding 2000 new devices to connect to the accounts.
4) In all likelyhood this is a simple issue of the CAS (Client Access Server) not being size right, or not being sized to include the increase in traffic which would occur (mind you the IT dept might n
Re: (Score:2)
3) They are not adding 2000 new accounts, they are adding 2000 new devices to connect to the accounts.
If the 2000 accounts existed and different devices are now connecting to them then there is something fundamentally wrong with the software.