On 4/15/05, Khanh Tran
Thanks to all on the list for the suggestions. As you may notice by my email address, I don't work corporate. I'm in Education, so the 2,000 users comes from our student population (it's a small school). I have our Administration (less than 100 users) on it and it's a more of a chore to support than the over 2,000 users on the Unix system. The costs and backup times are real to us, but my boss is looking for third party (not me basically) documents on reasons not to migrate the rest of the users to Exchange.
I have looked at OpenExchange and the like, but I need more proof AGAINST Exchange than I do FOR Unix systems.
Khanh Tran Network Operations Sarah Lawrence College
-----Original Message----- From: Dan Am [mailto:suse@dertext.de] Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 3:55 AM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] anti-Exchange
Add to the list from the words of seasoned exchange admin (not me): - Yesterday he lost his message store, because exchange did not report disks were full. He recovered, but it required inside knowledge. - Message store is kept in only one file, that cannot be backed up online. You hae to stop service for backups. (Can't vouch for these, as I myself have no clue about M$) Best Dan Am Friday, 15. April 2005 08:44 schrieb Raoul Snyman:
- i can not think of one week that the server didn't die at least once, and we only had 150 people on the network (not 2000 like you). - the total mailbox (i.e. everyone's mailboxes combined) size is restricted depending on what version of exchange you are using (standard, professional, etc). i.e. if you want bigger, you have to upgrade! (now where have i heard that before?) - you have to have a license to run exchange on the server. - you need a client access license for every computer that is going to
connect to the server - if you want web-based access to your e-mail, that's another set of licenses
I work in edu as well and management seems to be lemmings with regards to MS. Money with regards to licensing, etc simply doesn't matter to them. It's Microsoft or bust. I'm in the middle of a forced migration to Exchange/Outlook. There will be no pop or imap, mapi only and no OWA on campus. Users are complaining that Outlook isn't very intuitive and is just plain garbage. Management doesn't care. Oh well. Fortunately the VP over my part of campus is a long time Mac user. So I'm planting the seeds for a mass migration to OS X for user desktops. My ship is taking on water and no one seems to notice or care from this migration. As for your wanting help, the Sophos website has a section that lists the Top 10 for the month/year and it goes back quite far. If that isn't enough to help them see the error of their ways, well get ready for a very painful and expensive lesson. The last time I checked, about six months ago, for the last eight years running, the Top 10 were w32/macro virii and exploited IE and/or Outlook/Outlook Express and/(insert Office product here). In this time MS has little to nothing to fix the problem correctly, just slap a band aid on it. Good luck with your efforts. John