My sympathies.
For just email, the benefits of Exchange are outweighed by the sheer
weight of its baggage. I do like the lightning fast indexing and
searching of email, but this is hardly the scope of a MTA (and I argue
that Cyris IMAP is just as fast). And I admit that most of the mail for
my domain flows through Exim and then onto the Exchange server simply
because of the intense filtering and spam prevention tricks that Exim
has up its sleeve.
When it comes to group collaboration however, Exchange does shine. I
was very much an Exchange-detractor until I did a large enterprise
installation and saw how well it worked; especially when coupled with
active directory. It's a pain to set-up, it's a resource pig (I really
would like to see how they call this "scalable" when it absolutely loads
a PIII-dual with well over a gig of memory). It also makes management a
dream when adding users because you add them to AD, and you're in
business.
However, to answer your question, there are many reasons to use Exchange
and many reasons not to use it. I'm sure your university will get
educational/group volume licensing deals from Microsoft, reducing the
$90 CAL fee to probably a third. That's still a lot of money if you
have a large enterprise. You also need to expect to use new hardware
for Exchange. Your tired-old Pentium II/500 with 128 megabytes of RAM
won't work. Expect to use nothing less than dual processors with as
much memory as the thing will hold. And since this is going to be used
for far more than just email, expect people to store information on the
Exchange server that can be considered irreplaceable; investigate RAID
drives or Veritas' Exchange backup agent or someday someone will be
crying that their calendar/tasks/et al is missing.
Exim: Set it up, leave it alone. Works great, works cheap, lasts a
long time.
Exchange: Complex, feature rich, good group collaboration and you'll
spend a lot of time and money taking care of it.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: exim-users-admin@???
> [mailto:exim-users-admin@exim.org] On Behalf Of Rob Lingelbach
> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 12:29 AM
> To: exim-users@???
> Subject: [Exim] Exchange looming..
>
>
> I was wondering if anyone here in exim-users can present to
> me a cogent argument against the potential implementation,
> which I face soon in my department, of Microsoft Exchange
> Server. I've collected some notes over the years of
> instances where Exchange returns inscrutable error messages
> and the like, but I'm not sure if these problems have been
> fixed.. I assume part of an argument against MES is that it
> forces the use of other Microsoft products.
>
> I realize that asking this here is like asking Formula 1
> drivers to talk about ridable lawnmowers, but I think I might
> get a reasoned response or two. I don't think it serves the
> purposes of exim-users to rant much about Exchange here, so
> private replies are encouraged. Thank you.
>
> --Rob
>
> --
> Rob Lingelbach Senior Colorist, UCLA Film and Television Archive
> robling@??? http://www.alegria.com rob@???
> TIG admin He who suffers more is more special. --Moses Herzog
>
> --
>
> ## List details at
> http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-> users Exim details
> at http://www.exim.org/ ##
>
>
