On 27-Aug-2002 at 10:36:51 Sheldon Hearn wrote:
> On (2002/08/27 12:01), Jan Johansson wrote:
>> Exchange is an extremely competent platform, with proper handling.
>
> HAHAHAHAHAHA!
>
Okay I can't resist. I have to wholehartedly agree with Sheldon. We have
Exchange and we have problems. We have a whole team of people looking after
about 5 servers I think - I can point to them from where I am sitting, 5
people, a deputy manager and a manager. 3 Novell guys, and on the unix side
- 2 exim central mailhubs, 11 Sun boxes and 5 linux boxes all providing
central services - we have just me :-) The cost of the Exchange boxes alone
was a fortune for the University. They have been up and down more times than
any of the other systems have ever been. We have had more complaints since
moving users onto Exchange than ever before - they don't like outlook, down
time, etc. The diagnostics from Exchange, I am told, are crap and the
'restore a mailbox' is pretty much impossible (something to do with the fact
that you have to restore all the mailboxes...hmm, 20,000 users I don't think
so).
Oh, yes, the latest one, not really email related, sorry, a user forgets
their password. It gets reset and then they have to wait up to 3 hours for
it to be propagated to the other servers :-) I fell about laughing at this
one.
Speaking this morning to the IT manager of another dept, I am told that
remote working (i.e. users working from home) is also pretty much
non-existant die to all the security problems with MS, outlook and the like.
It has all been blocked at the firewall. Okay, that's our decision, but the
punters aren't happy - you have security (?) or remote access.
My personal opinion is to forget exchange. I'm just glad I work on
unix/linux. When talk was of scrapping the central unix boxes I started
looking for another job (seriously). We now have even more unix boxes than
before, because MS has so many problems and just costs too much :-) Needless
to say employing a team of poeple to look after the Exchange stuff is
costing enough. You weigh it all up and decide. Oh yes, the exim mailhubs
now do the spam checking because Exchange was crap at that (again too many
complaints from users), and I have been asked to look at the virus scanning
as well.
John.
PS - All the opinions are mine of course...just in case :-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne@???
PGP key available from public key servers
