Thanks for the honest assessment. It certainly sounds like MS has made HA feature decisions on the basis that Exchange in the cloud be the way that smaller customers get their HA. But with cloud disasters in the news, that may be a losing bet, at least in the near term.
-----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 12:58 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Exchange 2007 No, I can't comment on futures. Quite frankly, I know little at this point. IMHO - for the non-HA SMORG - the only "killer feature" in E2010 has already been mentioned in this thread - browser compatibility for OWA. The only other major reason for 2010 is -- it's out. If you haven't taken advantage of 2007 features by now, they probably aren't critical to your environment. So, 2010 will be supported for a lot longer than 2007. I've got customers I'm working with planning a move to 2010 for exactly that reason -- 2003 support is effectively dead, so they need to move to a supported platform where they won't have to move again for a long time. 2010 makes the most sense for them. But feature-wise - 2007 would be a much easier move. ________________________________________ From: Carl Houseman [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 12:44 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Exchange 2007 Wow, that's a lot of negativity for 2010. I guess you can't say if any of the half-baked features will be supplied later, as was the case for 2007? Given the choice of 2007 or 2010, and considering the features, ease of upgrade/migration (from 2003), still-unfixed-bugs, for a small business environment with no HA requirement and a PS-ignorant admin, which would you choose? Carl -----Original Message----- From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 10:48 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Exchange 2007 Now that it's RTM'ed, I can express my opinion publically. I've got a couple of bad things to say about it: 1] Lots of normal functionality (i.e., things your average admin will need to do) isn't in the GUI console. You have to do it in PowerShell. 2] Retention Policies are a step backwards from Messaging Records Management. 3] The implementation of the Archive Mailbox is half-baked, at best. 4] All of the Continous Replication solutions are gone - I'm most disappointed with the removal of SCR and LCR which did not require Windows Enterprise. The only HA solution is DAG (based on failover clustering, which requires Windows Enteprise). In USD, this puts about a $6K licensing premium on HA. 5] STILL no two-box HA solution. While you can colocate CA/HT on MB now, for that to be a HA solution, you have to have a clustered LB solution sitting in front (if the LB isn't clustered, then you don't have a HA solution - you just have a resilient backend). With the cost of that, you might as well have two more CA/HT boxes sitting in front running Windows NLB. 6] No method of doing an upgrade without either: a] breaking HA of an existing installation, or b] purchasing new hardware. 7] Microsoft is pushing SATA for storage HARD. People using SAN are now at a price/feature disadvantage. Not using SAN is going to be a hard-sell for a lots of techies, I think, when just one release ago they were pushing management for lots of expensive SAN disk. Not to say that there aren't lots of good/great features - there are. As always - you should evaluate the features/functionality for each company, one by one. ________________________________________ From: Jason Gurtz [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 10:31 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Exchange 2007 > If you're about to deploy an Exchange server and can wait, I am hearing > only good things about Exchange 2010. Finally, useful cross-browser OWA! It was about time :) ~JasonG
