Having used, installed and cofigured exchange quite a bit in the past I can tell you that you are wrong on most counts below.
You can create individual PSTs from each user, or configure each computer to maintain a local copy of their mail in order to move email from one server to another, let alone backing it up and restoring it en masse between exchange servers. PSTs can be imported into outlook regardless of the user or their existing email configuration. Moving outlook mail to something else, ie Mozilla, is a little more complicated, but is do-able by passing it into outlook express, then on to netscape / mozilla. Other apps exist for moving mail between other packages without resorting to individual forwarding. Using Backup Exec with the exchange option you can delete / restore individual emails to/from tape. This is probably true for most decent backup packages. >From memory the built in backup package in Windows 2000 server will not allow this, but then its not really a 'real' backup package anyway (IMHO)... Exchange is prety misunderstood, and takes a lot of flak. Its not really a bad package if you know how to use it (Something a lot of people say about Linux, too :) My 2c Steve PS: I'm not a Microsoft advocate, but I hate to see people shooting MS down without a full understanding of the product they are attacking. > On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 07:46, Terry Cole wrote: > > With all the MS problems/virus as well as Exchange problems I have been > > having.. > > Others can comment on the rest, but since I have an exchange server here > and probably most of the problems you've had, I'll comment here. > > Exchange is a festering heap of fertilliser. There is no way to move > all the existing mail from ES to any other mailserver other than > forwarding all email manually. > > We have made a partial change - I run squirrelmail on the webserver > (linux) which is a webmail/imap gateway, and that runs fairly well. > > Users will loose all the calendaring/schedualling/addressbook components > of exchange server too, when you change to something else. > > But then - its impossible to restore a single email from a tape > backup... you have to restore the lot to a scratch machine then forward > it to the real server, so I have always told users to save important > emails to disk. > > You might have to bite the bull's horns and change wholesale, loosing > the old mail... which is going to be a real turn-off for users. > > > > > >
