This weekend (in between stretches of the last frantic push to get my house ready to sell) I'm building a demo/test Exchange environment that I need in order to test the integration of third party spam filtering tools. To be sure, this is not a Citadel related project, but read on. Yes, I have an MCSE on my staff, but he only works on high visibility projects that make him look good to at least the next two levels of management. But this provided an opportunity for me to update my knowledge set, and my strength is as a tech-heavy manager who hasn't become ignorant of the inner workings of a technology infrastructure. And what I discovered is interesting. I've helped out with Exchange maintenance over the years but this was the first time I've done an Exchange install from scratch in more than a few years now. One of the inspirations for turning Citadel into a groupware/collaboration platform was that in the late 1990's when I was doing field service work, I was frustrated that the Unix world still provided a solid mail system but you had to be a genius to put it together, while Exchange 5.5 was a piece of garbage but it was easy to install -- you just popped the disc in, ran the install, and typed your domain name, and you were basically up and running. I knew we could do better than that, which is why my vision of Citadel being the easiest to install has always been a driving force behind the project.
I didn't realize that at some point we not only achieved parity with Exchange on this, but that Exchange then took GIANT STEPS BACKWARDS in ease of installation. There's no such thing as an easy Exchange installation anymore. There's a giant list of prerequisites to put together in Active Directory. The installation has dozens of places where it can fail because you didn't prepare the system properly. Then it simply completes and gives you no instruction on what to do next. When you find the "System Manager" application, more often than not it fails to initialize and doesn't tell you why it couldn't connect to your "organization." You have to go digging through the event log to figure out what went wrong. Then once you do connect, you have to manually create recipient policies, mailbox policies, send/receive connectors, and a bunch of other stuff that Citadel has ready for you right out of the box. Microsoft's attitude seems to be that if you're a large organization you should make use of an MC$E that paid megabucks for training, and if you're a small organization you should be using their cloud service instead of an on-premises (or on-private-cloud) server. So here we are, just as I suspected we were: we've got the small organization space available for takeover with very little effort. Keep up the good work, guys -- and let's dominate this.
