Exchange Sucks
IWLTA that Exchange is a piece of crap. I always thought it was a decent mailing system, and it certainly has the best integration of mail/calendar of any server out there. Boy was I wrong.
A couple of weeks ago, our Exchange server at work crashed and burned. I mean hard. No incoming email, no access to archived email, nothing. The reason for this? Get this, it has a built in limit of 16 GB! That’s right, you cannot store more than 16 GB of mail in your this Exchange server. And if you do hit the limit, exchange crashes. Not stops and complains, chrashes. And, deleting mail doesn’t free space, you have to delete the mail and then run some offline database compression program to actually get the space back. And, if you hit the 16 GB limit, you can’t start Exchange back up after it crashes to get the space back, you have to run the compression program and hope it gets enough space back to bring exchange back up so that you can delete mail so that you can take exchange back down so that you can run the compression program so that… You get the picture.
Anyway, here we are, weeks later, and mail still takes hours to be delivered, and that’s mail sent from inside the company. With any open source setup, there wouldn’t have been any stupid limit, and even if it crashed, we could have built and installed a replacement server in a day. No go with exchange.
Microsoft? You suck.
Ah, you didn’t pay the extra money for the enterprise edition, which has no such limit . . .
Yep. Exchange sucks hard. Taske a look at some great alternatives, such as the Open Source, free SME Server (which needs a commercial plugin if you need calendar sharing). It’s great for my clients who want to spend about $400 dollars on a solid, stable server and run everything Win2003/Exchange does for no OS cost, eith a couple of small exceptions (like shared calendar).
This computes to a savings of roughly $9,000 (not even including per seat licensing fees fopr both Windows and Exchange) for a far simpler, stable solution - and without a tacky 16 gig limit (which has been increased, but is still ridiculous).
You can edit your servers reg and knock that limit up to 75 GB
http://www.zdnetasia.com/techguide/storage/0,39045058,39356304,00.htm
Exchange sure does suck … for an alternative, check out Citadel [ http://www.citadel.org ]. It is a free, open source groupware server that can completely displace Exchange. Access from all of your favorite client programs, plus a really good ajax-enabled web front end as well. Easy to install and maintain, too.
Ditto what ig said. I moved about 500 users from Exchange to Citadel earlier this year and never looked back. And no 16 GB or 75 GB store limit either. It maxes out at 256 TB (yeah, *tera* bytes) which is hopefully more than my shop will ever need