Microsoft Exchange (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly)

by Bryon D Beilman

In the IT world, Microsoft Exchange can evoke a range of emotions. I find that people either love it or hate it and surprisingly not much in the middle. The range of emotions can be justified and are many times based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), some of the love is based on the scalability or the rich feature set while other emotions stem from that which is required to keep it running or what is needed to recover it when it breaks.
Let's take a moment to explore some real life scenarios about Microsoft Exchange and related mail platforms. While thinking of Exchange, put in the back of your mind the famous whistling music of the classic spaghetti western "The Good, the Bad & the Ugly" as we explore this realm. Before you read further, please realize that I am not an Exchange expert, but have experience with MS Exchange and many other mail platforms.

The Good

Why do people like exchange and why do executives demand exchange? Have you ever been in a company that does not have exchange where you have senior management and sales managers who want to manage calendars, contacts and have push technology to mobile devices? It turns out that (cue music here), there is nothing better than Microsoft Exchange for this functionality. Scheduling meetings, conference rooms, public folders and sharing contacts adds real value to a business. Most enterprise class mobile device push technology works with Exchange. Goodlink, Blackberry and now Microsoft's own email push technology all keep people connected. I am a big fan of Good Technology's Goodlink server over Blackberry's Enterprise Server for functionality as well as their pricing models. If you haven't heard of good, just go to http://www.good.com . (Their domain name alone is a gold mine, but they were also just purchased by Motorola).

Getting back to exchange; There doesn't seem to be anything that competes well with Microsoft Exchange for this functionality. Lotus Notes is the "other" commercial enterprise email platform, but is clunkier and does not integrate well with the Microsoft Office Suite, which is the de-facto business standard. If you started a company today, you might be able to try Google's gmail with calendar, but then all of your proprietary data is on the wild wooly Internet. I have worked for quite a few companies who spent significant amount of time configuring Open Source alternatives that offer full Collaboration suites of email, calendaring and office. I will explore them briefly, but in summary, they never worked as well as Exchange and the promised seamless integration, was not in fact not seamless.

Who are the valid competitors?

Oracle Collaboration Suite - An enterprise class email suite that should present itself such that outlook clients do not know the difference. I have worked at a company that made servers that excelled at running Oracle and the performance of this application (at the time) prompted them to dump the product and go back to the drawing board.

Sun Java Messaging Server - Sun's products have gone through many iterations in the past. They claim to have Outlook connectors and if deployed campus wide, could provide a messaging and calendaring platform.

Zimbra - A very respected open source alternative to messaging.

Lotus Notes 
It has been a while (1999) since I used and supported a Lotus Notes server. Without recent experience, I would venture to say that it has Enterprise quality and reliability, but I have not heard of anyone who wishes they had Lotus Notes.

There are at least a dozen others that can be used in combination to provide messaging and collaboration. It shouldn't be difficult, right? After all, there are published protocol standards for SMTP, IMAP, POP, MAPI, HTTP and HTTPS. You can, with minor effort glue together your Postfix MTA with your SquirrelMail webmail, and your UW IMAP and POP server and you have the fundamentals to build on without spending money on software. But will your users like it, love it and be productive with it? They very well could, so it is up to you to determine your own requirements.

The Bad

So, why do people hate Microsoft Exchange? There are Microsoft bashers and people who are true to the open source movement. There also regular IT professionals (esp. those in the UNIX arena), who don't like the fact that behind the scenes, Exchange is a database and if they need to make modifications, it is not as easy as tweaking a configuration file or relocating a mailbox to a different directory. Some of it is FUD, some of it is legitimate. One of the challenges of managing an Exchange server is backing it up? There are many ways to back up an exchange server with many different products, but have you ever had to "restore" a server from scratch? I will get into that a bit later in the next section. The security of Exhange has come under scrutiny as it relates to the general security of Microsoft products and although a well architected and secured Exchange server should provide a robust messaging platform, many sites have policies of not allowing Microsoft servers to be connected directly to the Internet. The licensing of an Exchange server is certainly more than the open source model and the more reliable you want the server, the more you pay. If you want to separate your Exhange and OWA, or want to provide clustering, that is more cost.

The Ugly

The ugly has particularly bitter taste for the writer as it bring back memories of losing my memorial day weekend on two separate occasions with two separate companies because of an Exchange failure. In both cases, it was not Exchange that failed, but it was a disk. In one case it was losing two disks of a RAID 5 and the other case was losing one disk of software RAID 1 and having the other disk become corrupted. I mentioned briefly about backing up MS Exchange, but how do you recover?

The most recent failure was the failure of an OWA server. It had no data, but only configuration files. It had good backups including a full backup using shadow copy. But how do you restore an OWA server? Well because Exchange is integrated with AD, and the files are integrated throughout the application and OS space as well as the registry, the way you rebuild and recover an Exchange server is ...(cue music here), very carefully. It turns out that in order to recover the guts of any Microsoft server, (and you cannot afford a cluster), is to use a product such as Acronis True Image or a product that you can recovery the exact files in a bare metal recovery scenario. Otherwise it is having exact build procedures, accurate change management logs and copies of patches and software as well as exported SSL certificates and custom gifs. When reinstalling Exchange, there is a nifty install flag called /DistasterRecovery that helps, but it is critical that you have a tested backup plan when it comes to Exchange.

To summarize, Microsoft Exchange offers a wide range of experiences for email and collaboration. If you want the beauty of Exchange without the hassle of administering it, you may look to managed Exchange services offered by companies such as Intermedia and Together 123.