You still have 2gig mailbox limitation/corruption in exchange? That died around Exchange 2000.

Call me when you reach 4Tb public folder structures and a few 16gb mailboxes. How about a calendar with over 30,000 entries in it?

Lotus Notes is the biggest POS out there not only will you have local client database corruption and why do clients need a local database why cant the application create it on the fly?, your clients will hate it with a passion, but having to use IBM support services will nearly bankrupt your company. Dont believe me then hire them and watch how they embed java script that cant easily be migrated over to any other system.

interested_party - Im trying and I tried to find common ground. Fighting off ancient complaints about the exchange products.

I just didnt like the Zimbra guys generalized statement that the typical exchange server experiences 4 hours downtime a month. People/companies that pull numbers like that out of their arse need a good beat down. Its like saying the average Zimbra user has herpes. Could be true but its a BS statement. Maybe Zimbra is a good solution for those who have bad IT departments for whatever reasons. God knows I have seen a lot of them. Been on a few interviews where the people interviewing me dont have a clue about Exchange also. I am willing to say Exchange may not be the solution for every environment especially the smaller shops which cant afford a an IT admin. But Exchange is a very solid system that is evolving. These one off companies with their one trick they do over Exchange doesn't mean superior yet they yell from the roofs about thier one trick. Its the same with everyone yelling they have the iPod killer and some players have a few good tricks but has anyone seen them dent the iPod market share? So far every complaint I heard about Exchange was resolved years ago or the Admins just dont know what they are doing.

I'm a better man than both of you two put together.

I am trying to make a joke out of this.

You cannot win an argument, only alienate a possible future ally. I think you are both pretty smart, better at IT than me (so you both claim anyway, lol) but, perhaps, you could learn to walk away when it's not worth fighting for something that doesn't matter. Such as a comment on a comedy IT news website.

Have a good twenty-ten.

Look systems like groupwise and lotus notes (not sure about zimbra since I have never used it) allow for 4 GB inboxes and in the almost 6 years I administered it I never saw one mailbox corruption .... can exchange do that... oh btw saying that exchange 2010 or 2007 can is not a possible answer since well that version needs to be around for 6 years for it to be able to prove it.

Exchange 2003 has had this kind of problem frequently at 2GB inboxes ... one thing that so many messaging engineers like your self do is to limit the inbox to 1GB.

Your probably saying "who would want a 4GB inbox?" well everyone... no one wants to use archive or PST or what ever they want it all in one place.

Exchange 2010 DAG has not been around long enough to prove shit.

When ATM's went away from unix/os2 is when BSOD on them started and they still do hell last year I saw not only ATM but train/plain arrival/departure screen go BSOD or have a nice little Vistaish error message appear. So until windows can actually be ran long enough to prove something then I will believe it and just saying it's new and fast is not enough.

Sometimes new versions can regress in every area imaginable. Take for example Vista, great example. XP took about 3 years for the code to stabilize so from my opinion XP was one of Microsoft's best ever system since it was around for at least 5 to 7 years in full force. This is the kind of stuff Microsoft (The richest, most influential/powerful/resource/.... software company in the world) they should do all the time being who they are. For all that MS has they should be untouchable period but all too often some young bright kid on his own can code stuff better with higher quality then they do. That is pathetic. Compiz Fusion is a great example of MS being made a mockery by people coding in their spare time can do.

Yes, yes this isn't exchange your right but this kind of apathy that MS often shows in other products is all too often seen in others. Get back to me in 2015 and let me know how exchange 2010 worked out for ya.

PS you said you worked for AV companies to help improve the software.... that is extremely vague, improve what, the interface, the algorithms, the correlation engine ... just curious.

Ed it must be true as a reps signature contains

Zimbra, a Yahoo! Company

Read up on Exchange 2010 DAG I think you will be surprised.

FYI I have like I said 2 diplomas one in Electronics Engineering Technologist (poke poke) and one in Computer Networks Engineering Technology. So yep we are at the same level actually since I have the second diplomas I would technically be above but for arguments sake I will just stick on apples with apples ... I would never defame the title Engineer by saying I'm an Engineer. The reason why they use "Engineering" instead of Engineer is because in Canada no college can call a graduate an Engineer.

I am not an Engineer and would never use that title and I would never claim to know as much as Engineer. In about 4 years from now I will be an Engineer and from that time on only I will use the title.

If the paper hanging on your wall says diplomas you are not an Engineer but if it says degree then you are.

Agreed about the quality of admins around but there one point of contention which is Microsoft stuff works well when all other systems are microsoft, so if you are not a microsoft shop you will have problems. This is because they purposely choose to not be compliant to IEEE standards. You do know what IEEE is right?

One of the latest examples of this is the XML standard that microsoft paid to get fast tracked through the standards entity, ie: cheating, undermining and making the standards organization a mockery. There is a reason why standards are set ... let me ask a simple question:

When wanting to make a claim to your insurance company for damage to your car do they accept only 1 quote or 3?

I'm basically trying to make this point clear and there is a good old addage that can be used "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"

How can you guarantee redunancy when relying on one company alone. And please don't reply back with the obvious stupid answer of "uh a cluster?" this is rhetorical.

@db

I hold an electronics degree and can program in 5 computer languages. I designed a memory chip that IBM patented as V-Ram. I Have been consulted by an Anti Virus company on improving thier product. The type of meeting they pay for you to visit with them to discuss changes. I have dissected Viruses but dont have the time to currently and I dont get paid to do that. More curiosity than anything else. Ive written several programs that not only monitor servers but correct the system along the lines an admin would. Fully automating the actions of an Admin unlike crap that just sends off warning messages (Mimesweeper and Blackberry to name two systems)

I certainly feel I am justified in using Engineer in my title.

Someone like you should know your system is only as good as your Admin and blaming the system is usually a sign of such a poor admin. I certainly have seen my share of Linux/Unix admins which should never approach the keyboard but does that mean Linux/Unix sucks? No because I have worked with Engineers who can make Linux/Unix run like I can make Exchange servers run. Its a scapegoat when you have admins that blame Microsoft for their short comings.

IT is one of those fields that is saturated from all these overnight tech shops that tell everyone you can make 80k a year right out of school after a few weeks months in a training class. You too can me an MCSE in 2 weeks. MCSE certification has been a joke for a long time since the Answers to the exams are easily found and passed around as employers think its a measure of technical ability. I have met plenty of PAPER MCSE's and a few that didnt even own a computer. IT is full of dead weight admins that hide behind blaming systems instead of themselves when something goes wrong.

As I told an Electronics Engineer once who threw his title in my face. I fix all the things you didn't design correctly.

Best of luck in your new career. I understand your choice to change.

"Global Messaging Engineer"

Wow impressive, where I live (Canada) we have something called "criteria" to have the privilege of using the term "Engineer". I've been in IT for 17 years and I have administered Unix, Linux and Windows servers. As Patrick mentioned that with any/all *nix systems you can actually update services without a reboot requirement since with these type of systems being that they are modular they allow for core components to be closed updated and restarted. Other then kernel updates (which btw can be done without a full reboot... bring system down to bootloader and reload the kernel) you don't need to reboot ever.

I mention the Messaging engineer comment above because I will be going back to school full time because I've grown tired of dealing with people who love to have big name titles such as your self to fool others into believing that your something special. Exchange technicians (which is what you are) are a dime a dozen. This is also an other reason why I'm leaving IT is the lack of integrity that many IT people have. I'm a security analyst although I'm not really a monitor monkey like most people would assume I actually reverse engineer malware which actually requires me to step through assembly code bit by bit until the malware reveals it self. No offense administering a network/domain controller/exchange servers was something I did when I graduate from my second college diplomas. So with very little experience I actually do what you call Engineer.... oh btw this was for a multi-national corporation (Thales) with over 10K people working for it all over the world. So yeah I could use the GLOBAL MESSAGING ENGINEER title but I'm not pretentious hence the reason I don't call my self a Malware Reverse Engineering Specialist which is what the title of the certification I got that supposedly means I'm an expert (Someone is at best an "expert" for a little amount of time nothing more).

Guess what I'm going to university for Electrical Engineer... and you know what here in Canada as I mentioned above it is a privilege to use the title Engineer because you actually have to do the equivalent of 4 years of courses at a certified university and you must take an oath of Engineering which does actually have consequences such as, if you fuck up large your name will be put in a book that all graduating engineers in Canada get to see (also businesses get see I might add).

I know that some other countries do not have such stringent criteria for the privilege of using the title Engineer but some countries it actually means something. There is a reason why Canada requested Microsoft to not use the term MCSE because paying 1K for 6 tests (that can be memorized easily) does not grant the privilege of using this title. I have been using this term for years to represent what the acronym MCSE "Must Consult Someone Experienced". So please spare the world of your facade.

I do agree with you about consultants though since I've been a consultant for a little under 2 years now I find such bullshit attitudes by them but that pales in comparison to the apathy I see from permanent employees. There is a reason why consultants are used... if they fuck up they get canned very quickly where as perm employees do have much more protection from being fired for incompetence. Also if we are not there we are not paid, nor can we take vacation when we want or might be out of work for a few months at a time and we actually have to document every little thing we do which from my 17 years of experience I can easily say this is the biggest thing lacking in IT. After all if IT shares knowledge then we actually might have competition and might be shown the door because someone is faster and better then we are.

I am very sorry for bashing you but dude when you throw a title as pretentious as "Global Messaging Engineer" be prepared to be insulted by people who know better.

PS: The 5 certs I have I never put in my email signature for that very reason. I am humble and don't believe in that male cow excrement.

I patch/reboot any servers with ports open to the Internet as security patches are made available. My non public servers get patched monthly depending on what the fix is for. The point is that you can do a complete version upgrade on zimbra 5.x to 6.x without rebooting the box. Another giant advantage zimbra has over exchange is how portable the system is. backing up and restoring is just a matter of tar and untar. Entire system can be moved to a new server in less than a hour.

db
Ive been a Messaging Engineer for Lucent, Merial, Merck, Schering-Plough, Pfizer, and have worked with Wachovia and Bank of America. Patch Tuesdays generally occur monthly and there are not patches every month for Exchange. In addition a lot of patches aren't necessary to deploy immediately if you know your surrounding infrastructure and whats a real issue and a non issue.

Patch Tuesdays and weekly reboots are what contractors due to get easy overtime money from moronic managers that dont know any better about their infrastructure. Just like one place I went to that did monthly defrags of the exchange databases. This is generally where IT people rip off the company with bogus maintenance and scare tactics.

Yeah, "patch tuesdays" (wednesdays where I live) are the only reason we re-boot our exchange servers, and a cluster deals with that "outage" issue.

Also the support costs... hmm a unix tech is more expensive then windows tech but since unix servers on average go down 1 to 2 times per year (even if it is for a 30 minute period) it still costs less then windows support... Have you ever worked in an ops environment?

Do you know about "Change Windows"?

BTW this doesn't mean removing windows but at what time can the update be applied. All too often IT environments are understaffed therefore overtime is usually paid for techs to come in a 2am to 6am to patch things up. So your supposed costs differences are moot. Oh yeah one thing that I find no one ever thinks about when it comes to using proprietary software is migration costs... the world economy could be saved if we didn't have to spend trillions world wide to migrate from Office version x to Office version x+1.

Hell every man woman and child in the world could easily get 10K USD for what migrations costs world wide.

Mike what he is saying about the reboots is the "Patch Tuesday's" or do you never patch your servers??

This blog post provides a look into what is really driving VMWare's acquisition of Zimbra: http://scaledb.blogspot.com/2010/01/vmware-zimbra-and-virtualized-software.html

Patrick why in the world are you rebooting your servers weekly? Thats a clear indication of admins that dont know what they are doing and think reboots are the answers to their problems. If your preaching about Viruses on your exchange environment your certainly 10 years past due for knowing how to prevent that. Your organization is a perfect candidate to be outsourced to someone who knows what they are doing.

J-Rod MAC's run outlook fine. Otherwise they would be pretty useless in the work environment. Everything a MAC can do a PC can do and at less cost to support.

Zimbra is licensed per mailbox, so you can easily set up a 10 server cluster for the same cost as 1 server. MS would soak you beyond belief for that ability. Exchange has lots of cool features until you ask them, "does that work on a Mac?" at which point they roll their eyes and say "no." Now I'm a huge MS fan, but the reality is that unless you are a Windows-only shop, you will not get what they advertise. Plus, the licensing is a big issue and MS royally soaks you pretty consistently. They remind me of NetAPP.

We have been running zimbra for about 4 years and I would say its uptime is fantastic. We have 20 other MS servers that need updated/rebooted every week or so compared to the yearly reboot I do with the nix based zimbra box. Also I would say you need a bit of unix knowledge to set one of these up in an enterprise environment which your typical MS admins are not capable of. Moving to zimbra from exchange was one of the best decisions we made as our availability went up considerably. I disagree completely with the above statement. You cannot get the same availability on a public facing windows server as you can on a NIX box without running multiple machines/cluster. Also guess how many virus's came through our mail server and attacked customers machines running outlook? Zero.. because we don't have to run outlook.

Places like Zimbra pray on the organizations that have poor IT departments. I watched the demonstration where he mentioned that Exchange based organizations have an average of 4 hours downtime a month. They pull stuff like that out of their arse and present this to bad upper managers who buy into this crap because they dont know or budget correctly to solve their problems correctly.

Let me say if you see 4 hours downtime per month on an Exchange based mail system you have either an Admin, Monitoring, Hardware, Budget, Management, or Network issue that needs to be resolved.

Companies that have bad management Outsource. If it fails they can hide behind it being a failure of the outsource party. If they have internal and fail its on them. Thats the bases of management that want to outsource everything instead of being able to properly manage.

Are you sure this isn't also a defensive move against Google? If organizations move to Gmail, VMware loses them as a potential customer. If EMC / VMware can offer hosted Zimbra and will also sell it to you (and can hope you run it under VMware, obviously), they can counter that.