Fud Buster Friday #37 - Exchange 2010 is Going to Kill Domino

While perusing InfoWorld magazine this week I came across an amazing piece of fluffy reporting from someone who should be able to do better.

His quote

Reliability has improved in Exchange 2010

Damn well hope so! One of our clients who we are migrating from Exchange report failures monthly if not weekly. Conversely my Domino servers stay up until I down them for upgrades(OS,Domino,Java etc.) once a quarter.

So aside from the great title, "First look: Exchange 2010 beta shines", what is so great?

First, Support for Windows Server 2003 is dropped in favor of Windows Server 2008 only. Okay, so we will see more push to move up to Windows 2008.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) will finally be ported to work with Safari and Firefox. Nice, iNotes and DWA under Domino has had it for some time, in various iterations(yes I know version specific, but at least it exists today).

Voice Mail Previews? OK, it provides a speech to text way to read your voice mail. Hmm, so why send the vmail at all as an attachment? Google just showed this recently. Nice piece actually, I hate listening to vmails and my phone doesn't play them so this I would like to see in Domino.

Users can create server distribution lists. WOW! And to think users had that capability, with proper security in place since version 1 of Lotus Notes. Welcome to the security world Microsoft.

Managers can search other employees mail files. With approved security. I hope so!

And they could not do it now because? Microsoft saw no reason to let you do it. Only Admins could search across mail files.

"The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) allows users to control their own server settings. Changing a user's mobile phone number in the global address list used to require a help desk call." It does? Really? Granular security coming to Microsoft finally. Thanks Ray for adding Lotus Notes functions that are 20 years old!

He says

Users can also control who can see their calendar information and in what detail: I might want my supervisor to know when I have a doctor's appointment, but all a colleague needs to know to schedule a meeting with me is when I'm free and when I'm busy.

What a concept, again, where have you been Exchange?


Mailboxes can now be moved live without taking the user offline. Isn't that how it should always be done? Again, Microsoft plays catch up.

But he says

Moving a mailbox from one server to another formerly required taking the user offline for at least a couple of hours, not to mention night and weekend hours for the mail administrator.

OUCH!

There was also this amazing insight:

Exchange 2010 now allows mail federation between trusted companies. This is especially powerful when it comes to scheduling meetings using shared free/busy calendars; suddenly, you can schedule meetings with your business partners as easily as you can schedule meetings within the company. You have the same fine-grained control over the detail that business partners can see in your calendar as you do over what colleagues can see. Another improvement in scheduling is that conference rooms and other meeting resources can be scheduled along with the attendees.

Ho Hum, thanks for following the Lotus Notes world, again. And that improvement in scheduling is also nice to hear so you can gain some parity with Lotus Notes calendaring.

So your boss wants to stay, or go with Exchange because he likes being the laggard instead of the industry leader?
You can also go back and read Ed Brill's post from last week about this and the volumes of comments about it.