I finally have some time to respond to these claims.
I would like to make it clear that I am simply responding to facts and have
nothing against Public Shareware's competing product and that my comments
are based on experience and not studies.
Gartner estimate may well be correct at UKP89/user. In smaller environments,
we find 2-3 hours/device to be an accurate estimate. As the number of
systems grows, the amount of time necessary decreases dramatically. It takes
us about as much time to migrate 20 systems as it does 200. This is
documented with our customers. Why such a time period? This is not truly
related to migration of data, in most cases, but more to catching up with
best practices lapses. 9 out of 10 cases will have no backup, no UPS for the
"server" machine, malware infestations (the infamous popups), highly
customized Outlook with various add-ons, and a lot of general training and
cleanup.
If the customer simply wants to go live with SBS 2003 for 20 desktops to
immediately start using the entire feature set starting with their NT4
domain or a peer-to-peer network and worry about data migration later, this
can be done in a matter of 4-5 hours.
I will go on the record to say that we can enable customers to begin
receiving Exchange benefits immediately after the deployment of SBS. The
legacy data migration does not take long either and depends on their current
groupware solution. This point is moot in the context of this discussion
since we focus on Outlook 2003 as the centerpiece of the common solution.
OK, so what is the business of Lucid8? Their business is to deliver value
through removing the human factor of Exchange management. As such, they will
offer quotes that further support their position. I am not a PR professional
and spend more of my time helping people than reading various studies.
I was considering writing software similar to Lucid8's a few years ago and I
may yet do so - I can leverage the Exchange BPA XML files courtesy of
Microsoft and automate the thing. At this point, I will make a claim that
Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is good enough for most customers to help
provide the most stable Exchange environment possible on that particular
hardware.
Practically speaking, Active Directory corruption in small environments is
not common. Active Directory is not a black box and it in fact shares the
ESE technology with Exchange for its database. The technology is based on
standard enterprise concepts - a database and a transaction log. Best
practices stipulate the separation of the transaction log from its database
to a different partition, and ideally a different set of physical disks.
Most of the supposed AD corruption is simply a manifestation of customers
choosing to cut a few too many corners and is directly related to hardware
failure. A properly deployed server, which means the user simply followed
the wizards and activated the backup wizard can be rebuilt in under 4 hours
from bare metal. We can do an Active Directory rebuild much faster than that
in about an hour from a System State backup. I do not view, based on my
experience as a recovery specialist for Windows 2003, Active Directory
corruption as a risk factor in SBS environments.
Exchange Server 2003 is legendary as far as reliability of the solution is
concerned. Customers wishing evidence of this fact need only to look at
Fortune 1000, of which the ovewhelming majority are Exchange users. Yes, the
database may get corrupted. However, there are tools available to fix that
corruption and there are a lot of Exchange experts available to fix these
issues. Exchange relies on transaction logs for data integrity and if
properly configured is extremely difficult to break. In just about all cases
I linked Exchange database corruption to disk failures. In a typical small
business that never even heard of RAID levels, you'll find the situation
more to be like "All of our data is gone!" vs. the typical Exchange down
scenario where the situation is "Our stores have dismounted. We need to
replace the failed disk drive and to restore the database. We then need to
remount the stores."
Customers who do not have have in-house expertise - Microsoft provides
unlimited no-charge web-based support to Software Assurance customers. They
don't need to pay me to come in and fix this as Microsoft will do it for
them.
My biggest concern with Public Sharefolder is that it relies on PST files.
PST files are known to be easily subject to corruption and there is no
transaction log generated and the utilities available are frankly not very
robust. If faced with Exchange database corruption vs. PST corruption, I can
recover Exchange with a much greater chance of success. Moreover, there are
very serious limitations in this format:
1. Pre-Outlook 2003 the file limit for a PST file was 2GB.
2. While this limit has been raised to 20GB in Outlook 2003, it is a far cry
from the 75GB per mail store in Exchange 2003 SP2.
3. Opening large PST files over a typical small business network will stress
the network, which will substantially increase the risk of data loss.
4. Attempting to use Outlook over a VPN with PST files is far from
enjoyable. The cached mode of Exchange does not exist in this
implementation.
I enjoyed this discussion, but... ;-)
... why don't you click this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297019&sd=RMVP
The title of that article is "Personal folder files are unsupported over a
LAN or over a WAN link". For the benefit of readers, I'll explain that PSTs
are the short technical name for "personal folder files". This means that
Microsoft will advise the customer that the configuration is not supported
when they call about PST file corruption issues.
I am aware that MAPI through DCOM is used to access the networked PSTs so
the file-level limitation does not necessarily apply in this case.
In other words, we are discussing here a potentially unsupported method vs.
an enterprise grade solution that is usable on very low bandwidth devices
and scalable to hundreds of thousands of users that every other vendor is
attempting to emulate.
We are addressing this with Small Business Server 2003. The cost of hardware
is irrelevant. I can technically put SBS 2003 on a PC platform. I am sure
you advise your customers to put your software on a server system.
Cost of installation - I can bring up a new SBS2003 machine in 4 hours from
scratch. Typically this is done much faster. 2-3hrs per device, ideal case 5
minutes. I can overlap working on desktops and the server.
Maintenance - 5 hrs per month for the entire account
Downtime costs - none. Sorry, but it's possible. $20/year for MX backup
service actually.
Hidden costs - none. This is not a recurring license charge. Software
Assurance is optional.
Server upgrades - none specifically required. For greater resiliency, these
upgrades will match those that your product would require.
SBS2003 cost - $599 for 5 users, retail. Includes the domain controller,
Exchange server, web server, Intranet, Outlook 2003 for every user, Outlook
Web Access, remote access through Remote Web Workplace, VPN etc. Your claim
was $750 for just Exchange. SBS2003 costs a lot less and gives the user both
Windows Server 2003 Std and Exchange 2003 Std. Combination of the two would
normally cost over $2000 with all the licenses.
You may have had a case if your solution was inexpensive at say $20/user,
however, license costs are all too similar and your product does not provide
any of the additional value-added features of SBS2003.
Your own support forums are full of problems with XP SP2, antivirus apps,
firewall and so forth. The solutions in the FAQ start with "Open Registry
editor". Guess who opens Regedit? The consultants that your clients hire to
fix it for them do. All of that is bypassed with Exchange.
Recommended scenario, and tell me if this recommendation doesn't apply to
your software:
1. Hardware RAID1 for system
2. Server OS
3. Active Directory
4. 2GB of RAM
5. Dedicated mirror for mail storage
That's just basic system resiliency.
Costs to deploy the above to support Public Sharefolder in terms of time if
done from scratch with Windows Server 2003 Std? Windows Server 2003 Std
actually costs more than SBS2003 does! SBS2003 is a deeply discounted
package of enterprise technologies. Costs to monitor this Windows 2003
Server Std, setup backups etc? It will actually be more - no built-in
monitoring wizards, no built-in backup wizard. In this case you will need an
MCSE because it's all too easy to not configure DNS correctly and break
things.
To summarize, the supported method is to use Exchange. Any other method is a
crutch. With the release of SBS2003 there is no reason to look at any other
solutions, especially if they leverage unsupported methods using PST files.
I am afraid you'll have to innovate because your solution is now obsolete.
By the way, you can access Exchange 2003 with older Outlook clients, web
clients, mobile clients, POP3 clients, and IMAP4 clients at the same time.
Microsoft does not require you to upgrade Outlook. I can access Exchange 5.5
with Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003 with older Outlook.
There is some upfront cost with upgrading the entire infrastructure so we
don't have to worry about a single disk failure and such, but if all things
were equal, such as installing in a virtual machine on some workstation, as
a lab example, you would find that SBS2003 would delivery significantly
better value to the customer and to be a much better supported scenario.
Further, if data corruption were to be introduced, with Exchange I can
restore a previous backup and not lose any transactions since that backup.
This is not the case with PSTs! With PSTs, if I restore that backup, than
all of my e-mail activity since then is gone permanently.
By the way, since you love quoting statistics...customers report 947% ROI on
their SBS2003 deployment.
That's is not the high...that's the average
a.. Exceptionally high return on investment (ROI)
ROI for the surveyed companies averaged 947 percent and ranged from a low of
63 percent to a high of more than 2,000 percent.
