Dan Lynch's Blog

When upper management or others ask you to participate in the process of evaluating why you should continue to run domino vs going to exchange, here are some key questions to ask Microsoft and why, that'll help you size, cost and specify a potential move to Exchange, and so those who may be footing the bill will know how much the MS path may cost.

1)  "Can you provide an Exchange messaging architect please?"  Do not allow yourself to be lulled into thinking you'll get difficult questions answered by the legions of pre-sales exchange people that Microsoft will make available to you.  They will burn your time regurgitating the sales hype about Exch 2007's improvements, and will not be able to answer detailed, technical questions without agreeing to follow up later, and will give you generic and/or wrong sizing information.  If the questions are difficult and the answers will portray MS in a less-than-ideal rosy light, if your experience is like mine, you'll never get answers from pre-sales people.   Insist on someone who understands the detailed architecture, sizing, protocols and associated services in depth.

2) "How do I size my Exchange 2007 environment in the event I want to use BES and Blackberry also, in terms of the relative load a Blackberry user will place on Exchange, using the load of one Outlook mapi user as the measuring stick?"  Ask the smart guy they might provide to you in #1 this question.  If the answer is that one BES user places the load of 4 Outlook/MAPI users, which added to his Outlook client means that one user places the load of 5 Outlook users, you've found an honest Exchange person. 

3) "How do I get the double-byte character set support for Asian/Pacific languages in Exchange 2007?"  The answer to this question is that you must pay the ongoing annual 33% costs for software assurance, for both the support on workstations and for support for Exchange in Asia pacific regions.   This expense is obviously a non-factor for Domino.  Microsoft has chosen to hold basic functionality required for a global company hostage, until the SA ransom is paid.  Aside from again reaffirming that MS is really just a marketing and sales engine, it just feels wrong to have to do this if you are a cost-driven entity.

4) "How many pieces of wintel hardware do I need to buy to replace my domino mail environment?"  Exchange requires 3 server roles (for non-edge services) to provide some of the functionality you can do today with domino, and in all but smaller environments, these will require 3 different pieces of hardware:  one for mailboxes, one for client access and one as an email relay that talks MAPI to the mailbox server.  Be sure to include your remote sites where you have one remote domino today.  If you are using partitioned domino servers today, this count of servers for the MS solution will be much significantly higher than the count of your host machines today.  If you are not using partitioned domino servers today, the count will still be higher, given you need 3 to do what one domino does. 

5) "Does Exchange 2007 support VMware or other virtualization?"  Although I've read that some have been able to get Exchange to run virtualized, Microsoft stated to us that it was not supported.  Domino has supported this via partitions for a long, long time.  This obviously increases cost, complexity, management and headaches with much more hardware required to do the work.

6) "Will Microsoft ever port Exchange to Unix, Linux or other more scalable o/s?  An obvious question and more obvious answer, but fun to see the look on the MS guy's face when you ask this.  It has further implications for long term cost, scalability, stability, security, etc, etc.

7) "I'm concerned about the security issues with the Microsoft web server, can I run OWA (Outlook web access) or other required web services for exchange with something like apache or other more secure web server?"  Another obvious answer, but a question that bears asking for due diligence, and to make your security people happier about Domino web services.

8) "How many additional tools will I need to buy to administer Exchange from the admin side?"  If you like being able to see what domino is doing in real time at the console view in the admin client, you'll not have that capability with Exchange.  Other admin functions that domino admins have had for many years will require add on tool from MS or 3rd parties.  Adds cost, complexity, etc.

9) "Our attorneys have advised us that due to the needs for litigation and e-discovery, we need to disable message recall.  How do you turn that off in Exchange?" It cannot be disabled in Exchange through the native admin capabilities.

10) "How many people will I need to manage Exchange for my environment with a given Exchange sizing?"  The answer to this one for many domino shops that are not overstaffed today, will be substantially more people to manage the servers and the clients (ie help desk) for the MS stack.  In our case this was "3 to 5 more help desk people and 1-3 more email admins".

The answers to these questions will help you begin to build a quantitative case to help choose a mail platform for your company, based on qualified, real information, vs using the typical pre-sales nonsense you'll get from MS.  In cases where you are already running on a more scalable platform, and you have domino virtualization already in place, and where up front cost and long-term TCO is important, Microsoft will have an uphill battle making a compelling case to change your environment.  If you add other aspects of drinking all the MS kool-aid to this, like having to buy server cals repeatedly with new versions, (ie a/d cal repurchases required to go to server 2008) the choice to go MS can be very expensive.