Exchange

Exchange 2007 Migration

I’m sleeping better at night. We’re in the middle of a major project, part of which involves consolidating way too many e-mail servers onto a single Exchange 2007 server. We never really planned to end up with as many e-mail servers as we did, but through a combination of growth and acquisitions, we somehow ended up with 6 of them servicing about 200 people. It was way too many servers for the number of users, even in a multi-office environment. We’re in the process of fixing that now, moving all of our users onto Exchange 2007. Prior to making this move, our primary server was running Exchange 2003, and the hardware was becoming shaky to the point we held our breath every time we restarted it.

I’m a big fan of Exchange. We’ve been running it since Exchange 2000 was released, and I’ve watched it become stronger with each subsequent release. This thing is a workhorse, and it’s been incredibly reliable over the years. When we have had issues with it, we’ve found Microsoft’s Exchange support to be more than equal to the task. As a result, we’ve had a solid track record of providing e-mail service to our employees.

While it’s probably a bit early for me to be singing the praises of Exchange 2007, what I’ve seen so far has proven to be incredibly useful. First, we had to move our storage databases off local storage and onto our shared iSCSI storage after we rolled out the server. (Our EqualLogic box arrived after the Exchange box.) Moving the databases was something which would have terrified me with prior releases. In fact, I’ve never even considered doing it. With Exchange 2007, we simply utilized the wizard and moved all of our databases on a Friday evening. We finished the DB moves in about an hour, and most users never even noticed an interruption in service.

Currently, we’re in the process of migrating our user’s mailboxes onto Exchange 2007. We’ve completed the move for 3 of our offices, and we’re in the process of moving 4 others. In the past, this type of migration meant a Saturday in the office moving mailboxes. With Exchange 2007, I literally do sleep through the moves. We schedule the moves overnight, and when we start the following morning everything is finished. Out of approximately 120 mailboxes moved so far, we’ve only encountered errors on two moves, and neither prevented the mailbox from moving. When they arrive in the morning, our users don’t even realize they’ve been moved.

There’s much more to Exchange 2007 than moving databases and migrating mailboxes, but so far I’ve been impressed. One of the other reasons we moved onto Exchange 2007 was the addition of Unified Messaging. That’s the next step in our implementation, and since that service is new to Exchange 2007 I’m prepared for some growing pains. However, when I consider the pain we’ve experienced with telecomm voicemail systems over the years, I’m actually looking forward to bringing this service into Exchange. Regardless of how that implementation goes, I’m sleeping better these days knowing that the foundation of my e-mail services is in good shape.

Unifying Communications

One of the things our company prides ourselves on is our collaborative nature, so the concept of unified communications is especially attractive to us. It’s one of those buzz words you can’t escape lately, and it’s coinciding with our own need to integrate another office into our infrastructure, and it’s driving us to take a fresh look at how we communicate internally.

We took our first run at Unified Communications when we installed our current phone system. Unfortunately, we had barely gotten the effort off the ground when we encountered issues with new versions of Outlook and Internet Explorer. The unified messaging and unified communications apps were breaking down on us before we could even get users trained, and our vendor was telling us the solution was to delay upgrading our Microsoft apps. Since the drive to Internet Explorer 7 was largely driven by desire for increased security, we decided to give up on our initial attempt at unified communications. Furthermore, the unified messaging and unified communications apps themselves added another layer on top of what we were already using, and learning yet another app was not high on anyone’s list.

When I first heard about Microsoft’s entry into unified communications, the idea of using our existing apps and e-mail server for delivering these services had a great deal of appeal to me. We’ve been exploring this option for the past 6 months, and so far we like what we’ve heard. When we added a new office location recently, the final piece of the puzzle may have fallen into place. In the past, integrating a new office into our infrastructure meant that we pulled their phone system out and installed a new system which was compatible with our own. It was expensive and disruptive. The promise of being able to integrate different phone systems into a common telecommunications software back-end offers some huge advantages to an expanding company. Whether the reality lives up to the promise remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to be worth a look.

Stay tuned because we’re just getting started on this path, and I’m sure it will make for some interesting stories in the coming months.

The iPhone – an Enterprise device?

Now that Apple has announced the long-awaited SDK for the iPhone, I thought it would be a good time to discuss mobile devices. We’ve had a policy restricting employees from purchasing their PDAs/Phones and tying them into our network, but over the past 5 years we’ve still managed to reach the point where we’re currently supporting 3 different platforms/devices (Palm, Blackberry, and Windows) .

We certainly didn’t wake up one day and decide that it would be a good idea to support three different mobile platforms. In fact, from what I’ve seen and heard, we arrived at this point like many others have done. A senior manager or CEO shows up on our doorstep with a new device and says “make this work” I envy those of you who are able to successfully fend off all of these requests, and I would note that we do manage to deny more requests than we approve.

I’ll actually take responsibility for introducing the 3^rd platform, which was Windows Mobile. I was never particularly fond of adding Blackberry or Goodlink servers to my environment, so when Microsoft added push capability to the Exchange servers I already owned, I jumped in with both feet. Don’t get me wrong, the Blackberry and Goodlink servers are both good products, but given the opportunity I’m more than willing to eliminate the middleman. I also find the provisioning process to be much simpler on the Windows platform. We’re currently in the process of phasing out a Goodlink server which supports the Palm devices, so soon we’ll only be supporting two platforms.

Which brings me to the iPhone, and I’m certain that our phasing out of the Palm platform and Goodlink will coincide with our phasing in of the iPhone as an Enterprise platform. In my mind, the recent announcement of ActiveSync support for the iPhone seals the deal in terms of our supporting this platform. We’ve already got several senior managers using the iPhone, and they’re actually content to access e-mail via Outlook Web Access. Once we can deliver push e-mail directly from Exchange, I can’t see any reason not to use this device as an option for mobile e-mail, particularly in our business. I’m thrilled that it’s going to work directly with Exchange. We’re signed up for the beta, and I look forward to testing this as a mobile option for our organization.