Tell us what you think: Silverlight for Exchange management UI?

It's an interesting idea; my concerns would be:

* People need to admin their servers locally, and it's preferable not to install things like java, flash and silverlight onto servers.  These tools are for browsers and internet surfing, they get vulnerabilities, they need patching.  I'm a firm believer that the less there is installed on a server, the less there is to go wrong.  You might argue that you shouldn't admin locally, but *never* admin locally?  

* The MMC was supposed to be the unifying admin interface, and the concept is sound.  I'd be wary of having different products administered in different ways.  

But I'd say something needs to be done, development of the management UI has fallen behind and it's no longer fully functional.  Powershell has great potential, but it's not strong on "rummage around until you find what you need".  Everything that's in Powershell should be in the UI, whatever that might be.

Silverlight as new OWA GUI thats fantastic. But Silverlight as a new Management GUI i think this is the breakup. The Management GUI in a Webbased Technologie rewriting is a bad idea. We have seen this be the change from a Standard GUI to a Web Java GUI on a populate Antivirus Product. It was no longer useful for us. It had so many bugs and problems only from the GUI and not from Product him self. I now that Silverlight is not a Web GUI but it coms from this World and it is on the moment a Child from the Technologie. And finaly all Other Microsoft Application GUIs ar NOT in Silverlight. Keep it consistent with all Other Product.

I vote for Silverlight within EX 2010 management UI!

Great! Though I'd even take JAVA on Ubuntu if it gets more configuration tasks out of Powershell. : )

Just took the survey.

How about putting EMS in Silverlight?  I, like James, rarely open the EMC unless it's quicker to find the info there vs. the EMS.

I would love to be able to hit a web browser and execute saved scripts, cmds, etc.

I agree with Jon.  Granted I spend much of my time in EMS and mainly use the Gui for basic things and for that "feel good" value of seeing things set correctly.  As long as you don't do the same thing that was done with Exchange 2007 pre-SP1 and release a Gui that is very limited in showing what can be done/configured in Exchange then I guess it doesn't realy matter.

A Silverlight version of the EMC would be fantastic.  Would definitely make it easy for field engineers to show up onsite and just launch a web admin panel for their customer's Exchange org.

Maybe something that could also be published via ISA etc.

I was under the impression that the GUI was just that, a GUI for Powershell running in the backend. Would silverlight still function in the same way?

I'm going to take a non-end-experience approach to commeting on this.

I'm not enthusiastic about Silverlight as it doesn't have, for example, real windowing. I would say that using Silverlight as the interface is a great idea if it means greater development productivity for the MS Dev and MS QA teams to produce the same (or more/better) UI. If DHTML/AJAX is more productive and quality-testable for the same basic tasks, stick with it.

I come from a mindset where I believe that a product is only as good as the developers' experience was, because the end product its their fruit. For example, a *good* DHTML/AJAX developer not hampered by the oil+water scenario of ASP.NET Web Forms + custom Javascript can get much done very fast and produce a very high quality product. Silverlight's developers are new to productive development workflow because Silverlight itself is still relatively new.

I think this would be a brilliant feature, if the tools are at least as complete as the admin console is currently.

Silverlight is certainly a lot easier (and already largely present) install on a system than the existing toolset is, so accessing them as an OWA extension would be fantastic.