What are the top ten questions IT pros have about Exchange?
Published May 11 2004 12:41 PM 813 Views

This is for our VP, Dave Thompson. He's giving a talk at Tech-Ed, and as part of that talk, we're trying to put together the top ten questions IT pros have about Exchange so that he can answer them.

These questions don't need to come from existing Exchange users or a certain type of org, we're looking for what are the common questions across all org sizes, across all customers of any messaging system.

Some examples of the ones we've heard so far are: “What is the future of Exchange?”, “How can I fight SPAM and viruses?” and “What is the future of public folders?”

Add your questions in the comments to this entry, or email us.

Thanks,

- KC Lemson

11 Comments
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What is the status of "Team Folders"?
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Your mention of spam reminded me:

I would like to filter spam at the enterprise level using an "X-Text-Classification: spam" header flag. I know Outlook supports creating a rule to do this, but that's not easy to deploy to more than 10 users. How can I create such a rule on the Exchange server-side to some/all users? For that matter, will I ever be able to manage server-side rules for some/all users in Exchange Manager?

I have searched but not found any easy solution to this. If you have any ideas, or know of plans for the future, I'd be very interested to know.

Thanks.
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Most of this comes from the company I work for right now (as opposed to a general view). I can give you my general opinion separately if you'd like but it'll certainly be more longterm.

1. Antivirus / Antispam in Exchange. By and large we're sick of paying 100K/year each just to get protection for something which we'd rather be getting from Microsoft. We'd have no problem giving you guys 250K (an extra 50K) if it meant we got an integrated, supported, managed solution.

2. Greater connectivity and stability with other platform. The Connectors are good. More Microsoft ones would be better. More stability would be better. More error checking would be fantastic, especially on shared address books and calendars. All of our connected sites have to do manual cleans every year. On 50K entries that can be a big deal.

3. Caching / bandwidth throttling is becoming increasingly important. This might be more of an Outlook thing though...

I think those'd be our biggest ones, but that's mainly because the organization is (sadly) starting a push to Novell products.
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1) When are we going to see better tools to collapse Exchange 5.5 orgs into Exchange 2000/2003 Orgs. The Exchange migration wizard/Iterorg replication tools are a start, but there are a lot of missing gaps.

2) What is Microsoft doing to prevent Groupshield from crashing my Exchange servers (if at all possible).



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More info on Exchange Edge Services would be good :)
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What does the future hold for Public Folders?
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Are there any plans to address regulatory and compliance issues? More robust (and granular) "journaling?" or archiving capabilities?

And as mentioned before - Edge Serivces info!
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What is the future of ESE?

Database replication capability (for mailbox store)?

64bit Exchange Server?

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Kodiak staying with ESE or Yukon?

Better integration with Sharepoint?

Sticking with MAPI?
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WINS Requirement?
I know it was said that the next version will not need WINS, however, it was said that this version won't need it as well... :)
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Why is XSO almost a year late now? Why won't Microsoft bite the bullet and fix the longstanding implementation problems with the MAPI layer components, probablems affecting everything from IE to Outlook to Exchange to SQL? Why does Exchange, more than any other product group, abandon API's while they are half-finished? Why won't somebody do something about the transport event sink kludge which affects a growing number of developers and ISVs each day? Why does the Exchange group habitually release code long before documentation is ready (not just supplemental docs but critical release notes and installation considerations)?
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