Sat
20
Dec '08

Exchange 2007 Sucks

I write this post as a response to a friend's Facebook wall posting. I started to write a response to him, and ended up writing this much-longer-than-allowed entry instead.

My employer has moved to Exchange 2007 twice. The first time, it was completely unusable for Mail.app users, which also happen to be 100% of our development team. Of course, that's not going to fly. We moved back to 2003, time passed, patches were distributed, and it became time to move again. We're still on it after this current move.

So, why does Exchange 2007 suck? Oh how I can count the ways.

  1. The CLI (PowerShell) sucks. "Get-ExchangeMailbox -identity blah ..." is incredibly, unnecessarily verbose. It's like it tries to get GUI people to realize the power of a CLI, making it needlessly complex and wordy. This could be made better if tab completion gave you a list of options, like in Bash, but instead it picks the first option. Therefore, you have a 1/n chance that it'll actually be the item you want, less so if the first command (alphabetically speaking) is one you use less often. You might as well not implement it at that point. Also, I wouldn't have a problem with the CLI if the GUI wasn't half-assed - IMAP and POP3 GUIs didn't even show up until SP1.
  2. IMAP is a second class citizen. This goes for POP3 as well, though we don't have many (any?) users on it at this point. Mail.app used to speed along just fine with Exchange 2003, and now it's a dog on 2007. Granted, I have thousands of email messages in my Inbox, but I never had a problem before. Please fix this, so I don't have to wait 5 minutes in the morning just to get my email.
  3. Creating mailboxes is slower than before. I used to be able to create mailboxes when I created the user account. This is no longer the case, requiring me to log in to another application after the user's been created just to create a mailbox for them. Why?!
  4. Performance in general sucks. I am 100% certain that I could serve the same number of mailboxes on a PII or PIII server running Linux and get better performance than the quad core, 4G RAM, 10K in RAID 1 server we bought specifically for this purpose. Logging in to Server 2008 is incredibly laggy, waiting for the Admin Console to open up is even slower. Pathetic. Did I mention this is on Gigabit ethernet?
  5. Backups? Nah. Their "backup solution" sucks. On the aforementioned Linux box, I could rsync the backups to another folder, or another server, onsite or off. Cost: $0. Exchange 2007, however, is no longer compatible with the old ntbackup system. You need to get (read: purchase) Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a product with a horribly long name and dumb limitations. I'll admit, the shadow copy system is really nice; I like knowing that I could restore down to within an hour of a problem. Want to do offsite storage? HAHA, I don't think so, not without a tape drive. Yes, we use disks since we're small enough that they're economical. Also, we can't send a tape over the VPN to a different part of the country, can we? Nope. Of course, you could buy Cristalink's Firestreamer product to simulate a drive and use a file as a "tape" - but that'll cost you another $250.
  6. SSL? Don't need that either! I don't care if SMTP sends messages in plain text - I want to secure the connections between our clients and our servers with SSL to protect passwords! What happened to this? It was in 2003...
  7. Added 2009-01-08: Just TRY and get your data out. So Microsoft is really pushing the 64-bit platform, releasing 32-bit binaries only for testing purposes, not as a supported production system. That's fine. However, why do I have to use a 32-bit computer with Outlook (another product that requires purchasing, now that it's not part of the CAL) just to export the data? I want my data out of your product without hoops or additional costs. Too much to ask? Sure, I could jury-rig something up to hit the POP3 or IMAP connector, but that seems a tad inefficient, don't you think?

So, as it should be plainly obvious by now, Exchange 2007, despite it's new bells and whistles (which, incidentally, cost more money), sucks at its core functionality - being a mail server.

This entry has 8 comments:

MEC2 says:

Agreed 100%. The CLI is a joke - the product is called MICROSOFT WINDOWS, why am I dropping to a command line to perform functions that should be in an admin GUI? As noted, the admin console is hopelessly slow, it's a memory pig beyond compare, it is simply grotesque. 8 cores and 8GB and it is STILL a slug. MS has driven Exchange right into the ground with 2007.

dave says:

I agree too. I think this new product is HIGHLY inefficient in soo many ways. I am thinking its a worse bomb than Vista.

Dan says:

Nice review. I'll definitely steer clear of that one. *pats his Linux boxen*

Raphael says:

Couldn't agree more! It's nice of MS to offer another way to do things (CLI), but it's cumbersome and almost completely different to 2003 and 2000. No longer seems AD-integrated, backups don't work and with every SP it seems to lose some functionality. Just try setting up a shared mailbox on this one- you're blood will boil!

steve lavoie says:

Thanks for coming out and calling it what it is. It is a good revenue stream for Exchange support people. The CLI is a throwback to the dos era. I'm on the phone with support almost every month for one issue after another. 3 servers Isa, Edge, Hub WTF!!!!. Don't even get me started on certificates and edge subscriptions. Memory leaks, slow performance. Thanks for the vent!

Jason says:

Mandating the overly complicated, easy-to-break Autodiscovery crap for simple features like Out of Office assistant was a nice touch too. I'd much rather manually configure 150 Outlook clients than deal with this BS. Nothing but regret...

Mike says:

I know this is an old post but damn. here its been over a year and exchange 2007 still sucks. I recently installed SBS 2008 on a new server recently which of course comes with exchange 2007. The one thing I did want to point out is this: because of the nature of SBS2008, all exchange roles are on one box. The problem comes into play if you use a 3rd party certificate so publish owa, active synch, etc externally. These retards at Microsoft have basically mandated that you must use a split DNS with your server AND a new type of certificate called a SAN certificate. Right now there's only a handful of providers that even offer this crap! basically it allows for the use of both internal and external names for one certificate. If you do not do this, the offline address book will not download to internal clients and whenever they open outlook, they get an error stating that the name on the certificate does not match. wtf is an internal client doing contacting an exchange server over http anyway when MAPI is available? I don't care if public folders are no longer used...using http for exchange is just plain stupid especially if it requires all of this extra crap in an SSL cert. Exchange is a mail server....what in the hell is Microsoft thinking? there is absolutely zero need to over-complicate email like they have done.

Spuddy says:

Well if you thought Exchange 2007 sucked balls (and it does) then wait till you get a load of 2010; it's an even BIGGER pile of shit!

Comments are no longer accepted.