Anyone using Exchange 2007 in production?
Discussion
It's very good, miles better than 2003 in my opinion.
How strong a case there is for upgrading depends on how you're using Exchange 2003 and whether or not you stand to benefit from any of the 'ground breaking' new features.
For example you're not going to see much benefit of 64-bit architecture and it's scalability if you have several hundred users on one server, because 2003 and 2007 are going to cope and behave similarly without pushing the box to any limits.
On the other hand in the above scenario if messaging is critical and you're desperate to implement some form of clustering but can't afford a decent highly available SAN solution (a position held by many small / medium sized companies) then Exchange 2007 is going to give you options that simply don't exist with 2003.
I also think that mobile access, especially OWA and support for smartphones, is much improved.
Tell us a bit more about the scale of your environment and what features in particular you think you may benefit from.
How strong a case there is for upgrading depends on how you're using Exchange 2003 and whether or not you stand to benefit from any of the 'ground breaking' new features.
For example you're not going to see much benefit of 64-bit architecture and it's scalability if you have several hundred users on one server, because 2003 and 2007 are going to cope and behave similarly without pushing the box to any limits.
On the other hand in the above scenario if messaging is critical and you're desperate to implement some form of clustering but can't afford a decent highly available SAN solution (a position held by many small / medium sized companies) then Exchange 2007 is going to give you options that simply don't exist with 2003.
I also think that mobile access, especially OWA and support for smartphones, is much improved.
Tell us a bit more about the scale of your environment and what features in particular you think you may benefit from.
At present we do fall into the "beefy server with a few hundred mailboxes" category, and that server is up for replacement at the end of the year which means I need to start thinking and planning.
We currently have a SAN and a couple of clustered ESX boxes, redundant switches etc. although that's new so things like the Exchange system are still on physical hardware.
For mobile access we're already making use of OWA and of course RPC over HTTPS.
The thing that strikes me is that the license costs alone for 400 or so Exchange 2007 CALs could buy quite a lot of hardware to make a more redundant 2003 based setup.
In short as with IT departments everywhere I'm being squeezed and I'll need a bloody good justification to move to 2007 from 2003.
We currently have a SAN and a couple of clustered ESX boxes, redundant switches etc. although that's new so things like the Exchange system are still on physical hardware.
For mobile access we're already making use of OWA and of course RPC over HTTPS.
The thing that strikes me is that the license costs alone for 400 or so Exchange 2007 CALs could buy quite a lot of hardware to make a more redundant 2003 based setup.
In short as with IT departments everywhere I'm being squeezed and I'll need a bloody good justification to move to 2007 from 2003.
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