I’ve been laid off – which means the end of the Migration to Exchange Post series

I knew it was inevitable, but I’ve been laid off on grounds of “cost cutting – due to economic crisis.”

As a result, I won’t be continuing my “Migrating to Exchange – One Domino Admin’s tell all journey” series.

I hope it was informative to those out there that haven’t had the chance to work with Exchange, but have heard all the hype over the past few years.

Here is my summary:

  • Microsoft is not the best solution, but it does integrate well with it’s other products (desktop, email, document management, proxy servers, firewalls, security). You can have an end-to-end solution. There are obviously downsides to putting all of your eggs in one basket, but it has to be said.
  • Microsoft Sales team promises alot that they can’t deliver.
  • If you use Microsoft Engineering team to implement what the Microsoft Sales team has sold you, you will get proof positive on the previous point. Even the Engineering team will admit that they’ve oversold you.
  • If you are going to migrate to Microsoft, get a 3rd party independent consulting company to implement it for you or at least help with managing the project.
  • When migrating to Microsoft, keep an eye on the cost of additional hardware, the cost of SQL server licenses, and the cost of bandwidth upgrades which will be inevitable and make sure and factor in those extra costs. You won’t have a server for server comparison between your existing products and Microsoft. You may be able to use virtual machines for some of your systems, but some of the systems require physical hardware and/or cannot exist on the same box as other servers.
  • Single Copy Storage that Microsoft has touted for Exchange is a myth (for lack of a better word) and Microsoft Engineering is actually recommending against factoring it in as a disk saving attribute when doing capacity planning. Single Copy Storage is only valid across each Exchange Store (database) on an Exchange server, and typically, you will have several Exchange Stores on each server – so the benefit is minimal.
  • Only a certain number of mailboxes can exist on an exchange server and those mailboxes must be split amongst different Exchange Stores (databases). There is recommended limit to how many stores you put on each Exchange server. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than the Domino database model and Domino’s DAOS (which is server wide).
  • I can’t stress enough how much more bandwidth you will need compared to a Domino infrastructure.
  • There were many things that I felt Microsoft did much better than Domino, such as the Calendaring and Scheduling, but I won’t get into that here. :)

…..and yes, I am interested in contract work, please contact me at the link on the navigation menu (upper right).

7 Responses to “I’ve been laid off – which means the end of the Migration to Exchange Post series”

  • Keith Brooks says:

    Sorry to hear, but you knew going in the likelihood of the outcome.
    Nice insights from the posts.
    On the bright side you are now an Exchange Migration expert and can help others.

  • patrick picard says:

    Thank you for the insight re: migration to exchange. Our head office made the big move 1-2 years ago. The number of servers they have is insane.

    Luckily, we have many dbs in notes and the move has no business case….unless the head office’s IT eats our IT….

    Sorry to hear about the layoff. However, it does look like you were enthusiastic about the move to exchange, so it might be an opportunity to go back to your roots, or try an entirely new venture. Best of luck
    Pat

  • Sorry to see you go. Your posts have been most enlightening and serve as a good warning to all those who would make emotional decisions about business infrastructure.

    Who knows, you might get re-hired by the same people when they need to move back to a stable and manageable system.

  • Paul Benwell says:

    Like the others said sorry to hear you got laid off (been there myself a couple of months back).

    I came late to your blog (found it via ed Brill) but its been a fascinating read going back over all the ups and downs you had.

    I have already made some notes in case an customer decides they want to migrate just so they realise what it is they want to take on.

    All the best and thanks for an amazing blog journey.

  • Paul Wilson says:

    Similar story at the company I work for. 6 fold increase in exchange servers over domino plus bandwidth requirements as you point out. I’d like to know where you think Microsoft Calendaring & Scheduling is better than Domino. For me C&S is elegant in Domino with one mailbox for many (or even all) resources as opposed to one mailbox per resource in the Microsoft World.

  • Michael Dwyer says:

    My cynical side says that the reason they let you go was to get some funds to pay for the 102 MS servers.
    You’d think that there would have been a cost/benefit study done in light of the impending global financial crisis, or didn’t the financial types think it could happen to them?

  • [...] few weeks ago, I posted about the fact that I had been laid [...]

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