Symetrik Domino Consulting

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).

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