Exchange your Exchange servers

I’ve always worked for companies that have thought that Microsoft Exchange server provides them with the necessary stability and security to keep them in their jobs. The problem is that this comes at a cost. The cost is born by the employee. Here’s a list of my favorite Exchange pet peeves:

  1. Exchange has the worst mobile compatibility I’ve seen. My job means that I have to work with many types of phones, many of which offer some rudimentary Exchange support, none of which has worked seamlessly.
  2. Exchange Webmail sucks. Period.
  3. The Exchange client for Mac, Entourage, sucks.
  4. Exchange has no easy way of removing duplicate entries, such as emails or contacts.
  5. Search? Fuggedaboutit.


There are a few administrator-level evils that I’ve run into over time. The first is not upgrading to 2003. I’m not sure why this happens: budgets, maybe, or just plain laziness. This is perhaps the second worst crime against users that a technology group can pull. Especially that small portion of us using Macs. See Mac users have this thing called Mail. It’s not the greatest email app ever but it works just fine and a damn sight better than Entourage. Mail supports Exchange 2007 but, sadly, not 2003. So, while I’m not a fan of Exchange, I’m much less critical of 2007.

Small-sized user accounts. Okay, maybe at one time a 400Mb ceiling on an email account was unthinkable. But these days 300+ emails a day are de rigueur and you plough through the ceiling on a pretty regular basis. No problem you say, set your machine up to Auto Archive to your local machine (ignoring the fact that Entourage doesn’t have an Auto Archive function, oh the joy). The problem is then you’re stuck with less than a month’s email available online while traveling or on mobile devices and all your rich history of mail is archived on a local drive. Great for the Exchange admin, but this is an extra onus on the user and you can guarantee that the local drive will burn out right before I finish “Auto Archiving” (aka Drag and Drop) and take years of work email with it. Way to go, technology services, you’ve made my life slower and more difficult than it used to be with POP, with none or very few of the advantages of IMAP. Oh wait, I forgot, I’m not being fair, Exchange has calendars.

Here’s where a little capitalism might come into play. Why not create multiple tiers? Sure, Theresa in Finance probably isn’t going to get 20Mb mockups every day, that she has to keep for over 6 months. For her the 400Mb limit works. For heavier users, just bill us. Honestly. I’d pay $39.95 a month for 10Gb of Exchange space. And I’d spend $200 on your damn well-overdue 2007 upgrade. As it is, I spend over two hours a week pruning and fixing this broken system. At market rates, the economics do not make sense for me to spend any more time than, say, 30 minutes a month worrying about not having enough email space.

Oh, and did I mention that I want it on my mobile. Not just on my BlackBerry, but on every mobile device that I have the pleasure of testing.