Exchange Server SE set to debut just before 2019 version breathes its last Microsoft has finally broken its silence on the fate of on-premises Exchange, and administrators will need to move quickly to keep their servers supported. Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 are due to drop out of support on October 14, 2025. In a post yesterday, Microsoft confirmed there would be no last-minute reprieve for either …
‘Everyone who’s interested in platinum should definitely check out "Lotus Notes R5 Competitive Analysis" on \\boweb \bodocs\Polar\jan25.
This is a comparison of platinum/pkm (the project code named tahoe) and notes R5 I’m about 1/2 way through and have found it to be fascinating reading It’s the best concrete document I’ve seen so far on some of the many cool things that the platinum store does and on why betting on platinum is a good move for the server extensions (because tahoe is taking competition with notes very seriously and adding features that compete with notes -’
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“In Platinum we’re making a big investment in web/filesysten/Office integration, in an effort to merge the way that users and corporations use and manage their documents, email, and web content. We believe that will represent a significant advantage, and one that will be very hard for Lotus to emulate.
The lack of a tightly integrated tools story for Platinum wall be a major competitive weakness that won’t be addressed until Visual Studio 7 & Office 10 (and even then only if we dramatically increase our investment). We are also investing heavily an NT5 integration, optimizing our product’s performance and administerability for this platform alone.
Along these lines, the Active Directory integration will be a mixed proposition in the near term, but will represent a big win for both Microsoft and customers in the long run. Our continuing strong enterprise-DS focus is both a strength and a weakness, though, since Lotus is taking a grassroots approach that will likely allow it to get de facto deployment in many of today’s heterogeneous network environments.
The overall Microsoft response to Lotus has been uncoordinated and uneven to date. Since Notes features touch many different product areas at M~crosofl, many teams feel that Notes is a competitor, and each of these teams are building features to compete with Notes and in some cases positioning their products directly against Notes.”
Exchange and Notes, after all these years.
Neither should have survived the 90's, frankly. The Exchange team has been consistent, you have to give them that. In the consistently under performing sense. All so people could put off the inconvenience of getting familiar with anything other than using Outlook for an email client. The same one that spent 20 years trying to convince the world that RTF was a sane and reasonable format for email source coding. The same one that would gladly store more mail in a .PST file than the PST file format supported.
Then there is Notes as it's main competition for being a stubborn and irrationally cranky nightmare for admins.
If it didn't imply there was a just god somewhere else I'd swear this is hell and we are being punished for our sins.
Some of my 'sub 10 staff' clients have been moved over to IMAP because of the subscription threat. I ask if the loss of the 'out of office' or synced address books will be an issue and usually get a no, or I show how to add a Outlook rule.
Not everyone wants 365 nor subscription and forcing subscription won't make everyone run to 365
We only recently migrated to Exchange 2019 and the costs of keeping all the MS VMs up to date are staggering in comparison with any fairly standard unix setup and that's not including the annual SNAFUs that Microsoft seems to manage: the most recent one with Exchange even led to a poorly worded e-mail from our internet provider. I'm definitely going to assess the competition next year: the clients can wait but I'm fed up of massive VMs for fairly trivial services.
Aside from extreme privacy or regulatory requirements running an on premise email server is one of the more expensive options these days, especially if you've got under a 100 users.
I loved running a lot of mail servers 20 years ago but it's starting to feel like admins could be doing other things for a commodity service.
Depends on costs.
From my experience a few years back when I was looking to replace Exchange 2013 for a third-sector client with circa 30 users and intending to grow to circa 50 users, the on-prem and 365 costs were very similar over 5 years, extend the line out to the 10 years… given most nt funding excludes 365 subscriptions and prefers capital costs, on-prem was the preferred financial solution. Now things have changed as MS revamped their third sector offering making it more attractive, yet grants still exclude costs associated with 365…
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