[sdw2003] L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Googleand the cloud

[Raleigh]

We have no intention of outsourcing our email system. I suspect that many email system admins and security admins would never consider this because, quite simply, your organization's confidential mailbox data is floating around out there somewhere in Google's storage cloud. That's fine for my personal email (I use Gmail for that), but not for confidential corporate email.

The Gmail web interface is fine as far as webmail goes, but it doesn't compare well, feature to feature, with Outlook. It simply can't. It's a web interface.

I've been an Exchange admin for quite some time, and I find Exchange to be a very solid product in Microsoft's lineup. It has been extremely reliable, and highly integrated with AD. Exchange is extremely popular in corporate America (~80% market share) not because admins *have* to run Exchange, but because they *choose* to run Exchange. Of all the things on our network that I would consider outsourcing or using a non-MS product, our email system is the least of them. Outlook/Exchange are a solid combination. Each version has been an improvement on the previous one. I will not hesitate to upgrade our system to Exchange 2010. 

This is the first time that I've heard someone refer to Exchange as a "mess", and I'd be curious to hear what administrative experiences they've had with Exchange to give it such a label.

--Raleigh



Raleigh Moody
Network Engineer, MCSE
Associate Director of Information Technology
California Western School of Law
San Diego, CA | 619-525-1406 | ram at cwsl.edu



-----Original Message-----
From: sdw2003-bounces at mattware.com [mailto:sdw2003-bounces at mattware.com] On Behalf Of Tracy Reed
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 3:27 PM
To: San Diego Windows 2003 User Group
Subject: Re: [sdw2003] L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Googleand the cloud

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 03:09:09PM -0700, Thaddeus Braun spake thusly:
> Any thoughts on this? Anyone already "clouding" their email offsite for
> a whole company of 50+ people?

Many universities have already done this successfuly (so far):

http://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+university+email

They say it is cheaper than running a campus email system. I'm not
sure how I would feel about it for my company. But I'm all in favor of
anything that unseats that mess that is Exchange. If I get one more
"so-and-so would like to recall the email they just sent" message I'm
gonna go nuts. :)

PS: This list is the only one of the 118 mailing lists which I
subscribe to (but obviously don't read on a daily basis) which
flat-out rejects attachments of any sort including GPG
signatures. Pretty much every email you have ever seen me post here
had to be sent twice: once with the GPG signature attachment which got
rejected because I always forget to tell my MUA not to sign and then
once again without the GPG signature. I like to think this implies
something about the email security mindsets of the different
communities in which I participate. :)

-- 
Tracy Reed
http://tracyreed.org
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