It must be lovely being a Microsoft Exchange customer. All your users are happy because they have a nice shiny Outlook client and don’t know any better. However, you have to wonder if the boys in the back-room view it the same way.

I get a lot of mileage out of Exchange’s roadmap (or lack of it). I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject - why should I be, I don’t work for Microsoft, do I? No, I just tell customers to go and ask Microsoft the right questions.

Over the years we’ve been told that we have a slim window of opportunity to tackle Exchange customers. Exchange 5.5 upgrades (upgrades?) to Exchange 2000 for example - the absolute requirement of Active Directory and an upgrade that was really a migration made a lot of customers stop and think. Although there are still a few Exchange 5.5 customers around, that window of opportunity has all but closed, but Microsoft kindly open another. An ‘upgrade’ from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 cannot be carried out in-place… mail boxes have to be physically moved from one server to another. And the server hardware has to be 64-bit-compliant (maybe no biggie these days) and the Windows operating system also has to be 64-bit. All this hassle and then you find out they removed active / active clustering. No wonder Dell where pushing migrations to Exchange - they knew they’d shift more hardware.

Here’s the latest - Ed Brill, as usual, beat me to it. According to Network World and based on advice from Microsoft themselves, “it is impossible to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2008 on a server running Exchange 2007 SP1″. Hang on, haven’t these people just moved big chunks of data from one server to another? Or many servers to many other servers? Now they have to do it again?

Microsoft also has said “rolling upgrades” of failover clusters for Exchange are impossible.

Ed noted that Microsoft say “in-place upgrades are not considered a best practice and that most large IT shops do thorough testing before deployment”. Yes, most IT shops (large or small) do carry out thorough testing before deployment. That’s almost a “duh!” moment. However, I’m sure many thousands of Domino customers would disagree on the other point. While it’s true that many customers would take an upgrade as an opportunity to look at the server estate and potential for consolidation, if you told a Domino customer that they had a mandate to move server code and data from one box to another they’d want to know what the f*** was going on. Exchange customers may accept that kind of stuff as business as usual, but Domino customers don’t.

If all this sounds like great fun, you might do well to consider two things. One is an article on eWeek, Exchange Equals Profit, which discusses the fact that services organisations are going to make a lot of money out of Exchange customers because of all of the above. And it contains one of my favourite quotes from 2007…

“Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations.”

Secondly, what about the future of Exchange? As yet they have no published roadmap beyond Exchange 2007 (other than spending time and money on a Windows 2008 upgrade). The smart money is on a version of Exchange which utilises SQL Server under the hood. This raises all kinds of questions… like what’s the matter with the current architecture, does this mean the architecture Microsoft want me to upgrade to is already dead, and (here’s the biggie) is this going to be a simple in-place upgrade or a migration? We’re talking about Exchange’s current object store (which is a bit like the Access database format) versus SQL Server - do you think that’s going to be straightfoward?

But like I said… don’t listen to me, I’m no expert on Exchange. These are just my observations. Yes, I’d prefer to spend time talking about Notes / Domino and how great they are… there will be blog posts on those topics in the coming weeks. I believe that it actually shouldn’t matter what Microsoft are doing, we at Lotus have better solutions for e-mail and collaboration. Period. In the meantime, make sure you understand the implications of the Exchange roadmap - talk to your Microsoft rep and demand answers.