This article on ZDNet makes an interesting read on the pros and cons of Exchange 2010.

Bear in mind that upgrades to an e-mail infrastructure are never trivial – they require planning, execution, resources and funds, and sometimes carry a small amount of risk when moving from a mature stable version to a newer version. Although I show a slide with successive versions of Domino and the word ‘upgrade’ plastered all over it, I recognise it’s often a major undertaking for companies with thousands of users. However, it seems that Microsoft are willing to pile more risk on their customers and ask for more resources and funds.

Imagine you’re a customer running Domino 6.5 and you want to upgrade your servers to 8.5 – I’m not going to say it always takes just 30 minutes per server because often customers will use an upgrade to implement new capabilities, consolidate servers, tidy up aspects of the infrastructure and so on. But Domino upgrades can be performed in-place and allow customers to skip versions – 6.5 to 8.5, no problem – and servers can actually be upgraded in 30 minutes.

Compare that with the considerations for Exchange 2010…

Exchange 2010 is a 64-bit-only release. Other caveats: users who want to run Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 together must upgrade to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2. And Exchange 2007 also won’t work at all on Windows Server 2008 R2, so users who want to run Exchange on the latest and greatest Windows Server release have no choice but to upgrade to Exchange 2010. In-place upgrades from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 seemingly are prohibited.

Now imagine that you’re in charge of the Exchange upgrade – you have 30 Exchange servers, but the lack of support for in-place upgrades means that you have to build a new server and then move all the mail data from the Exchange 2007 server over to the Exchange 2010 server… multiplied by 30. So you need more servers (all of which need the latest 64-bit operating system and require hardware capable of supporting it), more time and by moving so much data across servers you have just substantially increased your risk of something going badly wrong. Also note that there’s no mention here of a direct upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2010 – it’s probably not possible, but feel free to correct me. In the Domino world there’s really no major hurdles in upgrading the 2003 release (6.5) up to the late 2009 release (8.5.1). Imagine telling a Domino customer they can’t do an in-place upgrade.

We’re currently working on return-on-investment cases, but it’s fair to say that we’re seeing a cost of ownership reductions of  30% or more in upgrades from 6.5 to 8.5. The huge improvements in scalability could see an even higher reduction in cost for some companies depending on their existing server estate. DAOS, which provides an average reduction in mail storage of around 50%, is another big factor in the cost reduction. But I always say that customers should look at the future… and also the past. Domino has a long history of upgrades – never a migration, never a requirement to move data from one server to another. Yes, server operating systems such as Windows NT have been dropped and hardware does get replaced. Look to the future and you can be confident that in-place upgrades will continue. Look at the Domino server requirements and you can be fairly certain that Domino will be less fussy than Exchange about what it runs on. Got 32-bit hardware, got Windows 2003 Server? That’s okay – it’s what we call ‘protection of investment’.

I’m not going to deny that here in Lotusland we speak to some customers who are considering a move to Exchange. Funnily I’ve never heard the compelling reasons be anything to with the server, it’s always about either Outlook or an Enterprise Agreement that provides the software for ‘free’. On the subject of Outlook, I’ve found that a good look at Notes 8.x goes a long way to stem the cases of Outlook lust. On the subject of ‘free’ software, IBM run Project Liberate in order to show customers how much money can be saved on their Microsoft licensing… and even if the software is ‘free’ (which it’s not) the cost of the migration per user completely wipes out any cost benefit several times over. Oh, and then the annual cost of ownership will be higher. And we haven’t even got onto the subject of the mission-critical Notes applications yet.

Let’s imagine a customer running Notes / Domino 6.5 – they’ve reached a fork in the road, do they upgrade to Notes / Domino 8.5, or do they migrate to Exchange? A Domino upgrade will be the lesser of the two projects in terms of disruption, risk, cost, man-power and will deliver a scalable robust secure solution with a world-class flexible (and great-looking) collaboration client. What about the Exchange route? The current product is Exchange 2007, but Microsoft have advised anyone not already on Exchange 2007 to forget it…

At TechEd, keynote presenter Bill Veghte, senior vice president for the Windows business, said companies testing Vista should stop and move to testing Windows 7. The same advice was repeated for users who have not yet moved to Exchange 2007; they were told to skip it and wait for 2010.

So, Microsoft say that customers should deploy the new version when it ships in October or thereabouts. Hands up, how many Domino customers deploy a .0 version of the software? Oooh, not many, and here we’re talking about an upgrade to a consistent architecture. So how many want to deploy Exchange 2010 before it receives it’s first service pack? If you have your hand up my personal opinion is that you need your head tested. Service pack 1 for Exchange 2007 was released one year after the initial server release. For Exchange 2003 the first service pack came about 7 months later. Based on this, let’s take a guess at Exchange 2010 service pack 1 coming Spring next year.

In summary, Domino customers at this decision point have a choice – they can upgrade now and start to realise cost savings immediately, or they can wait until Spring 2010 to start an expensive and risky migration project that really won’t save any money at all.