It was just over two years ago that Michael Vizard of eWeek wrote:

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.

Unfortunately the actual article is no longer available, but if you Google ‘michael vizard exchange pain’ you’ll find enough references to the article to prove that it once existed. Obviously this referred to earlier versions of Exchange, but it would seem that things haven’t changed much. To the casual observer it would appear that every new version of Exchange brings significant differences to the architecture, presumably as they attempt to fix deficiencies. Remember that their approach to e-mail storage changed with Exchange 2010, potentially causing a huge increase in the storage requirements.

Today, a handsome and enigmatic Scotsman sent me a link to Ferris Research’s blog, and the article in question starts…

It’s impossible to keep in control of Exchange / Outlook PST files. All in all, their management is a major pain.

I’ll be honest and say that I’m no expert on the Exchange architecture, but it’s interesting to see it’s administrative tools being described as “not a scalable solution” and the word ‘pain’ invokes a sense of deja-vu.