Some of the ways Exchange isn't working for us

I was recently asked by an employee (who's less than thrilled with our Google Apps transition) why we're trying to "fix something that isn't broken." It then occurred to me that we haven't been too clear about what we're trying to fix.

As a result, here are some of the ways in which our current on-site Exchange hosting is broken, along with the ways in which Google Apps resolves them.

Mailbox Size
Because of the costs of installing, managing, and backing up storage space, we've fallen far behind today's demand for it. It isn't explicitly broken, but our outdated limits on mailbox space have forced users to work around it in ways that result in more downsides than people often notice.

Workaround 1: Archive mail on your local machine.
This will stop the "your mailbox is full" messages while maintaining access to your old mail, but you'll now only be able to access it from that machine. Want to see it on your iPad? Mobile device? Another desktop PC? It won't be available.

Another problem this introduces is a lack of redundancy. Is the hard drive of your local machine backed up regularly? If not, a hard drive failure (not uncommon) could literally mean years of correspondence are now unrecoverable. While this may not appear as "broken" now, it certainly will to you if it's your hard drive that fails.

Workaround 2: Delete messages you don't think you'll need.
Depending on how much mail you receive regularly (and how long you've been here), this may involve quite a bit of deleting. Putting aside the obvious problem of needing something you've deleted, this also means that for each and every incoming and outgoing message, you have to consciously decide what is or isn't important enough... far from an efficient work flow.

Workaround 3: Have mail forwarded off-campus.
We should have gathered statistics on exactly how many users were doing this, but I can confirm that it was a significant chunk. If my free personal off-campus account offers 7200+ MB of storage compared to my 100 MB at Seton Hill, why even bother using my Seton Hill mailbox?

It isn't only students, though. I took a course here last Spring, and as a way of turning in homework, we were asked to e-mail our assignments to the professor's off-campus (@yahoo.com) e-mail address. Why? Because her Seton Hill account didn't have enough space. My assignments always seemed to reach her, so it seemed to work for her, but should she really have to do that? How effective do our IT department and school look when professors are forced to do things like this for something as basic as e-mail correspondence?

Solution: Google Apps
Each and every Seton Hill Gmail account comes with 25,600 MB of storage space. That's 256 times the student Exchange mailbox quota and almost 150 times the default employee Exchange mailbox quota. With sizes that high, users should feel comfortable deleting no messages at all, should never have to archive messages on their local machines, and will have substantially more storage available than any comparable personal e-mail account.

Gmail is well-known for the large amount of storage space offered.

Not only that, but users of Google Apps benefit from Google's implicit promise to increase mailbox sizes as the demands of storage increase. When Google Apps was first offered back in early 2006, the storage quota was 2 GB. In 2008, the quota was increased to over 7 GB, and just two weeks ago, it was increased to a whopping 25 GB. All of these upgrades were implemented at no additional charge.

Meanwhile, our Exchange quotas have stagnated and will only increase at considerable additional cost. Even then, we'd offer nowhere near what Google Apps and Gmail are able to provide. In terms of solving the mailbox size problem for the future, it's pretty clear what should be done.

Desktop Mail Client Support
Most of our employees have become quite familiar with Outlook, and for good reason. For most of them, it's an effective tool that they've built their work flows around using. Perhaps more importantly, it does what is needed and isn't expected to do more.

To put it simply, though, if the seamless use of Outlook represents your entire experience with e-mail here, you're either one of the lucky ones or you haven't been here long enough.

Outlook for the Mac has been nothing short of a support headache for our help desk. Users sometimes have to wait for hours on end for the mailbox databases to be "rebuilt" before they can send and receive mail. It also has poor public calendar support and contains only a subset of the features included in the Windows version. Another common complaint is that it can be slow and unresponsive at times. A select number of users have even had to deal with the unrecoverable loss of archived mail.

Outlook 2011 isn't the only client that suffers from issues, though, and it's not always just unlucky users that experience them. Many Entourage users will recall when our upgrade to Exchange 2010 completely broke the calendar feature. That is: the latest version of Microsoft's own software intentionally breaks its own clients. This was not a bug, but intended behavior. What were our options as support staff? Deal with it the best we can? Work around it? These aren't acceptable to us and they certainly shouldn't be acceptable to you.

E-mail shouldn't be this difficult. It doesn't have to be.

Windows users may have been better off so far in terms of avoiding issues like these (at least in Microsoft's own software), but they're not quite "in the clear." Due partially to the user interface overhaul in Office 2010, many users have stuck with Office 2007. Using old software isn't inherently bad, but it isn't a long-term solution. Even without this transition, Outlook 2007 will eventually stop working. Whether that's with the next version of Outlook, the next version of Exchange, or with some other upgrade or change, it will happen, and it may not be at a time of our choosing.

Even for Windows users running the latest version of Outlook, though, how do we know that it will continue to work as changes take place? After what we've experienced before, what guarantee do we have that Exchange 2014 won't break some key feature? Perhaps more relevantly, what possible excuse could we have if/when it happens? That snake has already bitten us twice since I started here, and that was only a year ago.

Solution: Google Apps
Whenever you open your Gmail, you are always using the latest version. There isn't a "new version" to get accustomed to every few years. Since Gmail is web-based, any new features or interface changes can be phased in slowly over time. This way, rather than being overwhelmed with new features while you're just trying to learn how to do what you've always done, you might see a new feature show up every few months. Even then, interface changes are typically available months ahead of time for trying at your convenience.

You also see the same familiar interface, whether from Windows or a Mac. Keep in mind that as long as employees are still using desktop mail clients (like Outlook) the way we have been, any of the things below could mean having to change mail clients and learn a new interface anyway:

• Upgrading to a new machine
• Switching to a different machine
• Switching from Windows to Mac (or vice versa)
• Upgrading to a new operating system
• IT staff upgrading Exchange

None of these things would affect how a Gmail user sees his/her mail, and it would be immediately available with no configuration necessary.

Reliability

Our on-site Exchange system has multiple commonly tested points of failure. It's a single server hosted on our single network, so any issues at all with these mean that no Seton Hill users can send and receive mail. When I first started work here last year, outages were a common complaint, and although it's happened less frequently, it's not because any direct steps have been taken toward creating redundancy. Just last month, the Exchange server was down for several hours one night just because it applied a Windows update and got "hung up" rebooting.

Solution: Google Apps

That single night of Exchange server downtime was more than Gmail has experienced collectively over the course of years. Gmail's uptime percentage was 99.984% throughout 2010 and it's on track for 99.99% this year.

Costs

Exchange costs the college substantially more to use and support, even in its current state. In spam filtering alone, we spend tens of thousands of dollars each year, and if we accounted for the time we spend supporting it and the various mail clients, that would add many thousands more. It also requires a notable chunk of our available virtual resources (memory, hard drive space, processor cycles) which could otherwise be utilized elsewhere.

If we attempted to offer services on a level similar to Google Apps, costs would sharply increase.

Solution: Google Apps

As an educational institution, Google Apps costs us nothing. Thousands of businesses pay $50/user per year for the same services. Our only post-transition cost is for archiving (discussed below).

Backup

On-site, we store daily backups of Exchange users' mailboxes to a certain point in the past (approximately eight weeks ago). This allows us to recover from a disaster, restore most recently deleted mail, or even restore an entire mailbox to whatever state it was in when the backup was run. This covers most of our needs for backup.

While the ability to recover from a disaster is important, how quickly we can do so is also important. If a fire broke out in our server room, it could take hours or days to return to full effectiveness. What if this occurred during finals week or some other busy time? What if getting the Exchange server running is just one part of recovering from a larger disaster?

Solution: Google Apps

On Google Apps, our mail is redundantly stored in multiple data centers all over the world. If a fire broke out in their server room, we likely wouldn't even notice. It would take multiple simultaneous disasters in multiple countries before we would be affected, which is (naturally) very unlikely. Likewise, even if all of our on-campus servers went offline, users would need only a basic Internet connection to access their mail just as they always have.

Archiving

E-mail backups typically serve another purpose, though: compliance. If a legal question is brought up about what information was shared with whom when, it's important that we're able to answer that. Without going into too much technical detail, our ability to reliably answer "what happened when" questions about e-mail is limited. Except under ideal circumstances, we would have difficulty answering with absolute certainty--especially if we don't find the message(s) in question.

Postini is Google's separate e-mail archiving solution.

Solution: Google Apps

Google Apps offers a separate service called Postini which archives all sent and received mail separately from Gmail. Through this, we can archive up to ten years of messages in case we ever need them. If and when we do, we could use the service's search feature to definitively answer any question regarding what has been sent or received from various e-mail addresses.

How could we go with anything else?
Once you take into account all of factors above, it's difficult to argue that our on-site Exchange hosting is anything but broken. Besides, with something as important as e-mail, we don't have the luxury of waiting until basic functionality no longer works. Google Apps doesn't just represent a better way of solving these problems, it represents the ideal way of solving them. This isn't just a different way of doing our mail, it is, by far, the best way.

In fact, the only substantive downside of this transition is the only one we've been hearing complaints about: unfamiliarity with the new interface. This is completely understandable, but it's also completely temporary. That's why we've arranged for free web-based training for any interested employees and have made ourselves available for any and all questions you have. Once the transition is complete, we're confident that Seton Hill will be much more effective technologically not just today, but well into the future.

NOTE: The focus of this post has been on the problems with our Exchange system and how Google Apps does things better. It doesn't just solve problems, though. Google Apps also provides many exciting new features that I've covered in a different post.