Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange is the primary source of email communication for our users. All departments use it and it is the one service that cannot be down for any significant amount of time. It allows for group distribution of information via mail groups; conference room reservations; communications with outside organizations; management of daily work schedules; and communications via instant messaging. Without it, work would almost literally come to a halt.
- Setting up Mail Groups/Distribution Lists which allow for communications with large numbers of people without having to address email to each person individually.
- Setting up resource calendars for users to access and reserve. For instance tying a physical room to a mailbox calendar allows for very easy scheduling of that particular room resource. It helps with the timeframe of planning meeting locations and for easy reservation without having to coordinate with multiple people wanting to use the room resource. The same would apply to equipment resources.
- Exchange allows for the creation of shared mailboxes, which allow email to be funneled to a central mailbox that can be managed by multiple people and allow for one point of contact rather than multiple individual contacts. When dealing with outside contacts this is absolutely critical.
- It is an excellent tool for managing users' primary source of communication. Everything for message discovery to helping correct something as small as an incorrect Out of Office notice is possible via the Management Console. It's also a good source for PowerShell scripts since it provides you the ability to see the command and syntax in PowerShell of a task or function you perform within the tool.
- Permissions for users on other calendars (Specifically Delegates) could stand to be improved quite a bit. Permission via Delegation, Full-Access on account or things like Send-As should be more easily available within the Exchange management console rather than a combination of using the console and using PowerShell scripts.
- Mail discovery could also use an overhaul of its current process. While it does work, the limitations are difficult work around and sometimes it’s as though only have of the management done is via a GUI versus having to script a lot of the work needed.
- The online version for Exchange O365 could also use an overhaul of how it works. There are too many related components that would seem to go together that reside in completely different locations. And again the reliance of scripting can be troublesome for someone that is not an extremely experienced administrator.
- It provides a means for interfacing with other applications such as trouble ticketing systems or other third-party applications.
- There really is no other tool that allows for near-instant communications between users with all the options available for managing them.
- The only negative that would be the fact that there really is not fallback in place. Once everyone is using the Exchange, you really have not options to consider other alternatives down the road. Where that really becomes a problem is you are at the mercy of Microsoft when they make changes they may or may not be beneficial. There are many times they deploy updates or patches that you must deploy but find they have not been fully vetted.
There is nothing I've seen in any organization I've been part of in over 20 years that's been used in place as the corporate solution for email. The standardization of Exchange across nearly all major corporations and government agencies is near complete I not really aware of any viable alternatives. There is Yahoo or Google, but these are not used by anyone I've worked for so no really things to compare against.
Do you think Microsoft Exchange delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Microsoft Exchange's feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Exchange live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Microsoft Exchange go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Microsoft Exchange again?
Yes