Boy, that's not my experience. I've never run an Exchange server, but I've been in a number of companies where it's using many more man-hours than I think is appropriate. Maybe they're just incompetent admins.

Exchange can be a dream until it breaks. Once it breaks if you don't know what you are doing then you can burn an awful long time sorting it out. Even restoring from a simple backup can be a challenging task.

About 6 months ago, I restored the entire OS/Exchange..yada yada onto a brand new box. Just didn't restore the hardware registry. Exchange started right up fine.

I've never had such an easy email server to configure and maintain. Especially compared to Lotus Notes {{shiver}} ok, it's not that bad...yes it is..

I agree that Notes is a pain to set up, configure, and modify. But once it's up, it takes a nuclear catastrophe to bring it down again. Reliable as can be.

While I have no knowledge of Exchange, I use (and rely on) it daily. My co. has something like 10,000 UK Exchange/Outlook users each with a 100MB quota spread across (I believe) 8-10 servers.

I'd bet though that most of my colleagues would (if asked) complain bitterly about periodic outages, having to log out of Outlook for scheduled hardware work etc. I often (once/fortnight) arrive in the morning and unlock the Win2k console to find Outlook has hung only to find that I hadn't bothered to read the mail from IM telling me to logout the evening before because of scheduled maintenance.

In 5 years only on one occasion have I ever heard about people losing emails - a server failed (RAID controller I believe) and some people lost about 3-days of sent/received email, myself included.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that I believe I gain a lot of productivity from Exchange/Outlook with it's Calendar, meeting requests, task scheduler, document tracking etc. that I would find it hard to re-adjust to a life without it. Maybe there ARE better solutions out there but Exchange works sure well for me too

Thank you, but my best point is the one on the top of my head.