Michael Vizard shares in unusual candor a sentiment in this eWeek article that may resonate well with many who are responsible for managing large Exchange environments.

“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. And worse yet, they will all tell you they are paying top dollar for the privilege because the expertise needed to successfully run a Microsoft Exchange server is some of the most expensive in the IT labor pool.”

While I don’t think that many of the issues that companies encounter within their messaging infrastructure are limited to Exchange, its tight integration and dependency on Windows and Active Directory as well as the limited choice of hardware platforms, sure seem to compound the problems. Now just imagine the arrival of unified communication.

As Michael points out:

“E-mail is considered the most mission-critical, a simple fact that is only going to become more evident once more organizations begin using Exchange as the underpinning of a unified communications architecture that is going to tie voice and video to the Exchange server. And if you think people get upset when they can’t access their e-mail, imagine what will happen when they can’t make a call because the Exchange server is down.”

For solution providers this offers great opportunity to provide supporting technology that lessens that pain. For companies considering Exchange this article gives some interesting insight worth sharing with an “Outlook-happy” executive who wants to replace an existing system that is functioning properly, with Exchange.

Technorati Tags: Exchange management, unified communication, Microsoft Exchange

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