The end of Exchnage server?

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I can't quite understand what peoples requirements are for on premises Exchange these days, don't get me wrong I love the product, did a little Exchange admin back in the day (5.5) but these days it's easier having it offsite and managed by someone else.

 

I think it's to do with the loss of control you experience when moving to Exchange Online tbh.. I like the simplicity of Exchange Online, it's a lot easier to administer but feel you do lose much of the control that you have with Exchange on-prem.. no doubt Exchange on-prem will eventually die so best get familiar with Exchange Online pronto lads.

 

I contracted for a while at a firm based in London, but with offices all over the world. About 40,000 employees in total. I was part of the team who worked on the migration to Exchange Online because the CTO had "had enough off Exchange outages". The on-prem infrastructure was Exchange 2007 and within a short space of time of me being there, I noticed that the outages were mainly due to network issues or Server/Storage issues, both operated by separate teams and who lacked "talent". There was actually nowt wrong with the Exchange 2007 infrastructure, as in Exchange 2007 as a product seemed pretty bullet proof. However, this CTO was one of those "time for change" and "time to move forward" and so pushed for the move to O365 Exchange Online.

Once we got approx 20,000 users onto Exchange Online, the big problems then started to happen. We had a 4 hour Exchange Online outage with this CTO in Oz spitting feathers at us "do something"...which we couldn't. MS came back with "we'll give you some service credits". Then the WAN links collapsed with BT saying "yeah, we're looking into it". At that point 30k users were up in the cloud. I'm sure that was a 2 hour outage and we were supposed to be on the best links that money could buy. The corporate comms team were upset that they couldn't email all internal users about the external outages. There were many outages which were either MS or BT.

We were working with a very well known 365 consultancy, who I won't mention...but you would have heard of them. They set up the hybrid email routing using the Exchange 2007 Edge servers which caused at least 50,000 SPF email failures per day (MS recommended 2010 hub transport or Edge servers). EOP was chock full of such failures. The business really suffered because of that. Missed flights, missed deals...missed everything. But that's not the fault of Exchange Online.

So what happened? The project was put on hold. We were let go. The CTO got fired. Last I heard from a permie there is some legal problems with MS because the company is now off-boarding users onto an on-prem Exchange 2013 environment and so they're in limbo. I was told that the costs for moving to Exchange Online massively outstripped the costs of the old Exchange 2007 environment.

I don't mean to be stuck in the past here, but for me the jury is still out on cloud stuff. The problem is that I believe we've witnessed huge outages already, but due to "pride" the problem has been blamed on other things. What I've witnessed is the sheer panic of being unable to communicate internally when this stuff goes pop for a few hours. It's losing communications by 100% which seemed to anger many folk.

Dunno...whenever accountants like something, then you know for sure that you shouldn't do it.

Actually, just to add, could you imagine as an Exchange bloke, back in the on-prem days, and saying to the bosses "sorry, but we're suffering some service degradation" and they ask "what does that mean" and you reply "don't know"? You'd be up the road in no time. Yet today, Exchange Online suffers quite a bit from "service degradation", no-one knows until MS updates the status and no-one can find out why? Yet everyone still pays...lolz...no-one sacks MS?

 

It wasn't, Exchange 2010 was put in alongside...but that was for public folders migration only. The "know it all" consultants deemed it OK for the Exchange 2007 Edge servers to be used for hybrid mail routing. However, MS recommended 2010 Edge or hub transports at the very least. We pointed that out, but the lead consultant wanted a "case study" before he would believe it? Even though MS's own deployment guide stated what we had told him? Eventually, he got sacked. He was on his last life after he let rip with public folder replication to the new 2010 servers which ended up causing over 100,000 emails to get stuck in the 2007 transport queues. We all did near 24 hours with MS on the other end of the phone to fix that one whilst he was nowhere to be found.

The WAN links were a funny old game. BT totally owned the MPLS and WAN etc...the network team were literally restricted to some Call Manager stuff and plugging in switches here and there. Eventually, they all got the boot and BT took over the lot.

Then they brought in HCL to do "Exchange Online" management..they screwed that up and the company had to re-employ the 2nd line folks they had got shot of in favour for outsourcing.

If I remember correctly, the CTO who pushed this 365 stuff ended up having some sort of a break down and then got the boot after he went AWOL for a month. His Linkedin is nowt but lies...hilarious to read.

 

What I've noticed in contracting is such people leave a trail of destruction behind them when they leave to go onto the next victim.

Saw the same in a recent contract. The "Head of IT" got rid of 1st and 2nd line in favour of an outsourced solution in Poland. 2nd line in the UK was reduced to "hey 3rd line, you're now doing 2nd line"...which then became "oh and you're doing 1st line because the outsourced bunch in Poland are clueless".

He then left and moved onto his next victim. On his Linkedin he talked about the "successful" outsourcing project that reduced the "wage bill" by 50%, but failed to mention how guys on £400 - £500 a day suddenly found themselves doing 2nd line work. After he left, the outsourcer got the boot and 1st/2nd line were brought back to the UK. I believe it cost them a tidy sum to break the contract.

Seems to be the trend in IT. Hang on long enough until people notice you're sh1t then leave, rinse and repeat.

 

Im currently in the mits of an Exchange Online migration (I litterally just loaded another batch of users) and there are 400+ users being migrated from Exchange 2013.. biggest ball ache ever! But I cant even blame Exchange Online.. its all the security systems we have inplace and trying to integrate it with Exchange Online can be a nightmare.. will be glad the day its over and I can stop running in hybrid mode. I truely believe Exchange Online and the whole cloud package works best in small environments and when you have a pure cloud based environment, with your AD in the cloud.

 

Of course, I'm not stating that everyone is like that. But I've been gigging at some huge firms and it's quite an eye opener to witness what goes on at such places.