Things I Hate About Microsoft Exchange

This is a list I've been keeping for a couple of years that covers things I personally dislike or technically dislike about Microsoft Exchange, the Exchange and Outlook clients, or some of the add-ons that go with the product. Some of them may apply only to earlier versions, some may only apply to our particular system configuration here at my agency, and some may be the result of my unwillingness to plow through yards of documentation to find some subtle trick of doing something, a trick that should be more obvious. Take it as you will.

To give you a little tour through our agency without naming it, we're a Big Federal Agency™ that vacuums up a lot of money every year. We have 65,000 employees and around 25,000 of them are now on Exchange for mail. Another several thousand are still using cc:Mail, and about 1500 of us have access to Notes mail, though not many people use it except to discuss Notes issues. We operate a nationwide WAN on token-ring, are moving toward an all-NT environment, and we were "given" Microsoft Exchange "free" as part of a large buy of NT-based workstations and servers a couple of years ago. We have spent several million dollars implementing that particular "free" gift, including huge amounts of money on training, upgraded servers, more network bandwidth, and seemingly endless non-free Microsoft consulting services time.

Oddly, I had the first running Exchange 4.0 server in my agency, a month or two after the product was actually released. I wanted to check out the competition. After fighting through Microsoft's nonintuitive and sometimes outright wrong installation method, I got the server working, pronounced it a toy, let it run for a few months and had no particular attraction to it. I later gave that server away. If you're curious about me, I have worked with Lotus Notes/Domino since 1993, am a Certified Lotus Professional (I took the exams as a stunt about a year ago) and have worked on Windows NT since the beta of 3.1 back in 1993 or so. I am an expert at both Domino development and administration, and a highly skilled NT administrator and integrator. I've also worked with Domino on OS/2, Unix and Netware. In general, I know my shit.

This is not scientific, it's not complete, it's not unbiased, it may not even be entirely accurate. It's not the official position of my Big Federal Agency™. It's my opinion, though, and I'm sticking with it. I'm not interested in debating these things, I don't want to hear about your experiences all that much, and if you're Microsoft, don't waste your time trying to show me the error of your ways. If you fix your product so that it actually does half the stuff you've always claimed it could do, it'll be a worthwhile product and we'll all know it on sight. No marketing needed. Until then...

Note: some people have asked me whether I also have a "why I adore Lotus Notes/Domino" page. Well, I don't, at least not yet. I don't feel that just because one product sucks, you have to be able to sing the praises of another, though Domino definitely has some praises worth singing about. I'm thinking of doing such a page, so stop back and maybe I'll have one up one day.

Originally, this list was in a sort of order-of-entry, stream-of-consciousness mode. I've organized it and annotated it a bit to make my ire a little clearer.

Interface and client stuff

• Modality
  A lot of operations in Outlook/Exchange take over practically the whole machine, and you can't do anything in the software until it gets good and ready to let you. Searching and archiving are good examples, but there's more about that later.
• Limits on mailbox size are "hard"
  ...to the point where you can't send email to administrator to do anything about it, and you can't tell how big your mailfile is. Around here we have an 18-meg limit on MSX mail folders. There is no way for a user to determine how large their mail file is, nor even what the limit is, until they run up against it. True, earlier versions of Notes didn't provide any easy wasy to limit mailbox sizes, and now there are ways to do it, but even years ago, every user or admin could determine in a moment how big their mailbox was and do something about it. Like archiving...
• Archiving takes over the machine
  Don't start a large archiving action in MSX unless you have nothing else to do for a while, because the archive process runs in the foreground and nothing else happens in your client until it's done. There's no way to predict how long that might be. In Notes, the archiving can run on a scheduled basis and runs as a background process on the client, so you retain control.
• Name lookup is slow and awkward
  Name type-ahead is fairly awkward, in that you cannot just start typing any unique portion of the name, you must start typing in the format the GAL expects, which is last name, comma, firstname. Woe betide you if you don't know the middle initials of all your co-workers. What's more, the name lookup isn't completed as you type, it waits for a little while or until you tab out of the addressing fields. In Domino, I can enter any unique portion of the name, whether it's last name, first name, nickname, shortname, or alias. Domino will look it up while I type and then finish it when I pause.
• Replies don't include images and there's no "reply, no text" option
  There isn't an option to sometimes include or not include any images or other complex data in an email to which you're replying. This is a royal pain in the ass when your reply address list includes people who didn't get the original message, leaving you to hand-copy (slowly) the image(s) you want to include in the reply. I suppose I could see this as a laudable attempt to reduce disk and bandwidth usage, but mostly it's just a pain. What's more, there is no way to reply but not include the text. If you want to keep the subject but clear out built-up reply debris, you have to trash it manually. Through "reply" or "reply with history," I have the option in Notes of including all the preceding material or not.
• No "permanent pen"
  Some people insist there is a sort of permanent pen feature, but it ain't like Notes, where I set it and forget it, and turn it on when I want. Annotation within existing text is a royal pain in MSX.
• Awkward interface to confirm possible bad addresses
  Right-click, then try to figure out why the address is bad or which address is good and why.
• Valid-looking addresses can produce undeliverables
  Why? Why isn't the GAL up to date? It is, it just... isn't! It's possible in MSX to be able to choose a perfectly "valid" looking address and have it come back as unknown or undeliverable. There's no way for a user to turn on any tracing which will explain why the address failed. The incidence of truly bad addresses in Notes is much lower because replication can happen more often and more efficiently, ensuring that the NAB is up to date. The GAL is slow and awkward to replicate and there's no way for a user to trace a bad message path.
• Stupid non-conversion of embedded MIMEtypes
  A decent mailer knows to convert embedded objects, particularly graphics, to MIME or uuencoded attachments when sending things out into the 7-bit world. Microsoft Outlook isn't a decent mailer, and does absolutely nothing with embedded images. Your internet mail recipient sees the plain text and a couple of markers that indicate where the graphics used to be. This means that you have to treat the embedded images as attachments instead, and there's no tool to automatically convert one to the other. So, if you receive a file from a co-worker that contains, oh, say, five embedded images, you must manually save all five images to disk files, set the message up to forward, and then manually reattach all five files. This is of course a royal waste of time because...
• File attach dialogue is shit-slow
  This is another thing you don't want to try if you have anything else to do that day... it uses a particularly-slow version of the common file dialogue which attempts to filter possible attachments on the fly. I personally hate it that it takes anywhere from three to ten seconds to "arrange" the list of available files, even when you have *.* as the file-mask. And it happens again every time you move up and down in the tree. What's more, if there's an option to say "always attach from this directory" versus "always attach from wherever I got the last one," I haven't found it. Notes does this no problem. Wherever I saved or retrieved the last attachment from, that's where it'll go next time, and it uses a simpler dialogue that's faster.
• Archive list is nonintuitive... it looks like multiple archives
  I have yet to figure out why there are 19 "Archives" folders in my Outlook client. They seem to all contain the same stuff and point to the same file. Why there are 19 of them, I don't know. It also disturbs me that I have to archive all my stuff to one physical file. Why do I have to put my calendar and mail all in one file with everything else? Why can't I put them in different files but still search across them? Maybe I can, but doing it is not explained anywhere.
• "Please wait while Microsoft Outlook exits"
  No, bubba. I told you to close, now get the hell off my machine! None of this "please wait while I decide if I want to return control of your machine to you." File/Exit means something, and it means I want you gone NOW.
• Folder pane won't resize... wide folder names are impossible to read down in the tree
  There appears to be no way to resize the Folder pane if you drop it down to see the subfolders in any given folder. This means you end up using the scroll bar a lot to read long subfolder names. You can't resize the list.
• Use Word as the email editor
  ...sure, if you don't want to do anything else that day. I shouldn't have to explain this. On a machine with 32 meg of RAM or less, using Word as your email editor is like flying to the convenience store in a B-1 bomber. It's like using CorelDraw every time you want to put in a bullet.
• Outlook as the default "mailto" mailer is horrendous
  This is another one, but I think it's more a flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Click on a mailto link, and it wants to start the whole stinking Outlook client just so you can send a two-line flame somebody on Usenet. Anyone using Outlook to handle simple mailto links should have their head examined. What's that you say? Outlook Express? What, are you stupid and masochistic? Have you heard about the small mountain of viruses and Trojans that affect Outlook Express? Go look it up.
• Portable operation is nearly impossible
  Folder-based replication/synchronization is pretty slow and frustrating to users on slow modems. By "slow," I mean anything short of T1. Below, I have some comments about how Exchange deals with those times when you're "unintentionally portable," like when your server dies.
• No option to cancel out of Outlook if the network isn't there
  ... you're forced to go ahead and run the program just to exit it. If you start Outlook and the Exchange server isn't there, you have NO option to bail out and say, "nope, I don't want to work at all because I don't have any local data." You must sit through the load of Outlook and then exit it.
• Global "event" listings in the calendar can take over the entire daily display with no way to turn them off
  If you have a lot of chatty co-workers who load up the shared calendar with all-day events like their appointments and days off, it shoves all the "meaningful" things down the page until you can barely read the calendar at all. You can't turn it off, you can't move it, you can't resize it. What's more, your developers can't rewrite the calendar app template to do anything about it.
• No inbuilt full-text search.
  Again, maybe this has changed, but for a long time MSX did not include any full-text indexing tool. That meant that all clients were basically doing brute-force searches. Fulcrum used to be an OPTIONAL add-on; I know our organization never bought it. As a result, searches that take a second in a 15000-document Notes database take ten minutes in a 1000-document Exchange folder. Do I ever search for a particular email anymore? Nope.

Infrastructure, development and administration

• Development is horrendous and slow
  I have some first-hand and a lot of second-hand experience with this. There's a reason Microsoft has gone through three different development tools (Exchange Forms Designer, Outlook Forms Designer, and now whatever they use now in conjunction with VB and who knows what else)... none of them were any good. I once did a head-to-head test in developing a simple while-you-were-out form for both Notes and Exchange. The Notes form was created, saved and in use before the Exchange form was even laid out and saved. Microsoft likes to say that "there are lots of Visual Basic developers and they work cheaper than Notes developers." Maybe so, but you cannot be a neophyte VB hacker and expect to do anything with Exchange. You had better know MAPI intimately, know the Windows API sometimes, know more than a little about NT, and none of those things will come with your dinky four-day Visual Basic Introduction course. Good VB developers are even harder to find than good Notes developers, and they're not as productive because you simply can't be when you're developing for Exchange. The tools won't let you. Why? Because...
• VB sucks
  I'm sorry, but Visual Basic is considered an "industrial strength" development tool only to Microsoft and its sycophants. It still can't produce a standalone executable, for crying out lound, though that was promised over two years ago. And installing VB is not to be taken lightly... there are some runtime items that Outlook clients need to run certain custom Outlook forms, and installing them can foul up Word, Office or Outlook itself. Lotuscript may not be astonishing, but in Domino, you can use Javascript, Java, @commands, and (dare I say it) ActiveX to develop. With Exchange, Visual Basic is the only practical game in town.
• You can't modify the canned code, you have to duplicate it
  In Notes/Domino, if a particular thing about the default Memo form bugs you, and you're a developer, you can change it. Right now. It'll take effect, right now. If you are a manager and you'd like to share that change all over your organization, you can do it really easily. All you have to do is modify the form and there you are. In Outlook, there's no way for you to materially "modify" any of the standard forms or functions anywhere in the client. If you want, you can completely replace them, creating brand new ones of your own, but then you are responsible for all the coding (from scratch) and distribution (iffy) and maintenance and testing. You must duplicate all of the existing functions, you can't just modify what Microsoft already wrote. Lotus makes it easy to customize anything in the whole system, from the mail forms to the calendar layout to the way things sort in the NAB. Lotus gives you tons of code you can modify to suit your purposes. Microsoft makes you reinvent all the wheels. And the doors. And the paint. And the knobs on the dash.
• Write for the Web AND Outlook? Surely you jest!
  With Domino, one nicely-written app can be equally effective and accessible from web browsers and Notes clients. With MSX, you'll be lucky if you live long enough to see a decent web-based Outlook app. Access public folder? Sure, maybe, with Outlook Web Access, but what happens if you want to do more? See the paragraph above.
• Folder-based replication is awkward and wasteful
  Hey, this one nine-byte field in a 2K document changed! Let's send the whole stinking 134-meg folder across the wire! That's a built-in disincentive to keep replications infrequent, which means stuff gets out of sync and people hate it. Microsoft has yet to even think about document-level, let alone field-level, replication, and still lives in a world where they figure you won't need replication, just have all your users come to one big central server! We once presented this bandwidth problem to Microsoft, and their comment was that we should basically upgrade our network to handle the enormous bandwidth demands. They felt no particular urge to rewrite MSX so that it wasn't a hog. And forget trying to do data compression on the wire, as Domino can do. MSX won't do it. If you're on a remote connection, you suffer. Just buy a faster modem! MS sez so!
• If you can delete anywhere, you can delete everywhere!
  Maybe they fixed this, but early on I noticed that there was no way NOT to propagate deletions across the entire enterprise. This is probably a function of folder-only replication, so it can't stop to make decisions about whether a deletion of one document here should also go everywhere. To that end, that means if one user in Ohio with rights to delete stuff accidentally deletes something they shouldn't, there will be no way for you to stop that deletion from going everywhere in your company, short of just turning off all replication until you sort it out. Assuming you find out the accidental delete took place... in time.
• Forms distribution is a pain and documents are unusable without it.
  If you create a custom form for use with a particular type of document, in most cases, the recipient of that document cannot use the document AT ALL unless they have that actual form available on their machine. Not at all. Can't substitute a default form, the way you can in Notes. You're screwed, which means there's a development process, and then there's a distribution and change control process, whereas Notes/Domino has one process: write the form. It'll distribute it itself, and only rarely will you be totally unable to read a document.
• Administration is nearly impossible to delegate
  You had better trust your Exchange administrators, because to accomplish anything useful when administering Exchange, they mostly have to have rights to everything. In Notes/Domino, I can set ACLs to include groups, and then hand total non-administrators rights to add and change the people in those groups. Heck, I've even set it up so they can do that stuff through web forms. Just try that with MSX.
• Corruption in GAL is too possible, and then corruption goes everywhere
  We've had repeated instances where "something" crapped up the Global Address List. That crappage gets propagated everywhere, and then results in a lot of downtime and bounced messages. One time the GAL ended up with duplicates of every address, but only one address was actually "good." The other would result in an undeliverable. You had to guess which one.
• Way too susceptible to NT memory leaks -- servers have to be restarted weekly
  Around here we have to restart Exchange like clockwork, at least once a week, because Microsoft couldn't write Exchange to be aware of and deal with memory leakage. I have one Domino server that ran for 440 days unattended. I have several that routinely run for months at a time. I have a couple that do, for some reason, like to be restarted. But Exchange gets really sick if it falls far enough into a memory hole, to the point where it will die and corrupt everything it can get its claws on. We have sometimes required reinstallations to deal with this. And you can't really stick an MSX server out there with local staff who are clueless about NT administration, or just auto-reboot the server, because...
• Exchange services are too stupid to exit on system shutdown
  For some reason Exchange services want to be shut down separately from NT, before you take an NT server down. Domino will respond nicely to a system shutdown/process terminate signal, but for some reason you can really foul up Exchange if you don't kill its many processes before taking NT down. And this is a pain because there are...
• A million services
  Why the heck does Exchange need anywhere from four to nine separate services just to get off the ground? Domino makes do with one nice, neat service. Sure, it spawns other processes, depending on what you have configured, but you can light up a Domino server with one nice mouse click or one short command line.
• Too much dependence on NT security
  NT's security model changed with Windows 2000. Exchange/Outlook is totally dependent on that security model. Think about it. That means changes will be forced in MSX. Notes/Domino won't care. They don't even care if you ditch NT security entirely and put Notes/Domino up on the upcoming Linux port. Or a System/390 mainframe. Or an AS/400. It all works, no worries about whether a new OS security model is actually secure or even works at all. Notes/Domino just doesn't care.
• Your Exchange server is down? Sit'n'spin, bud...
  Woe betide you if you want to use Outlook and your server has failed. As noted above, if the server isn't running, and you start the client, it eventually figures out that your server isn't there, but does it offer an option to just say the hell with it and exit? Nope. Your options are "Retry" and "Work Offline." And exactly how much information do you really have offline, hmm? None? Funny how that is... you wouldn't be trying to hit the server if you wanted to use offline information, would you? And when your Exchange server fails while you have Outlook open, the system then badgers you to re-login. Nothing indicating "the Exchange server died, I'll wait until it comes back." Nope, it will demand a login, reject it, demand it again and reject it... FIVE TIMES before it finally leaves you alone. Wanna get out? No, you may not "Exit And Log Off" -- without logging in, which it won't let you do! To actually exit, you must endure three or four full cycles of the "badger/reject" thing with the login box. That's right, you must hit CANCEL fifteen to twenty times to simply exit the program because it's useless to you. By contrast, if a Domino server fails while you're talking to it, your Notes client will tell you it can't talk to the server right now. If the server comes back up a few minutes later, your Notes client will reconnect to it, and you never have to log in again. It just picks back up where it left off. Of course, Domino servers really don't go down much, not compared to Exchange... I've got a Linux Domino server that's been running for 433 days straight. I've never heard of an Exchange server that could go a week and a half without exploding.

Playing well with others

• Microsoft mail junks up internet mail
  Unless users are very careful how they configure it, Outlook as an internet mailer sends out a lot of crap attachments that junk up every mailing list it gets sent to. To be fair, Notes does the same thing, but I'm here to trash Exchange, not to be fair about it.
• Connector to Notes is laughable and a security hole
  We never got the connector to work. Its documentation was bad, it had problems handling the version of Notes it was purportedly designed for, it was finicky about what release of Exchange it would run on, and what's worst, the "connector" basically masquerades as a client, which means you have to assign it a Notes ID and give that ID a ton of rights you'd never give a human.
• No backward compatibility to anything
  I won't harp on this. Microsoft is famous for this. Few of their apps will play nicely with earlier versions of their apps, and Exchange/Outlook is no exception. Forget trying to get MSMail and Exchange to work well with each other... MS will give you one-time migration tools, but the "coexistence" concept just doesn't exist for them. There are many shops that successfully ran Notes 2.1 next to Notes 3.2, and at least one place I know has R5, Notes 4.6, 4.12, and 3.35 all running at the same time. Most of the time, you can't even have different versions of MSX running in the same shop. They'll come to no good, I assure you. And the first time there's a problem, Microsoft's only solution is "upgrade." And that upgrade will assuredly break something else that used to work. Microsoft lives in a world where nirvana and world peace are just one service pack away... the service pack that ain't released quite yet.

As I said, this is a growing list. I am the first person to embrace a good product when I see it, which is why I had some disdain for Notes 2.x but loved Notes 3. If Microsoft can get their act together and make Exchange actually do all the things they claim it can do, it might be a good product someday... but by then Domino will probably be even better.