Exchange: Should I stay or should I go?

So, in light of the pros and cons of the alternatives laid out in this test, should I keep going with Exchange, or should I switch?

The only truthful answer we can give is "it depends."

Certainly, Exchange is the more expensive messaging proposition, at least to start. There are many ways to buy Exchange, depending on how many users you need, but the short answer is that none of them cost less than about $75 per user and can run up to $140 per user for the bundles that include Exchange and Windows Server and user licenses for both of those as well as Forefront, Microsoft's antispam/antivirus service. Compared with a first-year cost of $10 to $60 per user coupled with the possibility of running it on an open source operating system, the Exchange alternatives we tested are clearly less expensive.

If you really want to make a case for cost, you could also claim that Exchange requires a $90 Outlook license for each user, a Windows XP or Vista license for each user, and more expensive hardware than a similar open source platform might require. Of course, those arguments are pretty specious: most businesses already have Office (which includes Outlook); they already have Windows PCs; and they probably already have Windows Server running somewhere.

But looking beyond cost, how does Exchange stand up to the less-expensive competition? Pretty darn well. In fact, with the possible exception of Macintosh support, there is no compelling reason to use a different e-mail product. Exchange works; it does a good job; it has a strong extended feature set; and the support is top-notch.

Exchange is, first and foremost, a mailbox server, and it does that job really, really well. It integrates with Active Directory cleanly, and certainly covers all the basic requirements for a mailbox server. When it comes to extended features, such as webmail and unified communications, Exchange meets or beats all of the products we tested. With the exception of CommuniGate Pro, nothing comes close to Exchange's support for VoIP tools and protocols.

If you require scalability, either within a single site or across multiple sites, Exchange delivers. With both availability and scalability features, Exchange has a broader reach than any of the competing products we evaluated. It's definitely true that your hardware requirements with Exchange will be higher than with some of the performance-focused products we looked at, but when you're looking at 100 to 1,000 users, you're not really stressing any of the products installed on modern hardware.

Exchange management has often been cited as a weak spot, and it's certainly not the brightest light in Microsoft's arsenal. However, with Exchange 2007, management has been extended to include both GUI and command line options, meeting a common complaint. But is Exchange 2007 as easy to manage as some of the other products we tested? No, definitely not. You're going to have a harder learning curve with Exchange, and it's likely you'll spend more time getting it installed and running cleanly. None of the products we tested took more than a half-day to get running successfully, while our Exchange test deployment took several days of hard work.