Bandwidth

I'm encouraged that some people are starting to question the idea of moving away from Exchange as their enterprise class messaging service. Firstly, all of those Exchange things that we know and love are simply not available in some of the more simple email systems (we have a checklist if you'd like one) but furthermore there are some infrastructure issues that impact organisations more than they initially consider.

Bandwidth is one such issue. If you have dozens or hundreds of people online, downloading stuff then your day to day functions like bandwidth need to be considered. Nothing worse than twiddling your thumbs waiting to log in to gmail. Like so many Microsoft things people look to change for changes sake and then realise that what they previously took for granted is actually quite cool and, well, seamless.

I have heard today that one organisation which has switched to Gmail and Google Apps is having to put in more internal servers to split the organisation into workgroups - surely that's the opposite of what the cloud evangelists say? Sure there's a place for cloud computing (we use it a lot) but we'll be keeping Exchange Server for a while yet.