Exchange

I was furious yesterday. I'm sure that was made clear. I've come to some realizations today. While I did lay blame to yesterday's fiasco on administration and staff, that doesn't really address the issue. Having used Exchange Enterprise Server for the last four years, it didn't immediately occur to me that Exchange Standard Server's miniscule mailbox limit would be a factor so soon. Additionally I didn't know that the database cap of 16 GB was the sum of priv1.edb and priv1.stm. The priv1.edb was "only" 9 GB so I didn't see anything alarming. Yes, some staff do have extremely large mailboxes but in all fairness, it was never explained to them why it's better for them to behave otherwise. Administration does fear creating computer use policies beyond security matters only because they do not know enough to justify their actions to staff. IT Managers need to explain themselves better to non-technical administration. It's important to remember that they aren't going to learn our language, so we need to speak clearly in theirs.

In speaking with my boss today we agreed on capping mailbox sizes. To what size is still up for discussion but I do like keeping those limits low. The conversation on attachment size limits has not concluded yet. But there was progress!

Here's some of my day's reading from the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Differences between Exchange 2000 Standard and Enterprise (link)
How to Determine Which Edition of Exchange Server is Installed (link)
How to temporarily increase the Exchange 2000 16-gigabyte database size limit (link)
Upgrading to Exchange 2003 (link)