Quote:
Originally Posted by phoenix  You'll never know, will you?
They are rather silly and short sighted comments. |
His phrasing might have been a bit weak, but indeed it's quite difficult to get a Real World test out of a new email system in a company of any size which has users who are *not* technical people.
The only way you can really do it is to put people onto it live, and let them use it... but if the decision is made *not* to switch, then you have the problem of migrating all their mail back to whatever you were using previously; it can be an administrative nightmare.
I'm in the middle of switching from Exchange 5.5 to Zimbra, in the free time I have available from the other things I do, and that's taken 6 months *so far*.
Luckily, we had a company spin-off, and that gave me a good clean-break point to use to get Zimbra under people's fingers, or it would have been even worse.
And if you're doing it underneath MCO...
It's easy to *say* that it's easy to test out a new mail service, or even switch to one -- but IMEO, anyone who says that has never done it in a production business environment. I've been administering email most of my 25 years in this business, and switchovers have never been easy, unless they've been preceded by catastrophic failures.