I need to find out the usefulness of the address book in exchange 1

[themac]

Hi

I need to know if the address book in exchange (for clients) is useful and user freindly.

we currently use Lotus Notes for mail and the address book is pretty easy to use but looking at outlook express and ldap that looks awful.

I hope you can help from here, basically what I feel we need is an address book that lists all our company employees in a full list and then start typing a name and the list goes to that person.

Thanks in advance

 

[ghostrider3]

well outlook and exchange will do that for you.

 

[dreux]

Trust me...Exchange address book is worlds better than Notes. First of all, I would use Outlook 98 or 2000 for your clients...actually, I think you have to use the full version of Outlook to setup accounts for an exchange server(unless you're using pop accounts). That's why you're getting an odd address book view (can't quite remember how express displays book). I just brought my company to Exchange 5.5 from Notes and the speed is incredible. We lost so much money with Notes, because we were constantly waiting for things to pop up (like the address book). It got to the point where we had to have a seperate spreadsheet of the company directory for peoples phone numbers. The address book in exchange is very useful for all kinds of info. That's just my 2 cents....
Regards, Dreux

 

[alynn77]

Are you still looking for information?

 

[themac]

Hi Alynn

I am still interested to know but am having to spend very little time on this for the moment.

We have a sort of unique situation where we have 400 remote users dialing through ISP's to order and send/recieve mail. So it is a little difficult to put my head around the best solution other than notes, as they know how to use it and the address book works well.

Anything you have would be appreciated.

 

[alynn77]

I need to preface by saying I am an MCSE and I use Exchange and Outlook. I really like Exchange and Outlook. I am not anti- Microsoft.

Exchange/Outlook are great for using on a LAN or with high speed internet access. When you start looking for the enterprise wide functionality of Exchange with remote users and slow connections you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Even the "solution to end all headaches of remote access" known as Outlook Web Access (OWA) has limited functionality. You never actually see the global address book, although you can check names by using the "check name" feature, it does not auto complete and it is tedious because you have to go around the circle for each mail recipient.

Also, OWA puts the burden of resource usage on the server, rather than the client. To support 400 end users you would have to have several top end servers [you could easily be looking at 8 processor boards and several gigs of RAM and even that might still be a bottleneck depending upon volume of mail].

As much as I do not care for Lotus notes, knowing what I do about the limitations of remote usage and all of the associated headaches, my works of wisdom would be, "If it aint broke, don't fix it!"

Hope this helps. If you would like further elaboration, please post more specific questions. I could go on for days but I don't want to bore you.