This is mostly a gripe posting...
Since about 2010 (when I had a customer on Exchange 2007 still) I've used the export-mailbox , and later new-mailboxexportrequest powershell commands to help manage our mailbox sizes. Each year I export people's mailboxes at various customers so I
can keep the database at a reasonable amount of space. This is beneficial because some of my customers have to retain most of what they are sent (it's gotten them out of many lawsuits when the building that were invovled in constructing had something
that they were told or asked to do, and were suddenly being blamed for it 3, 4 and 5 years after the fact). It also enables me to keep a copy of the .PST files (with instructions to the user not to add anything to it) in case their c-drive crashes. In this way they can keep a copy of their archives, I have a few safety copies, and it's off the mail server. Then last year after making one of these archives Outlook 2016 kept flagging it as corrupted , and the ScanPST utility
would fail to adequately repair it to Outlook 2016 's liking. So I had to skip archiving boxes and let the mailbox database grow.
To see if Microsoft happened to address this I tried putting on Exchange 2010 SP3 Update 21 on - that was a mistake. It screwed up the database on the server and I had to recover it. After the fact I found a posting by the Exchange team that
said they had a problem and you had to apply a specific hotfix first. It also didn't tell me at the time that in order to look for the flaw they were apparently scanning most or all objects in the exchange database so what's normally a 1 hour or so process
was still runniing nearly 9 hours later before it reached the point that required the hotfix. It would have been nice if their update would have mentioned this before I committed to that process....that sucked.
So now this year I tried to export another mailbox from 2010 (having stopped at UR19 last time after I had to recover the server from the U21 issue ) - I figured I could stop there because we are upgrading to Server 2016 anyway. At one of my other
clients I tried exporting the mailbox on Exchange 2016 - that worked, but suddenty the search-mailbox cmdlet I was using to delete the older mail after archiving wasn't working. Microsoft's articles suggest a convoluted process with some new powershell
commands - the documentation has a disclaimer that it only works on One fellow even proposed looping the search-mailbox command because that worked for him - I adapated that and the search-mailbox cmdlet runs, says it deleted items but they are still
in the mailbox. Run it again and the results come back with 0 hits. Waited several days to see if it would delete them during nightly maintenance runs of the database - nope.
To recap a bit: So Microsoft has effectively taken away my ability to archive mailboxes by inadequately keeping their tools functional. It seems the left hand (Outlook) doesn't know what the right hand is doing (Exchange) when PST files are created
and fusses about it. The Exchange 2016 series of server doesn't allow you to use search-mailbox to delete content anymore effectively (which is also quite useful if somebody has a bunch of junk messages on their server to be cleaned out - according to
the fellow that suggested looping the command , as that's what he's had to do).
Now I get to the next bit of fun - I started looking at Exchange 2019 for one of my customer sites. The posted system requirements for Exchange 2016 mentioned 8GB of ram (I of course use more than that , but that's the listed minimum). Now Exchange
2019 is requiring 128GB of RAM - so we went from 8 to 128.
It seems by Microsoft's actions (significantly increasing hardware requirements , breaking cmdlets meant to help with malware, archiving, etc..) and inactions (not fixing these things for seeming long periods of time) they are trying to deprecate the Onsite
product to force people to the subscription product. Obviously I'm not somebody who get's inside information from Microsoft - so this is just how it appears to me.
Since I'm taking the time to gripe - I remember a day when Microsoft's products weren't working and I could call them and speak to a real person without having to drop $500 bucks to initiate the call. In some ways I miss when Microsoft had real competition
and an interest in keeping their customers happy. Too bad Groupwise isn't a serious competitor anymore...God I miss when there was real competition and customer service to be had....
Signed
The tick on the dog whose tired of paying for insufficiently supported products.