Exchange is actually still fairly prevalent, even among smaller companies. Although many of the smaller orgs that still have on-prem Exchange tend to have a migration plan to M365.
> Exchange is actually still fairly prevalent, even among smaller companies. Although many of the smaller orgs that still have on-prem Exchange tend to have a migration plan to M365.
and I hope they do. most of these smaller companies are sometimes sitting on really really old versions. "it works" is mostly the argument.
updating exchange sometimes can be painful. most of the time everything works, but sometimes things just break.
Let’s not ignore that if you’re a company self-hosting a highly available Exchange installation (plus backup infrastructure and maybe near-line storage solutions for mail), it’s almost certainly comprised of very expensive capital and > an FTE of labor, all which are entirely a waste of time and resources at this point.
There are vanishingly few circumstances where it makes sense for an organization to be funding deep expertise for the direct management of an Exchange environment. This has been clear for nearly a decade.
The capex to refresh that hardware is a ridiculous waste, so yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if the people still running those setups have very aged installations (e.g. WinSrvr 2008-12), which are as great a risk as the Exchange Server software they’re running.
The gating factor is often the expertise to plan and execute a migration with minimal disruption and loss. It’s not simple, and it’s nothing like an exchange upgrade project. It’s a downright UGLY project if a company has been abusing their mail system for years (e.g. using their mail system as a document management platform since ‘99, allowing distributed PSTs, etc.). Seen it.
Exchange is actually still fairly prevalent, even among smaller companies. Although many of the smaller orgs that still have on-prem Exchange tend to have a migration plan to M365.