I think Coronas opinion has some truth to it and I'd like to expand on that:
The UNIX philosophy is indeed to have every tool do one thing and be good at it. To quote from my favourite RFC (1925):
Quote:
(5) It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.
It might be good to have the calendar and the mail integrated, but the downside is that Exchange can't be brought to work as a real MTA. There are so many inaccuracies in the implementation that the only client it really works with is Outlook. I don't think that anybody in his own mind wants to use Outlook as a mail client. Outlook will outright refuse to show you the email address of a local recipient (it will - whatever you do - change "john.doe@yourcompany.com" to "Doe, John"), it cannot be brought to format replies correctly, it will send mails HTML- (or even worse) formatted instead of in ASCII even if you configure it not to do so, and so on and so on.
In my current project i am forced to use Outlook 2007 (means extra punishment: this damn "Fluent" GUI can't be deactivated and the look and feel of the OS and the application is forced to be inconsistent) and after 2 days trying to configure this thing to work like a mail client is supposed to work i simply gave up, write my mails with vi and a bunch of vi macros and copy/paste the results to/from the Outlook window. Sorry, but this is not "user friendly", this is inacceptable.
The LDAP implementation is also quite buggy: we set up OpenLDAP as general authorization tool across the the "open systems" (that means AIX, a few HP-Ux- and SunOS-boxes and [CentOS-]Linux here) and my colleague wanted to connect the Exchange Server too: no chance, somehow it's LDAP, but not quite - this is, sad to say, often the case with MS products. They claim to implement a standard but implement it in a way that only their own products understand it.
bakunin