Another gripe

I have been in the middle of doing an Exchange 2007 migration at work.  When we started the process I was annoyed that MSFT did not offer us any upgrade pricing.  In addition,  Exchange 2007 requires 64 bit hardware as well as 64 bit Windows which throws more expense into the process.

Well I finally got the server up and wanted to test it out with Outlook 2007 since Outlook 2007 takes advantage of all of the new features where as Outlook 2003 does not.  I pop in the Exchange  07 CD looking for the Outlook 2007 client.  It’s nowhere to be seen.  I fire up Google and do a quick search.  As I see the excerpts from the results my blood starts to boil.

Microsoft no longer includes an Outlook license for Exchange users (they did with 2003).  Well maybe they dropped the price of the Exchange license then to make up for this omission? Nope, same price if not a little more.  I checked with my sales rep, if I want to get Outlook 2007 for my users it would cost me $63 per head! WTF??!!!  Those greedy assholes….  This is bending you over and ramming it home dry in my opinion.  It’s blatant double dipping.  Essentially it works out to paying double what an equivalent Exchange 2003 installation would run.   

Thieves.

So my option is to lay out 6K plus for Outlook 2007 licensing, stick with Outlook 2003 or have users work in the Exchange 2007 Web Access client which is pretty robust on it’s own.  I am 99% sure one of the latter two options will be the avenue we pursue.