I’m not sure how many people have picked up on an announcement that Google made last week, but it definitely caught the attention of my dev team. (For those that may be new to this blog, I work for a company that offers Hosted Exchange and Hosted OCS services.)
Here’s the announcement.
Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.
Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.
Background
A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do.
There has been a lot reported about the Bush administration’s missing email issue. The main details are this. A 1993 court decision stated that emails fell under the Presidential Records Act which requires the president to preserve documents related to the performance of his official duties. Seems pretty reasonable that the White House should keep a record of every email that is sent.
The Clinton Administration answered this decision by adding an archiving system to their Lotus Notes email system.