Kudos to the Exchange Documentation team

If you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Exchange documentation, you may appreciate the quality of coverage and organization. Or you may not. But if you really want to appreciate what the Exchange team has done over the last 5 years in terms of providing coherent, relevant information at various levels for Exchange Server 2003, 2007 and 2010, spend some time with the documentation of their competitors.

If you have to wander into the website of a competitor and look something up, you may find it easily or it may take awhile. I don't mean looking up the odd question. If you spend a good week in their documentation, whether it is Lotus (Domino), Novell (Groupwise), or Yahoo! (Zimbra), or others, you will most likely garner a greater appreciation of what Microsoft has accomplished for Exchange Server. From the Exchange Server Library to the marketing-free technical Exchange team blog, I find the quality of content exceeds what I see elsewhere in the market.

As an example, recent searches within the Lotus website returned promising results; however, selecting several of those sites resulted in 404s. Clicking the Search button within the online help system for Lotus Domino and Notes 8.5 in either Firefox or Internet Explorer glosses over the search page and returns the page on How to Search. Searching the product infocenter for Domino and Notes 8.5 creates a minor usability glitch - duplicate results by title. In actuality, they are separate results for versions 8.0 and 8.5, but there is no immediate identification in the search results as shown in the screenshot.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head. In practice the frustration was even more profound. And I don't mean to just pick on Lotus as they are just one of the offenders.

William Lefkovics