On Upgrading the Future

Microsoft has made, what by most accounts, is a fine upgrade in Windows 7.  They're also making more of a push to go to 64-bit, and unfortunately are meeting resistance; Be it drivers or applications, many vendors aren't compiling 64-bit versions of their products, and this is a shame.  We've been on 32-bit long enough, and we've been tapping at the ceiling for awhile now; you can walk down the isles of the big-box retailers, electronics stores, and office-supply stores and find that most of the machines (that aren't netbooks) have 64-bit capable processors and most will come with 4GB of RAM.  So off-the-shelf these machines are at the 32-bit limit...

Fine, Great.  Things move relatively quickly on the desktop, but what about the enterprise and their infrastructure?  Pretty slowly.  I think that you'll find that most of the MS Exchange-using companies are still using 2003, with a sizable minority on 2007, and few on 2010.  You know, the typical split.  Enterprise is slow, because the Enterprise likes stable.  It also likes ROI (Return on Investment), and Exchange is expensive.  Expensive to license, expensive to design, expensive to implement, expensive to manage, expensive to upgrade (because it's expensive to do all of those things over again while maintaining compatibility).

Given these things, why would you (assuming that you're Microsoft) not provide the SysAds (specifically Exchange Admins) the ability to manage Exchange 2003 (a product nearing - but still within! - support and maintance) from 64-bit Windows 7?  It works with 32-bit Windows 7, but not 64-bit.  ADUC + Exchange Tools installed displays the proper tabs in 32-bit Win7, but not 64-bit.

That blows.

Microsoft, we don't always see eye-to-eye, but what's going on here?  Why would you tie the hands of your biggest proponents, the guys who make your products work, who are TRYING to go 64-bit?  Sure, we can install XP-mode, add it to the domain and do the jiggery-pokery to make it work (albeit slowly).  And sure, we could RDP into a server with the proper tools installed.  And sure, we could just use PowerShell - oh, no we can't; not on 2003...  (Trust me, I'd love retroactive Powershell integration...)  And sure, we could just convince our management that we need to go to 2010 post-haste.  (Oh, wait.  We've been doing to for some time already...  And it hasn't worked...)

Please just compile a damn 64-bit version of the tools for Exchange 2003!

-Waldo

P.S. Thanks again for PowerShell, the Script Center, and the Scripting Guys!