[KMSigma]

After reading everyone's input, I'd have to say that the decision really is between BoxTone and Zenprise. I guess it depends on the costs and on your needs.

My organization already has a ton (and I mean TON) of alerting for Active Directory and Exchange. I've even helped write a few VBScripts to pull non-standard variables from WMI for the Exchange Environment.

That being said, it's all about what you need. We only needed BlackBerry monitoring. We currently don't support any other devices for mail.

Our helpdesk loved the BoxTone interface for troubleshooting and reporting. They loved the way the Zenprise interface ran, but it lacked function (again, I may be speaking of an older version - we haven't looked at them each in over a year). My main problem was getting the alerting right. Unless Zenprise has changed thier previous practices, there was no legitimate baselining. If we had a mail server go down, I didn't get 1 alert that the server was unavailable, I got 35 that database X was down, SMTP connector was down, this was down, that was down etc.

Here's the deal - we (messaging team) didn't need alerting, we had our own. We needed something that allowed the helpdesk (and possibly the user community) to be proactive.

We're currently going to review all the products again after our 5.0 Migration project is complete and I'll add a few notes if this is still an active thread.