[cool_chick]

My suggestion? Make sure to outline the cost/benefit analysis in your proposals, e.g., the hardware upgrade proposals. A good way to analyze the cost if the hardware is not upgraded is to analyze the cost to business if, let's say, Exchange is down. Business impact. It will cost the company $100,000 an hour if Exchange is down.

Additionally, I would try to implement a monthly "downtime" window. In my company, on the third Saturday of every month, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., we are allowed to do upgrades to servers, including those critical servers (e.g., Tier I apps, Domain controllers, etc., if it's not an emergency situation), do those reboots, etc. It is a given that the network will not be available at that time. If a customer forgets and attaches to Exchange, and if no maintenance is taking place on Exchange, then they got lucky. But we do not guarantee data integrity during this window. This has been rather successful.

Good luck.