I can imagine there'll be a few comments on this topic regarding why you shouldn't use maintenance plans, I'll make a start:
You may redesign indexes by specifying a new fill factor and contribute to rearranging the data stored on both the data pages and index pages. By providing a new fill factor for indexes, you can ensure that the database has proper organization of data and free space. This facilitates smooth and faster database growth
You have to be very careful in doing this blanket across the board, fillfactor should only be amended after you've done the relevant analysis and proved that by changing it you'll get a benefit. See Kendra Littles post on fillfactor[/url].
You can update the statistics information for all indexes in your database in order to improve the performance of query optimizer. The query optimizer uses this information to speed up access to data. The index statistics information is updated on a routine basis automatically by the SQL Server, but this option is a must-have if you want the updates to occur immediately.
Why would you want to rebuild all indexes and statistics if not required? Unnecessary overhead on the system for little / no benefit. There's several other options out there including Ola Halengren's maintenance solution and Michelle Uffords defrag script[/url], both of which will look to rebuild/defrag/update stats based on thresholds you set.
Don't get me wrong, everything has its place and in some environments (ie non-production) they can work as a quick n easy solution but if you're to post about something like maintenance plan's then I believe you should also explain the drawbacks.
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