Re: [PLUG] Anyone tried replacing Exchange lately?

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 03:10:54PM -0400, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> You don't know how much I'd love to right now.  Exchange is proving to 
> be terribly expensive to us when you figure in admin overhead, 
> downtime, etc.

And then there's the fact that SSL doesn't get enabled alternately
because the Windows admin doesn't know how to gen SSL certificates,
or because it "puts too much load on the server" to do crypto...

> I put the SuSE option in front of $BOSS as something to explore but 
> methinks it is too thick a political issue to ever be explored 
> (replacing Exchange would, in effect, put egg on the face of whoever 
> wanted Exchange there in the first place).  So we go on living with an 
> intermittently functional groupware server.

You're not the only one looking at alternatives. $NETWORK_GUY (we
probably could just get away with first names here, Chris... though
maybe that'd get confusing in this context ;^>... in any case, the
only person who'd notice PLUG commentary is Barry). Ahem, $NETWORK_GUY
threw the recent Oracle Exchange alternative advertising off as a
serious consideration to $CTO.

The argument, and it's a frighteningly good one, is that as soon as
Outlook 2004 (XP2, whatever) rolls out, compatibility with anything
that's not Exchange will magically and inexplicably break. It'll
be fixed some months later, sort of, but not really for these
specific things that, really, you want to have, so you should
probably not have ever ditched MS to begin with.

This is a HORRIBLE reason to stick with a vendor. We know they're
going to screw us with a later version of their client if we're not
also using later version of their server. So we don't go through the
pain of getting the hell out of dodge now. But it's one that makes
sense if you're counting beans, because you're counting beans in
Microsoft Excel.

At our employer, Chris, it's not worth the brain power. Help me
bitch about getting IMAP/SSL (or SASL, or TSL... I really just don't
care, since mutt can do them all) working, go on with life. There
are far better things (I dunno... fixing Cold Fusion? ;^>) to be
doing. Better as in "better for the company".

> The moment you say that you can live with a loose collection of smaller 
> tools for each function is the moment a whole new world of 
> possibilities opens up.

Agreed. Postfix for SMTP, LDAP for contacts, maybe a real DB
(Postgres certainly qualifies in this context) for calendering.
Tying them together is Perl-I-could-write-in-a-weekend, the
canonical litmus test for "somebody must have done it already".

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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