OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:37 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I agree on exchange really
> > If you need just email exchange is the wrong thing but if you are
> > looking at all the other stuff I haven't seen anything close without
> > some serious work and cobbling
> 
> As a forced user of Exchange via Outlook I consider the combination
> proof that MS is a monopoly.  The number of UI odd-nesses, broken
> metaphors, failures to schedule, etc. that I regularly suffer with
> amaze me.  If it was a tool competing in a fair market, it would have
> been ridiculed and died.  (Or our IT people are doing it wrong.)
> 
> That said, I have not been an administrator of such a server nor have
> I used other competing solutions, other than Google.  But I am
> saddened to think that Exchange and Outlook, as broken as they are,
> represent the best enterprise PIM solution available.  Sad indeed.
----
Exchange can be a nightmare...

- Tough to backup
- Costly to integrate spyware, anti-virus and other content scanning
- Specialized client software (Outlook)
- Requires AD
- Quirky management interface

Perhaps the most aggravating thing is that if you don't use Outlook, you
lose features and it all just plays into vendor lock-in to support
protocols and features that are simply not standardized.

The main selling point to Exchange/Outlook is that management likes the
simple interface of Outlook...it's something that they can almost use
without much training and all of the nastiness is handled by others.

Today's office needs to look beyond single source, proprietary software
if they want to provide less costly, more standard options.

Contact management - LDAP is a fairly well standardized commodity.
IMAP is a well defined standard
CalDAV is well on it's way to becoming a standard

To combat this, Microsoft has apparently recently released documentation
on MAPI protocols so that other applications can integrate into Exchange
Server.

Thus there is little reason to adopt Exchange/Outlook today because
there are a lot of other options.

On the other hand, you are staring at an entrenched beast and we all
know that people purchase emotionally and defend rationally so it's a
difficult proposition to change, especially when the typical pointy
haired boss is comfortable with Outlook.

All I can say is that the wisdom of this can be found in the fraternity
initiation scene in Animal House...Thank you sir, may I have another.

Craig