OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re:newhotness?)

[Bryan O'Neal]

Ok, lets talk lockin.  Perhaps you can tell me how using Exchange is any
different then using any other product, like groupware. If I move off of
Exchange I can get every email, every calendar item, every contact, every
task and every note out and into other system.  I can not tell how often I
have done this for people who have left different companies.  However, if I
am moving from groupware to a combination of dotproject, dotcrm, and bug
tracker it is going to be a bloody nightmare to migrate my data!  Just
because it is MS does not mean you can toss out the datalock/vender lock
card.  You are only as locked in as you chose to be, but your data can be
easily migrated.  As for as F/OOS not providing a single source, that has
been one of it's major problems.  Why do you think RH & SuSE are so popular
in the corporate world, and to a lesser extent Ubuntu on the desktop, while
slackware is in the hands of mostly die hard techno geeks?  As far as that
goes I can use Exchange just for email and use another product for
calendaring and another for contacts, but the fact that you have to for your
solutions seems to make it better some how?  Do you know how much it costs
to develop and implement custom solutions where you are the one doing the
integration and veding?  Not to mention the cost of training users on dozens
of different applications?  With regards to your spell checker argument,
windows has unified spell checking (Since XPsp1 I believe) and well
documented spell checking API's, however it is willing to let you implement
your own.  If you write your own because you don't want to use what ever the
user selected as their chosen spell checker on a windows system it is your
business as a programmer, but one exists.  Just like it does on the Mac
(Though the default on the Mac is far, far better then the default on a
windows system)  As far as restoration, on exchange the user would restore
his own mail box once deleted, not you. It is 3 mouse clicks of effort. Now
that said, at a VP level, the cost for them to do almost anything themselves
is so high I should say their personal assistant would restore it for them
;)

Again, you can not disconsider a product as "bad" just because its is a
closed or costs for licensing.  They need to be evaluated on their own
merits and weighed agenst their competitors.  Cost is one of those factors,
as is the ownership of the software, but they are not the only factors.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Craig
White
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 3:36 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin
(Was:Re:newhotness?)

On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 15:03 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
> These thread(s) which I spawned have been a mixed blessing.  I learned 
> much but sometimes felt like I opened the door to "sales pitches" for 
> lock-in technology.  Overall I have appreciated the discussion, 
> education and civil disagreement.
> 
> It is interesting to me, this balance between getting the job done and 
> maintaining software freedom.  It's obvious from this discussion and 
> from things I have experienced, that software freedom is usually not 
> highly valued.  Worse, it's not even considered in many cases.
> 
> I have been in situations where arguing for freedom is a very 
> difficult thing to get across.  And I failed.  Then, years later when 
> the closed, proprietary solution is entrenched and causing problems, 
> the same people that picked it now see that the Free choice would have 
> been better.  But, in their words, "It's too late to change."
> 
> It is this entrenchment and then exclusion of all Free Software 
> alternatives that Exchange causes.  Because the full benefits of 
> Exchange are not possible without MS Software from server to client, 
> it is a bastion of lock-in.  And businesses seems to enjoy living in 
> that gilded cage.
> 
> Yea, maybe the Free Software choices are not as "fully integrated" but 
> someday, with those of us who value freedom resisting the allure of 
> lock-in, someday maybe the Free choices that are good enough will be 
> valued for the freedom they protect.
> 
> I can dream, can't I?
----
ignoring the fact that Exchange Server represents a 100% lock-in/buy-in to
Microsoft's methodology...

the beauty of open source/free license stuff at least partially lies in the
fact that they don't provide a single source, soup to nuts implementation
but rather build upon other elements that are commonly available. This is
why a Linux system has far fewer spell checkers than say Windows where every
program pretty much provides its own.

Consequently, people are confused when comparing collaboration packages
because they look after feature laden soup to nuts packages and look for
comparisons in the open source world and that requires something like say
Open-Xchange or Zimbra which really are just collections of things that are
available separately. In reality, you can choose the items you want to
integrate and in fact, probably can tailor it to more closely resemble your
needs but you have to actually do the work. Toss in the fact that the
pointy-haired bosses want to use Outlook because it has e-mail, calendar and
contacts in one application and they think that they intuitively know how to
use it so they want that to be their fat client for whatever it is that
ultimately gets implemented. The truth is that it's a rare office that gets
more than just basic functionality out of a collaboration system and even
then, it takes a fair amount of training.

Everything is becoming a web application now anyway and fat clients like
Outlook are becoming passe. 

I sort of dismiss the "it's too late to change" thinking because if they
really wanted to change, they would do so. E-mail is critical to a business
these days and if their e-mail were deemed unreliable, it would come at a
cost to a business.

I had a client who not too long ago, one of the VP's deleted his entire
INBOX. It was trivial to restore from backup, create a new folder and put
the deleted e-mails into this new folder (so as not to interfere with new
messages). I was done in 20 minutes (and there were thousands of
e-mails...don't ask). I shudder to think of what the process would have
entailed if they were using Exchange Server. The newer versions of
cyrus-imapd have 'delayed expunge' which might have allowed me to
'unexpunge' but they are still on an older version so that wasn't an option.
Sometimes, it's not about when things are working but how things go when
they break...it's still part of the equation.

Craig

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