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

[Craig White]

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