Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
i can see this happening, and i would like to see more options besides exchange. i think its healthy for dev teams to have something to compete against. but remember exchange is also backed by a huge suite of other things that all work together and it all integrates. thats the flip side that competing devs need to take a stab at as well. not just email but full office collaboration. but i think that if it did come up it would be very groovy to see. and personally my favorite email client is the gmail web interface. i really have grown to love the way it threads conversations and handles email mass. so a 97 email topic is still just one line marked with new content. --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
on almost everything IT from the email to the phones to the CRM package. We also trained on standard policies and procedures. -Best of Breed vs. Homogenous Enterprise Both purchasing the rite tool for the job and keeping to a single vender have merits. I personally believe in the best of breed method, however I have never found a substitute for Exchange/Outlook. There are few to no other options to what outlook provides an enterprise these days. Remember we are not talking straight single user email and calendar we are talking about something that provides collaboration. The ability to assign tasks, track those tasks, integrate all communication associated with those tasks, etc., etc. etc. for calendaring, contacts, tasks, etc. all in a single pim is a very nice thing. Have you every used the journal feature in outlook? Just because you have to pay for something does not mean the cost always outweighs the benefit. Once you have to start justifying your ROI on new projects and show a comprehensive TOC analysis on what you already have, you have to take a cold hard look at your products and emotions play no longer can play a role in decision making. All this said, I put SpeekBack.com on a combination of Google Aps and Postfix because they were the rite tools for the job. However for Cornerstone Homes (and ASU) Exchange was the rite tool for the job. Exchange is a very good tool to have in your IT bag of tricks when your job is to reduce cost and maximize productivity of an entire enterprise. Unless you have a real replacement, you should not bag on Exchange just because it is Microsoft. Indeed it is one of two evil empire products I often feel compelled to defend. Most others have their substitutes or are not commonly used. Some uncommon product like groove are also quite interesting with few real substitutes, but don't have the wide spread adoption to be used by most businesses. And while I use others MS products, like Visio, it is only because I already own it and know it, like using Photoshop vs. GIMP. I would never go purchase Photoshop, but I would not go out of my way to learn GIMP if I already had Photoshop and new how to use it. Basically what I am saying is don't hate a product because it is proprietary and you don't understand it. Now Hans can get away with hating something just because it is not open but he never says he hates it because it cant be integrated, he just says it's not open and that's enough :) -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Craig White Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:14 PM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:37 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote: On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Stephen cryptwo...@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
RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 09:45 -0700, Bryan O'Neal wrote: I disagree... Mostly. - Tough to backup Like any database it needs to be shut down for standard file backups to work properly. This can be done via a simple script and is not a real issue. However the use of back up programs like BackupExec make it a breeze to back up and restore. However I will agree that if you never had to deal with it before and you don't have much space and you don't have something like Backup Exec it can be daunting to figure out how to get regular backups working. That said I also like to run all the clients so they keep a copy of all activity locally. Not only does this speed up the clients but it also ensures that if the server suddenly went belly up and the last backup I had was 10 or 12 hours old (if I was using a file backup system) I could restore everything up to the minuet for people who had their clients running. If I thought it was worth the time I would have liked to virtualizes the exchange server and take regular snap shots of it throughout the day. However other projects provided a greater return for the time invested so I never got around to it. this is absurd - once you have used cyrus-imapd and all of the e-mails are separate files you realize how antiquated and stupid the concept of an Exchange mail store is. Oh, you can buy programs with Exchange 'agents' to allow you to back up live or you can use some routine to shut down Exchange to allow a backup but it's clearly a hostile environment, much like backing up any database. - Costly to integrate spyware, anti-virus and other content scanning I never had any issues and must totally disagree. I have always used the scanning built into exchange. This has been quite a nice feature since Exchange 2003 SP2 which is quite good at controlling spam, viruses, and generally enforcing corporate policies. However, for less then $500 a year you can get a third party to spam scan all of your email before it ever hits your server. If nothing else this pays for it's self in saved bandwidth. If you are a medium size company initial spam scanning should be done by a third party, after that Exchange can be tweaked quite easily to help enforce corporate policies. In addition integration with products like Avast make it easy to offer AV/Threat scanning. After that exchange is easy to set up for limiting the kinds of files that can be sent or received, how big a email can be, and even who emails can be sent or received from. And while I never did it, I am fairly certain you can do key word scanning as well. Most of this this can be customized on a per user basses. I think you just made my point...buying specialized software add-ons to perform scanning - and of course, the 'Exchange Server' options. - Specialized client software (Outlook) You can chose what ever client you want, but some features may not be limited or not available. A fairly good webmail client is provided. You can use POP and IMAP for any client with regards to your email. With some server side add-ons colanders can be made available as well and global contacts can be driven via ldap. While it is true if you want to use the advanced features you have to use outlook, but again, I have not found any other client/sere pair that provides these features, so it is not surprising that other clients can not use them when connecting to the server. good webmail is easily implemented as are LDAP client applications. OWA is adequate. - Requires AD Yes. However this is like saying that it requires an MS server to run so I really don't see your point. I can integrate my Linux servers and clients seamlessly into AD using krb and some people indicate the opposite is also true. It is an enterprise mail system designed around collaboration. If you don't have an enterprise to collaborate with you probably are not looking at outlook. If you believe it ads additional expense look at the small business edition. The price for a fully integrated MS environment is very cheep these days. My point seemed to be rather obvious. You're in for the penny, you're in for the pound. The issue isn't about whether Linux or Macintosh can integrate into an AD environment...of course they can. The issue was about buying in and having AD dictate everything from user accounts to machine access and all resource management. To use Exchange, you have no choice other than to go the whole hog...there was no other options after Exchange 5.5 The simple truth is that Microsoft didn't create the Enterprise environment nor do they possess the only logical implementation. They have the marketing muscle and the foresight to create artificial dependencies to use software to dictate implementation. Start tossing in curveballs such as IP Telephony integration and it becomes a major clusterf**k. The ultimate issue is that the only decent client for Exchange is
Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
I know the 2 bugaboos for excahnge in requirements is Disk IO for large companies, (not as much an issue in a small sub 1000 users company) and ram. exchange up to 2003 is a 4gb of ram beastie. im not sure about the mailbox recovery, but i know it can run on ESXi vm as long as you have 2 cores and 4gb of ram to give it. we are getting ready to convert ours to a Virtual machine ill let ppl know the results if they want. Also excahgne 2007 is fully 64 bit and VM supported as well. we are hoping to deploy that and migrate soon but for mailbox recovery im not sure what has changed but i know alot has. but it is better than it has been in the past (comparing 5.5 to 2k3 personally) On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Bob Elzer bob.el...@gmail.com wrote: Well I haven't used the latest exchange and it's been a while, so maybe you can tell me if they worked around the issues I had with it. It requires it's own server. On a single core server, it bogged the system down so much, we couldn't run other apps. (granted it's probably best to do that, but when you don't have the budget for it, you have to do) There's no way to look at the raw email message on the server. Or go through all the mail boxes. Recovery requires a second machine. From what I remember it was convoluted, but you need a second box. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
I ran it integrated on the same machine as the AD server (which was duel core mid range Power Edge 1600 IIRC). Supposedly I should have run it on its own box because it slows down the AD controller but it met my needs and worked great. The only complaint I had was that exchange would act slow for a particular user when that user was doing something like searching for a specific string somewhere in the 120,000 message the user maintained their inbox. I could have solved this by turning on server side message indexing, but the resource cost was too high for the benefit it returned. To that note exchange can be a bit of a system hog but not bad. I ran three application servers and a BES off the same box. Exchange offered me a way to split the work load amongst several front and back end exchange servers that were dedicated to just exchange, but that was extreme overkill for 60-70 users. As for raw email, what do you mean? I could look as raw msg files including all the header and routing information for any item in any mail box. In fact I could do this either through their DB tools or in drive/file fashion where the mail boxes and sub folders are listed as directories and the individual mail items were simple message files. As for recovery, I can recover and mount any mail box I want, even duplicates (as long as the system identifiers were changed) on one box. However if you looking for recovery from a catastrophic failure I just needed a box. However, the down side was that it was heavily integrated with AD. Which was very, very nice for management. But if you lost your AD (all AD servers) you could only recover the individuals mail, calendar, contacts, task, and note items. The individuals processing rules, custom alerts, etc. are all tied to a system ID. But since I don't know any other system where users can set all this up on the server in a sand boxed format I did not see this as a drawback since other system did not offer this feature. In addition I backed up my AD the same as Exchange and everything else, so if I had a raw box I could recover everything no questions asked. I remember exchange back in the NT 4 days and it was a weird black art, but since 2003 Sp2 it is very nice. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Bob Elzer Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:14 AM To: 'Main PLUG discussion list' Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) Well I haven't used the latest exchange and it's been a while, so maybe you can tell me if they worked around the issues I had with it. It requires it's own server. On a single core server, it bogged the system down so much, we couldn't run other apps. (granted it's probably best to do that, but when you don't have the budget for it, you have to do) There's no way to look at the raw email message on the server. Or go through all the mail boxes. Recovery requires a second machine. From what I remember it was convoluted, but you need a second box. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Bryan O'Neal Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 9:45 AM To: 'Main PLUG discussion list' Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) I disagree... Mostly. - Tough to backup Like any database it needs to be shut down for standard file backups to work properly. This can be done via a simple script and is not a real issue. However the use of back up programs like BackupExec make it a breeze to back up and restore. However I will agree that if you never had to deal with it before and you don't have much space and you don't have something like Backup Exec it can be daunting to figure out how to get regular backups working. That said I also like to run all the clients so they keep a copy of all activity locally. Not only does this speed up the clients but it also ensures that if the server suddenly went belly up and the last backup I had was 10 or 12 hours old (if I was using a file backup system) I could restore everything up to the minuet for people who had their clients running. If I thought it was worth the time I would have liked to virtualizes the exchange server and take regular snap shots of it throughout the day. However other projects provided a greater return for the time invested so I never got around to it. - Costly to integrate spyware, anti-virus and other content scanning I never had any issues and must totally disagree. I have always used the scanning built into exchange. This has been quite a nice feature since Exchange 2003 SP2 which is quite good at controlling spam, viruses, and generally enforcing corporate policies. However, for less then $500 a year you can get a third party to spam scan all of your email before it ever hits your server. If nothing else this pays for it's self in saved bandwidth. If you
RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
Agreed, for larger companies ( I would even say over 500 users) the disk IO can brutal. Especially since it writes every message or change to the store before scanning for discard. Which is another reason why $500/year for off site spam scanning is a must. Also remember it is handling much more then just your mail. That and you can split it up so the actual mail box stores reside on faster disks with and mirrored to a more robust raid. Then again I have seen some very nice hybrid drives and well cached raid controllers produce phenomenal results for very little coin. The triad off some a company that size is quite good. Remember I did the bulk of my exchange work for a company with less then 75 people and a monthly cash flow of ~$10Mill so the $250K/year IT budget they tossed me was nothing. Especially since I maintained a 300% ROI on had documented savings and value generation. I could not have done this if I had forced everyone onto cyrus-imapd for all communications ;) -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Stephen Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:21 AM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) I know the 2 bugaboos for excahnge in requirements is Disk IO for large companies, (not as much an issue in a small sub 1000 users company) and ram. exchange up to 2003 is a 4gb of ram beastie. im not sure about the mailbox recovery, but i know it can run on ESXi vm as long as you have 2 cores and 4gb of ram to give it. we are getting ready to convert ours to a Virtual machine ill let ppl know the results if they want. Also excahgne 2007 is fully 64 bit and VM supported as well. we are hoping to deploy that and migrate soon but for mailbox recovery im not sure what has changed but i know alot has. but it is better than it has been in the past (comparing 5.5 to 2k3 personally) On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Bob Elzer bob.el...@gmail.com wrote: Well I haven't used the latest exchange and it's been a while, so maybe you can tell me if they worked around the issues I had with it. It requires it's own server. On a single core server, it bogged the system down so much, we couldn't run other apps. (granted it's probably best to do that, but when you don't have the budget for it, you have to do) There's no way to look at the raw email message on the server. Or go through all the mail boxes. Recovery requires a second machine. From what I remember it was convoluted, but you need a second box. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
I can concur with a great deal of what your saying. However I am intrigued by your statement of There are many other choices I am hoping to find ones that work well for the very small business and the very large that provide the same functionality of Exchange, but have not. Do you have a solution suite that you can recommend? As for the mail only portion, I can tell you other systems handle it much better (Personally I like Postfix for a pure mail solution). The last time I looked at benchmarks was back in 2006 but I can not find them now. Exchange was in the lower half of the companied mail servers. But when you talk exchange mail is really less then half of the conversation. But again, as for cost, it is not as bad as you think. For small business solutions it can be quite cheep. This cost benefit ratio does degrade once you get into the very large enterprises and you have to really look at how much you are willing to pay for what Exchange does (and other solutions don't) Similarly it is far to expensive for the five person small business by its self. Which is why it is bundled with SQL Server, Share Point, Terminal Services, AD, and a ton of other stuff in their Server 2003 Small Business Edition. Still for most very small businesses I encourage outsourcing all their IT needs. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Bob Elzer Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 12:00 PM To: 'Main PLUG discussion list' Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) Exchange works and for now it probably has the best calendar app. But MS designed it to only work with it's own relatives, It was not designed to play nice with the rest of the kids on the block. But the kids on the block, adjusted to play with MS. When you are done adding up, all the things you need to run an exchange server, it's just too costly, money and resources. There are so many other choices, that don't require all that special stuff, and in some cases, they may take a little more effort to make them play with MS, but in the end the money and resources are a lot less, and it works with everybody. Also when you talk about adding VM's, that solution works for everything, not just exchange, so when comparing mail systems that shouldn't be included. One thing, I think that has been overlooked, and I don't know if it's ever been done, is a mail server benchmark. I'd be interested in knowing, the difference between the mail server, how much disk space does the mail message take up when stored on the system, how many messages can they handle per minute, how much load on the cpu do they each take. I'm sure there are more question too. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Stephen Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:21 AM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?) I know the 2 bugaboos for excahnge in requirements is Disk IO for large companies, (not as much an issue in a small sub 1000 users company) and ram. exchange up to 2003 is a 4gb of ram beastie. im not sure about the mailbox recovery, but i know it can run on ESXi vm as long as you have 2 cores and 4gb of ram to give it. we are getting ready to convert ours to a Virtual machine ill let ppl know the results if they want. Also excahgne 2007 is fully 64 bit and VM supported as well. we are hoping to deploy that and migrate soon but for mailbox recovery im not sure what has changed but i know alot has. but it is better than it has been in the past (comparing 5.5 to 2k3 personally) On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Bob Elzer bob.el...@gmail.com wrote: Well I haven't used the latest exchange and it's been a while, so maybe you can tell me if they worked around the issues I had with it. It requires it's own server. On a single core server, it bogged the system down so much, we couldn't run other apps. (granted it's probably best to do that, but when you don't have the budget for it, you have to do) There's no way to look at the raw email message on the server. Or go through all the mail boxes. Recovery requires a second machine. From what I remember it was convoluted, but you need a second box. -Original Message- From: plug-discuss-boun...@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --- PLUG
OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Stephen cryptwo...@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. Alan --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
What exchange can do is really good, but gettong it to work well is almost Byzantine in its poorly doctumented way I have run them and will do so again but the bugaboos that don't come up till its an issue are the kicker and not worth it if your doing just email and the like but it is petlt the best in market because there isn't an apples to apples comparison to it, except lotus notes but I haven ever even used it. If like to see a real competitor to exchange and see the space get movin On 2/19/09, Alan Dayley ala...@consultpros.com wrote: On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Stephen cryptwo...@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. Alan --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss -- Sent from my mobile device A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button. Stephen --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)
On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:37 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote: On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Stephen cryptwo...@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 --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
