Ok, I'm chiming in with my two cents. I use Gmail and Google apps for my personal life and LOVE them. I find them to be more user friendly and more feature friendly than Outlook and MS Office apps. I have also used them to create web pages of the handouts that I give at museums conference etc. I decided to do this because we cannot have them up all the time on the museum's website and I wanted my handouts to constantly be available to people (everyone knows that you don't always get around to investigating something you learned at a conference right away).
I also love Gmail and Google apps because I don't own the same software apps at home that the museum owns, so if I want to work on something at home I have to worry about will this software convert to that software. Using Google apps solves that problem for me and I have access to the work anywhere there is a computer and Internet. Sadly, our city IT department recently decided to block a lot of the Google apps. Now I'm back to square one with my software not being compatible with the museums and not having access everywhere I go. At the museum we are currently switching from Outlook to Zimbra and it's not going very well. Granted this could be due to our IT department. But at any rate, we are losing emails and getting folders that we don't need but can't delete. It's also a weird time for us because they've switched a few of us but not all of us, so we are in that stage where if someone has a probably is it the old system, is it the new system, or is it just them. Very frustrating. Heather Marie Wells Collections Assistant/Podcast Producer Shiloh Museum of Ozark History 118 W. Johnson Ave. Springdale, AR 72764 Phone: (479) 750-8165 Fax: (479) 750-8693 http://www.springdaleark.org/shiloh/ -----Original Message----- From: Christopher J. Mackie [mailto:c...@mellon.org] Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 4:00 PM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Google mail versus MS Exchange or others -- how aboutZimbra? "You'll get me out of Outlook when you pry my cold, dead hands off the keyboard".... :-) I'm sure you've got a few users who actually know how to use the product who feel the same way. Why not keep them happy, too? If your users enjoy the scheduling and other functionality of Outlook/Exchange (which goes well beyond the functionality of Google Apps at present, and not just for meeting scheduling), then it might be worthwhile to take a look at one of the open-source Exchange alternatives like Zimbra: www.zimbra.com Zimbra was bought by Yahoo recently, so it's at least potentially a target if MS buys Yahoo--not the best news, though it's open source, so the worst that MS could do is to shut off the direct Exchange integration, which wouldn't matter if you're leaving Exchange entirely. But Zimbra's a terrific collaborative environment, it's fully web-based, and it solves the lack-of-equivalent-functionality problem much more fully than do Gmail/GCal. You can install it yourself, or buy mailboxes from them in a hosting model. Zimbra's not the only such product, either, so if you like the idea you can find a few other OSS competitors using similar models that would also like to help you leave Exchange. Hope this helps, --Chris _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
