On 10/12/2013 15:23, Charles Marcus wrote:
Having worked for a company on Exchange, that got bought out by a company on Notes, that then got bought out by a bigger fish on Exchange I can say that it is a very valid question to ask during the due diligence activities prior to M&A's taking place!!!On 2013-12-10 10:02 AM, Edward Rudd <ur...@outoforder.cc> wrote:You have been lucky where you work then:) The "political" nature comes in when some Executive @ the company gets it stuck in his head that we *HAVE* to switch to Exchange but does the dog and pony show of letting the IT department trial several alternatives (Zimbra, etc.) only to ignore all of the facts that prove Exchange is the only option that doesn't meet any of his criteria and choose it anyway. So now that company has an Exchange server used by everyone EXCEPT the IT department and the critical web application (which still use the Cyrus + Postfix server). And the Exchange server has to be rebooted once a month. And the rest of the employees (including the owner of the company and that one Executive) gripe and complain about how they loath Outlook, but he's the one who wanted it in the first place..The political aspect is all about irrational non-logical conclusions made by non-IT people in a company. So you really have to stack the deck proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ROI on Exchange doesn't exist. Now if they are wanting things like "push" or native Outlook integration.. take a look at z-push, openchange and SOgo. which all run on-top of your existing infrastructure to add those features. (all open source too)Exactly.I at least will be insisting on trialing SOGo, as we already have paid for enough support from them to get it fully up and running.But, as I said, the one thing that I may not be able to counter, that I'd like to be able to counter, is the belief that our NOT being on Exchange Server might somehow DECREASE the 'perceived' value of the company, as relates to a potential buyout question.Personally, it seems to me that if company A (that is an all Microsoft/Exchange shop) wants to buy company B, that is not using Exchange (say, uses SOGo, with clients being able to choose between Outlook or Thunderbird for their desktop client), whether or not company B is using Exchange on the backend would be a very minor detail - as company A could always simply migrate company B to Exchange after hey bought them. In fact, it might even make it easier, since, instead of trying to integrate an existing foreign Exchange system into their existing one, they could simply migrate the emails and users into their existing system.-- Best regards, */Charles/*
-- Regards, Giles Coochey, CCNP, CCNA, CCNAS NetSecSpec Ltd +44 (0) 8444 780677 +44 (0) 7983 877438 http://www.coochey.net http://www.netsecspec.co.uk gi...@coochey.net
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