[ILUG] MS Exchange alternatives (was: out of office replies)

[Paul Mc Auley]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 01:05:24PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
| Quoting AJ McKee (aj.mckee at nmtbmedia.com):

| > Why not have exchange replaced with something like opengroupware? Sure,
| > I've seen the mail that said something like "Replacing Exchange/Outlook"
| > is not an option .... Why is it not an option? What can we do to make it
| > an option?

Palace coup? It's worth remembering that quite frequently the directive is
handed down from on high. The people who make the decision are frequently
not the same people who will have to maintain it.

| Reasons businesses use Exchange/Outlook:

| 1.  In its new-ish Windows Small Business Server 2003 incarnation, it
| now Sucks Less<tm>, being fairly competitively priced and (reportedly)

I find myself wondering what exactly this means, is it just that the
pricing is rather more iceberg like with the bulk of the cost lurking
just out of sight in the form of CALs and license renewal?

| 2.  Because the executives are MS-Outlook addicts, and nothing else 
| integrates as thoroughly with MS-Outlook than does MS-Exchange Server.

The frequent requirement is for a mail client with little or now evident
learning curve. The fact that an awful lot of stuff you are I would want
to do like look at headers and so forth is buried to the point of being
useless is beside the point.

| 3.  Because their golf buddies use it.  I was discussing the incredible
| irrationality of many business IT decisions with a friend, and he
| finally explained it to me:  "Business executives don't want to talk
| about IT; they want to talk about golf."

There's also a degree of inertia, if somebody is used to O or OE, they
don't want to have to get to grips with something new.

| 4.  Because they're so accustomed to security meltdowns, lock-in, forced
| upgrades, and lack of control of their critical computing infrastructure
| that they no longer even recognise it when they sign up for more of it.

5. The fully integrated shared everythingness of it all. The ability to
share mailboxes, do stuff to each others calendars, use an integrated
addressboox and all from the credentials entered at login. Sure, you can do
pieces of this using (say) IMAP, but it's fiddly and probably requires some
credentials stuff that Joe User would rather not deal with. MSX provides a
lot of stuff 'out of the box'. On the other hand, one might ask _why_ a mail
server would want to do NNTP.

6. Easier to get the staff. Let's face it, it's quite easy to admin MSX
badly, which makes it easier to replace somebody who's been run over by
a bus, been drop kicked or has gone off to travel around the world. The
fact that the under the cover work requires a bit more in depth knowledge
is beside the point to your average VP, it's still easier to handle then
one of those difficult Unix people.

7. Support. _Yes_, _I_know_. But on some level, they think that if they
pay for it and then the information store eats their mailbox, MS will
dispatch a crack team of MCSEs to sort it out. After all, it's for the CEO,
and he's important.

In these times of watching the bottom line, the best weapon is to turn the
TCO gun on MSX and come up with some per/head/annum costs, with the
additional note on administrative downtime (because you're going to have
to do housekeeping on the information stores, right?) and the disaster
recovery aspect.
	Paul
-- 
--- Paul Mc Auley <paul at peema.org>
--
-   This message represents the official view of the voices in my head.