Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the corporate-incest dept.
cblood writes: "This article tells how the worker bees at Time Warner are forced to switch to AOL for their email. That's one way to increase your user base." Turns out that not everyone at Time-Warner wants to hear "you've got mail!" 50 times a day.
312 comments
Question.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
I can't get at the article at the moment, so can anyone tell me:
Are they being forced to use AOL mail at work or at home?
If it is at work then it sounds pretty reasonable - most companies have standard software. I, for example, am compelled to use outlook although I would never dream of using it at home...
If, on the other hand, they are being told what they are allowed to run on their own computers, then they should tell their employers to mind their own bloody business!
Its at work. However, have you every used AOL (let alone AOL email?) Its a disaster that predates the stone age. Hotmail has more features. In an office (marketing) environment like Time Warner, you need a fairly sofisticated Email system. Not one designed for residential use.
they should tell their employers to mind their own bloody business
From what I have heard about your employment practices in the USA that will not be good for your career prospects...
-- I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
for the 1% that actually know how to use outlook and all it's tools this will be an inconvience and a down grade, for the rest it will be an improvement. Remember, these are entertainment people, not IT people. They don't understand computers and don't want to. As a tech support rep for an isp, I am swamped by calls from people who are angry because they have to use a real e-mail client that doesn't do their thinking for them. never underestimate the ignorance of the american people.
Ha! My dad works for Time Warner cable in a VP position, and his corporate e-mail system until just last november was an embarrassing IBM system that worked over telnet. I mean, this system was only a little beneath the level of telnetting into the smtp server and writing your messages with an echo. They upgraded to a very very basic pop system but since the turnover rate of management is pretty low, few of them have taken to the advanced features. My dad was heard to remark on several occasions how "stupid" outlook was and how he used to be able to read him mail so much quicker in "the black window."
I might add that he's worked there close to forty years (since way before it was called "Time Warner", is an engineering genius and a great boss (so I've heard) and he is NOT afraid of technology. There are people at TW who are dicks and technophobes. For all of these people, AOL mail is more than sufficient. They don't need secure mail and bccs and flagging and receipts because they wouldn't even use them.
I imagine their IT departments will have a cow.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
You mean we have to install this POS (piece of software) on the machines? Our LAN is working fine now, and the computers run.
Imagine AOL taking over your computer, and useless network traffic as they logon to AOL and get more than just email. Ads, artwork updates, new sounds, AIM chat, and other useless bandwidth hogging stuff from AOL.
User names?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
How are they going to get user names for everybody? Or will everybody have a number in their email address?
Would you believe that mike_peterson331@aol.com really works for TimeWarner?
Re:First hand...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
(New Turner AC)...our old turner.com addresses (john.smith@turner.com) will map to our jsmith2343@aol.com addys. But I think (no ones really using it yet), that new outgoing email will show the aol.com as the From:) (though we may have a reply-to: option...don't know yet)
Re:Sell now!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
> AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail
WTF? The "standard" for email is plain-text!
Cripes I hate llamas who send out html emails...
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
That's nothing - the latest ad campaign, "Intelligence Everywhere", is being circulated as the file "intel_everywhere.ppt". Yes, by the very people responsible for advertising Motorola. Yet we're laying off engineers instead. The mind boggles.
Incentive to improve software = Good Thing
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Forcing Time-Warner employees to use AOLmail is a GOOD THING because it will give them an incentive to produce software that isn't crippled and mind-numbing. In fact, I think it's generally a good idea to force a corporation to use it's own software.
I wonder if they will try this with customers
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Let's see, according to the Road Runner FAQ at www.rochester.rr.com:
I want to use a different operating system, like Linux.
We don't support it. We also will not install Road Runner on a computer that doesn't meet our basic requirements - this means it has to run Windows or MacOS. However, we won't interfere if you want to install a different operating system.
Also, a good friend of mine discovered that by Windows, they mean 95 and its descendants. They don't like NT and won't install on it. They probably won't support it either. I can imagine how popular DSL will become in a big hurry around here if they ever do anything that breaks their support for non-Windows users.
Re:I wonder if they will try this with customers
by
Compenguin
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· Score: 1
But these days you ca do a self install, if you're competent enought to use linux you can do a self install
-Compenguin
Re:In related news...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
What's worse than a computer with Windows on it? A computer with Windows and AOL!
Re:They're not forced to use it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
Not completely true. (and yes, I'm a AOLTW employee). To qualify for a aol.net account in our division, you've got to be in "engineering", which includes server operations folks, dbas, etc., but NOT rank-and-file, or many people in the IT groups. Our IT project managers, developers, etc., do NOT have the option of using anything other than AOL Mail.
First hand...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5
I work at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta and we have been dreading this conversion for a long time. Unlike Time Inc, we have been using Outlook + Exchange for almost a year now. AOL's mail is a serious joke, they have no idea how dependant we have become on Outlooks calendar and meeting tools. (In fact, alot of our in-house applications have been developed to work with exchange, oh well back to the drawing board...)
So far they have pushed back our conversion to AOL mail because we are too dependant on Outlook and our managment would grind to a halt (turner has been firmly partnered with Microsoft since before the merger!). To make up for it, they are developing somesort of calendar + meeting thing using netscapes webserver. But I haven't heard much about it. Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username. I'll end up as like JoeSmi543879879@aol.com. Hows that for professionalism? Much better than Joe.Smith@turner.com! (not my real email btw!)
Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username. I'll end up as like JoeSmi543879879@aol.com. Hows that for professionalism? Much better than Joe.Smith@turner.com! (not my real email btw!)
But you DO get five screen names! You can be JoeSmi543879879@aol.com for internal email, thatguyjoeatturner@aol.com for external customers, momslittleangeljoe@aol.com to your mom, homerworks@aol.com for that Simpson's listserv, and teengurl69@aol.com for those chat rooms. It's the perfect corporate system!:)
For those that lack a sarcasm detector, this is humor.
-- What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username. I'll end up as like JoeSmi543879879@aol.com. Hows that for professionalism?
What about prefixing your corporate initials on the address? It's more likely that TBJohnSmith@aol.com (or some variant) is untaken. Ideally, if you could get your entire department (or even more people) to use a consistent prefix ('TB', 'TBS', 'Turner', 'Trnr', and 'AOLTW' all come to mind, either with a '_', a '.', or just capitalization separating it from the rest of the address), it'd present a nice, consistent image.
Of course it certainly could be worse. The article mentions that at Sun, they force their poor employees to use StarOffice.
Of course it certainly could be worse. The article mentions that at Sun, they force their poor employees to use StarOffice.
Not in Australia. We had some Sun guys come out and try to flog us some boxes. The sales engineer dudes did mention they have that policy, but the presentation they gave us was in Microsoft Powerpoint, in Win2k on a Toshiba laptop.
Why should they have to attach a prefix (TBS) to their user name? That looks unprofessional and seems like a hack. Why not do what most other companies do in this same situation... make everyones email at TBS something like "first.last@tbs.aol.com". Oh wait, the people who use aol (of their own free will) are too stupid and would get confused by an email with more than one dot in it;-)
However, like was said eariler, I would really fight to NOT have my real name as part of an aol adress.
I can't explain how absolutely giddy it makes me to know that Time Warner is working together with Microsoft. Hey, who needs antitrust laws? It's just a small collaboration I know -- I'm sure that part of healthy competition is helping eachother improve productivity. It's like good sportsmanship.......yeah, that's the ticket.
Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username.
That's probably for the best. One of the few knee-jerk prejudices I have is that I still think "newbie" or "luser" whenever I see an @aol address. I would insist on not attaching my real name to such an address, myself!
I've heard about that. What's really funny is, Motorola used to make its own computers - the StarMax line on Mac clones. My roommate used to have one. Kinda weird, a Mac with PS/2 ports (in addition to ADB) and (at a time when other Macs used DB-15 VGA connectors) an HD-15 VGA connector. And a mid-tower case made of metal, not plastic. Employees of the company that manufactured them weren't allowed to use them.
--
-- $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$]; $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Re:News flash.. Workers at Microsoft do NOT..
by
Isaac-Lew
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· Score: 2
Ford dosen't expect to deliver it's cars using Ford trucks.
Ford makes a line of heavy trucks...I've rarely seen a car carrier loaded with all Fords that wasn't being pulled by a Ford (most likely independent carriers drive whatever they want though).
Do you know what not "sacrificing your ability to work with their teammates" entails? It means using Windows systems like Exchange. It's the same thing that made me quit a job I had 4 years ago at a Unix software shop that "standardized" on Exchange when they instituted ISO 9000. They never actually *said* we had to use windows, but they did say:
1 - We must use the ISO9000 documents, and if we see a problem with them, we must seek to change them rather than violate them. We must follow what they say even if we know it will cause a failure, we just need to mention the problem first so that when it fails it's not our fault. (We can point at the protest and say, "see - I told you so", and that will lend a lot of weight to getting the official policy in the ISO9000 document changed.)
2 - All ISO 9000 documents will be stored in Exchange as if they were discussion groups, so
comments can be attached to them.
So, adding 1 and 2 together gives us the result that we MUST have exchange up and running 100% of the day so we can get at the ISO 9000 docs, which means we must be running Windows. This was excessively stupid since we wrote 90% of our software in Unix. When I had to give up my linux box at work and isntead reformatt it for windows full-time, by productivity dropped because my only access to unix systems was through terminal programs, instead of having one natively on my box. (I'm not trying to dis Windows here, but understandably A unix system is better to develop unix programs on than a windows one.)
That made me quit the place, not just because I hate using Windows (I do), but because the management instituting a policy that screwed over 90% of the programmers, making their lives harder so that the managers' lives were easier, was an indicator to me that they didn't give a rat's ass about their programmers.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
9:00am in what time zone? In which conference room? In which building.
That's the problem.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
Tet
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· Score: 1
Until then like the stick-shift automobile, it will remain strictly a specialist interest.
Only in the USA. The rest of the world is
dominated by manual gearboxes, and an automatic
is an expensive option that's rarely used
except by the
elderly and lazy businessmen.
-- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
than Lotus notes
with which you're forced to send Attachments, HTML mail, where the mail ID are changed when received by the server.....
--
none Yet.
Doesn't make practical business sense
by
IRNI
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· Score: 2
This makes no sense. The whole point of business is to get the most productivity out of your people. So you make things streamlined. You make your man-hours count. I can understand Microsoft having their employees use windows. Lots of companies do that. I can understand them requiring the use of Exchange/Outlook. Wouldn't want important email to go down with the user's computer. I just can not understand using AOL for email. Yeah that is great that your company makes software for home users that is easy to use. But for your company it wastes valuable time to have a whole online service software open just to read mail. Are they talking about AOL web email? Or do they have to have the AOL application loaded? It would waste resources and time.
Hey fire the employees you resist. They aren't there to complain about something stupid like an email setup. If they don't like it that much either quit or shutup about it. After all time warner/aol is paying them to be at work. It's about what the boss wants you to do, not what you would perfer....
you are soooo right. when i go to work, i expect to be just another cog in the corporate engine. i try, by all means necessary, to suppress any notions that my superiors are wrong; because, after all, they are my superiors and they must know what they are doing. in a truly successful company, everyone must blindly do what the bossman says...after all, if you're not a lemming, then why are you there?
Pardon me while i go puke
something stupid like an email setup
when you get out of high school, go through college, then get a job, you will find out that seemingly stupid things such as "email setup" can cost companies millions of dollars.
-- "My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
You're right. 'Email setups' can cost companies millions of dollars. Particularly when they let the clueless junior employees futz around and pick the one they 'prefer' instead of implementing a company-wide standard.
Plus, it gets the clueless junior employees to wave their arms vigorously in fury that they can't pick their own desktop theme and a skinnable email client. This makes it easier to identify and fire them. Believe me, the most creative and productive employee is the one who focuses on the job, not on what screen saver his PC is running.
My spider sense is tingling.
I sense Assholes in the area....
Yeah.. Time Waner Employee's are pissed!
by
DraKKon
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· Score: 3
My girlfriend works at Warner Bros, and because the "Don't want to pay the fees for Microsofts Exchange Server", which they have already purchased, they are being forced to use AOL Mail for email, iPlanet for groupware + another program that escapes me at this time. Yes, 3 seperate programs, just so they don;t have to pay for Outlook and Exchange. So, no more syncing to palm pilots (visor's and WinCE), plus the cost of retraining THE ENTIRE COMPANY to use three seperate applications. Pardon my french, but it's fucking stupid. AOL is fucking up TimeWarner. I dount if anyone did the cost of productivity and money lost in training and using these CRAPPY applications.
-- "It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
I'm curious why you *don't* use your own chips. Is it because you all got burned from the apple clone business? Or is it more the whole "how many executives would fly an airplane their company wrote the control software for" deal?
And if you'd been really ballsy, you could have written galvin back about the pcs after he made that phone crack. (cc'ing everybody, of course..)
Turns out that not everyone at Time-Warner wants to hear "you've got mail!" 50 times a day.
So turn off sound. Sometimes with linux you even get that for free.
(however, I'm quite happy with my old-school Ensoniq 1371)
You want to go from Notes to plain IMAP?
by
hatless
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· Score: 2
What kind of messed-up implementation of Notes does your company have? Notes/Domino can do things a generic IMAP server and client can only dream of. Efficient synchronization! Single-message stores! Support for structured data beyond plain email messages! A really nice web interface! Workflows!
If you want to give up all of this (or maybe your company doesn't use any of it), you're welcome to connect to a Domino server with your favorite plain IMAP client, and do user lookups with the little LDAP search gadgets in Outlook Express or Netscape 4.x or such.
Or were you thinking more in terms of an Emacs interface? [smirk]
Re:You want to go from Notes to plain IMAP?
by
eltardo
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· Score: 1
Where I work our logins are setup so we have our own personal network drive that follows us around from machine to machine and we just slap the Lotus ID in there. Makes life easier when you get a new desk every month or so.
-- plop
Re:You want to go from Notes to plain IMAP?
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tb3
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· Score: 2
The Interface Hall of Shame brought back some unhappy flashbacks, reminding me what a POS Notes really is.
Aside from the multitude of interface issues, a Notes client installation ties itself to the user and PC. In other words, you can only check your email from your own PC, you can't log on to another machine, because it won't have your profile on its hard disk. Sheesh! -----------------
Re:You want to go from Notes to plain IMAP?
by
cheezedawg
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· Score: 2
Wow! You are the first person that I have ever heard that actually likes Lotus Notes. I had to use it for 3 years at my last job, and that was enough (I am happy with Pine at my current job...).
If you want a good laugh, check out the Interface Hall of Shame. The developer comments are especially funny- the developers need to understand that if the user thinks the interface is crappy, it doesn't matter what they think of it- its a crappy interface.
-- "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Time to dump AOL/TW stock. I mean, shoot, AOL e-mail is even worse than POP3. At least with POP, you can easily save, archive and organize all your messages permanently and move them from machine to machine. AOL mail? Old messages disappear after an arbitrary number of days and you have to manually put messages you want to keep in your system's local "personal filing cabinet" which isn't exactly rich in organizational and search features.
AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail; instead, it's got its own hobbled rich-text format made from a subset of HTML, so it has a rough time with email from other modern mail clients like, say, 1996-vintage Netscape or 1997-vintage Outlook Express and Outlook.
Send more than one attachment to the outside world, and it gets zipped if you send it from a PC and Stuffed if you send it from a Mac, and godspeed the PC user who gets a binhexed Stuffit file from someone who has no idea this happens automatically.
The whining about use of SecurIDs is a bit of bellyaching, though. More companies should do things like that if they open mail access to machines outside their private network.
Then again, I'm not sure if any of the "AOL Anywhere" clients for access via WAP phones, Palm VIIs, Blackberries and whatnot support SecurID authentication. It sure would suck if all those tens of thousands of employees had no way to retrieve mail from a device smaller than a laptop.
Anyone know if AOL gives employees the ability to do mail forwarding or set vacation messages? AOL customers sure can't.
At least with POP, you can easily save, archive and organize all your messages permanently and move them from machine to machine.
AOL mail can do this too. By default, it doesn't save messages to the filing cabinet, but two checkboxes and all your mail is automatically saved. It's much more IMAP-model than POP-model, and most users just access their mail from the server, but that doesn't mean you can't store all your mail locally if you don't want to. 6.0 has a much more usable filing cabinet, though there is still no rule processing.
AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail
6.0 supports full HTML e-mail, modulo JavaScript and ActiveX, which are disabled for security.
Send more than one attachment to the outside world, and it gets zipped if you send it from a PC
This is true, and can be a pain when doing cross-platform multiple attachments. I know the Mac client can unzip, but I am not sure if the PC client can unstuff - or if stuffing is still what the current Mac clients do.
Jay, the mail guy, speaking for myself
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
Servo
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· Score: 1
As a former employeee, I can attest to the fact that yes, AOL likes to use the AOL Service to do MOST of its business functions. All employees are/were required to use AOL for corporate email. They did have some inhouse SMTP/POP3 type applications for answering questions submitted via email... but honestly, all they did was cut and paste generic answers to complex problems.
-- A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Some people REALLY love AOL, but it still isn't a corporate system.
I subscribed to AOL for three years, and I can testify that the people who "love AOL" like that are the ones who can tolerate the piss-poor interface and implementation because they don't know any better.
What they love is the community, the other people they've grown close to. Some of these people are even technically literate, but they place more value on their friendships rather than having a more efficient email system or being able to browse the web like a net_god...
Now, that's not a defense. I can't stand most of these people. They're generally ostrich-minded, single-issue people who you can't talk to without them working in that one pet topic that rules their lives, be it guns or Tolkein... And what's most scary that there are so many of them!
The AOL software is adequate for these people. But you put it in the hands of 86,000 serious, workaholic businesspeople - journalists, many of them - and they're going to scream bloody murder. I predict that within two years, the impact on their business will be such a burden that they will either 1) abandon it, or 2) rewrite it.
And based on my experience with AOL, if they choose 2), it will not be a solution, because management will move on to another "solution" before they get this one right.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
bughunter
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· Score: 2
While I don't disagree with your conclusions, I must object to your characterization of SecurID.
It's NOT that cumbersome. It's a smart card that fits in your wallet, like any credit card. When you need the passcode, you whip out the SecurID, type in the number it displays, and you're on your way.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
Pig+Hogger
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· Score: 2
This sounds just like HP: from what I've read, they exclusively use Windows/Outlook for all their
corporate stuff, including their website! They also use Exchange for their mail. This is instead of
using their own HP-UX systems for their website and other infrastructure, and their OpenMail
product (which is fully Exchange-compatible, including the calendaring). So apparently HP
doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have
to use HP-UX workstations?
It clearly is a case of bean counters not wanting to pay salaries for people who are competent to use HP-UX, but rather would want to pay MCSEs to mickey-mouse around with their servers...
No. Although HP uses Windows internally for email, all of its large, external facing websites run on HPUX. You think everyone at IBM logs in to AIX boxes?
-- Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
IntlHarvester
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· Score: 1
A few years ago, Netscape made a big "enterprise" sales push for it's messaging/calendar platforms. It just so happened that Microsoft and IBM/Lotus were also having a huge sales war at the same time (mostly because there was millions of old ccMail and MS-Mail seats out there ripe for the Y2K picking).
Anyway, Netscape came in a distant 3rd (or perhaps even 4th behind Novell) in that fight, which is one of the big reasons they aren't an independant company anymore.
The platform pretty much requires Netscape Communicator clients, and it's fuzzy how some things like the Calendar will work with Mozilla. Maybe AOL doesn't want to force Netscape onto their own employees.. --
It depends. I've worked in environments that get along just fine with the "Meeting at 9AM Monday" e-mail. However, if you are using some program with scheduling, it more polite to send a meeting invitation because the reciever gets an automated notification and they can just push "I Accept" or whatever, and not have to manually update whatever schedule book or software they're using.
There's also the issue of getting executive types to show up at these things, and that almost always demands sending some sort of invitation. Even back in the old days, we'd have to fire up a 3270 emulator and send IBM PROFS invitations to get certain people to show. (We were all happily on a POP3 system.)
There's definately different philosophies at play. Linus somehow manages the whole Linux Kernel project out of his Inbox, but I've found that my life is much easier with groupware tools and much less e-mail. --
Re:your kidding right???
by
IntlHarvester
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· Score: 2
There no such thing as a "generic" calendar solution, period.
Sure there's RFCs 2445-7 (iCalendar), but who the hell has product support? The fact is, if you are developing a scheduling application, you pretty much only have a choice between Outlook (Windows and sorta Mac) and Lotus Notes (Windows and Mac and sorta Unix). That's an ugly reality, and sitting on your butt waiting for a open platform is a stupid business decision, because you'd have been waiting for about 15 years now.
It's also pretty much impossible to create "generic" workflow mail routing applications either (no RFCs that I know of!), etc, etc for other groupware type stuff. --
they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange
Actually, I think most of the posts are saying that sticking with Outlook/Exchange is better than moving.
Personally, I think that a UNIX mail server (sendmail, or qmail for those nervous about security) with Eudora on the client side is the best choice. MS's mail servers have serious problems with resource use/responsiveness under moderate to heavy loads. The mail server here goes up and down like a yo-yo (probably due to a memory leak in the shiny new MS kerberoes mail authentication). On the other hand, because many people here use pine as their client, I've recieved one email worm (from an external source).
Recently (after yet another Outlook Email virus), a friend asked me what client he should use. He wanted something that would run in windows, and more user-friendly than pine in a telnet session (my initial reccomendation). For people who don't like pine, Eudora is probably the best client out there. It's much more secure than MS's offerings, but a lot easier to use than pine/mutt.
UNIX server with Eudora client is the way to go (of course, if you're 'leet enough for pine...).
From what I've read (I do _not_ use Windows for my email...), and what I've seen setting things up for my former employer, The Bat! might be a better choice. Reviewers seem to really like it (even the people at The Register talk about it from time to time, and use it as their standard e-mail client). There are also reports about the latest version of Eudora not quite living up to its reputation. But from dealing with supporting it, I can definitely say that Outlook is a pain. Unfortunately, I left the company before I could try to instate The Bat! (yes, the ! is part of the name, like Yahoo!)
As far as *nix mail clients go, after having used Pine for 2 years and Mutt for the past year, I'm completely sold. Folder notification, list reply, hooks, proper MIME (makes GPG happy!)...it's just great. I'd suggest you give it a try.
In a recent article about document version control, the allegation was made that Microsoft actually uses Rational's ClearCASE (a commercially available product) internally for large projects. I don't know if that's true or not. I would be surprised to see Microsoft using a proprietary system internally; surely if it's good enough for their projects, it's good enough for them to sell?
Of course, the whole ClearCASE thing might just be a rumor.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Re:Two Possible Outcomes:
by
ethereal
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· Score: 1
Could be worse - they could spend millions trying Exchange before going back to their old system:)
Although according to the article their old system (some sort of Notes system) is no longer going to be supported, which helped motivate them to switch. I'd be nervous about trying to run a corporate email system on AOL, but I guess if AOL can use it internally, it must not be as bad as I would have thought.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
ethereal
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· Score: 1
Windows has a command line
My wife uses Linux without ever touching the command line.
The only person who's forgetting something here is you - you're forgetting that Linux has changed since '97 or whenever you looked at it last. Although maybe you're writing from some future time when Windows no longer has a command line? Do drop us a line on how LNUX and RHAT turn out, will you? I'm sure ZicoKnows will be interested in that too:)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
You use them because they are, overall, the most cost-effective tool for producing whatever it is you produce. Presumably your business management has done homework on what capital investments they can make which will yield the greatest return.
HP has undoubtedly done this analysis as well and has decided that the best ROI is to use an x86 email system -- staffing, software, hardware, compatibility, all represent hard or soft costs to the company that need an ROI.
What surprises me is why one of the big boys hasn't ditched ALL.exe-based mail systems for some kind of web-based "groupware" that could more easily be integrated with their web presence, supply chain, and so on. They obviously have the talent and the resources, and it would seem to make more sense from an ROI perspective than the "swallow the string" routine that MS applications represent.
I keep wondering if the trend away from in-house developed custom systems will continue, or if someone will finally realize that it's a better investment to pay the salary of N programmers to develop/maintain an application that meets 100% of your business needs vs. licensing software that meets less than 100% of your business needs.
they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook
Which is all well and good, except that the web interface to Outlook is riddled with security holes. Where I work (Bellsouth.net), they just turned off Outlook web access because of the security risks. Our security was being audited and we were told we wouldn't pass while leaving that Outlook web interface running...
Too bad for all the UNIX engineers who couldn't get their mail (no POP or IMAP access to our corporate Exchange server, either). The UNIX engineers have had to get laptops running Windows just to do corporate communications.
That's efficiency for you -- buying $2500 laptops for employees who don't even WANT to use Windows, just to do e-mail and have group scheduling. [sigh]
But, we all still have jobs. And right now, that's looking pretty damn skippy!
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
sammy+baby
·
· Score: 5
Time and again the Linux crowd forget that normal people DO NOT USE LINUX BECAUSE IT HAS A COMMAND LINE. The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'. Until then like the stick-shift automobile, it will remain strictly a specialist interest.
Oh, for chrissake.
In the few dozen posts that were up at the time, I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever. Mostly, when they've suggested anything, they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange. And the majority of those criticizing the move aren't suggesting a specific alternative: they're just saying that AOL sucks.
And at some level, it's hard to argue with that. In the spectrum of features vs. usability, AOL mail is slanted pretty far towards the latter. That's great for people who don't know anything about applications, but at the corporate level, one hopes (perhaps against hope) that folks can at least, you know, use Office.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro-linux, just not for non-tech savvy people who do not understand what they are getting themselves into. Let them stick with their stupid windoze and Mircro$oft.
You don't have to be a Linux zealot to think that using AOL for corporate e-mail is a dumb-ass move.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
Photon+Ghoul
·
· Score: 1
I've thought about "switching over" like this, but I have all of my mail sorted out into dozens of folders with rules that tell them where to go when they arrive. Can you manage this with Outlook Web Access (Exchange 5.5)?
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
Photon+Ghoul
·
· Score: 1
Since all of the NT admins are gone due to layoffs - that means I'm the one to enable it:).
I suspect it's cc:Mail that's not being supported.
Let's just say I have a few years of experience with cc:Mail;-)
As far as I am aware, Notes are still supported. --
Leonid S. Knyshov
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora:)
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
Wiseleo
·
· Score: 1
That's why I talk to executives if I disagree with their decisions. I knew every exec personally but I didn't know my users. Guess what kind of impact a few words said to the right person can have.
Try it some time, send your favorite non-technical exec an invitation to have a brief meeting with you so you can voice some concerns.
Communication is the #1 problem in companies. If you agree to have your hands tied, that is your choice. I prefer to get things done and help the company attain its business goals.
Someone made a business decision to lay me off and the people I was in touch with were pretty upset about that. Unfortunately, not much they could do at that point. --
Leonid S. Knyshov
...Time-Warner reports a productivity drop of 25%
This is so spectacularly dumb that the words to describe how spectacularly dumb it is don't exist.
I mean...they're giving up flexible filtering, the platform-independance of POP3/IMAP, properly-formed headers on messages, and speed...
...for a.wav file, a stupidified excuse for a crappy mail client, the nastiness of another protocol layer, and all the horrible, horrible things that the AOL client software does to a Windows PC.
...Time-Warner reports a productivity drop of 25%
This is so spectacularly dumb that the words to describe how spectacularly dumb it is don't exist.
I mean...they're giving up flexible filtering, the platform-independance of POP3/IMAP, properly-formed headers on messages, and speed......for a.wav file, a stupidified excuse for a crappy mail client, the nastiness of another protocol layer, and all the horrible, horrible things that the AOL client software does to a Windows PC.
What would Time-Warner employees need to do except TRY to swap pictures and other copyright-protected files (and for the average user, that is via AOL mail)? That way they can internally test their copyright protection schemes, and see if the battalion of laywers needs to be notified for rapid deployment to enforce the DMCA.
--
-- Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Absolutely. And since Fisher-Price produces toy telephones, all of its employees should have to use them for business.
I find the Fisher-Price toy phones are best for me at work. I never get bothered by anyone, and thus I get lots of work done. Of course, I am NOT using AOL mail.
--
-- Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
What if your employee was very good and liked working at Jaguar, but wanted a sporty little two-seater, like the SLK-320? That's not even competing with your comapny, as Jaguar only makes sedans. Would you force all your employees to drive large, expensive Jaguars regardless of their desires?
Or what about random taste? I personally don't like how Jaguars look, but some people do. Would that make me a bad employee?
Not many developers at Time Warner (developing AOL applicataions, anyway). So there's no reason to make us use it. With all the other problems it's caused, my particular department, headed by a very bright guy, is forcing our local engineering group to put the software through an evaluation period before he will allow it to be installed on any computer in his department. If anything goes wrong (and we all know it will, even a minor problem), then he will refuse to allow it to be installed. We have production machines, some used in live broadcasts, we absolutely CAN NOT have a machine disrupt a live broadcast.
By the time it's evaluated, the next version will be out, and we'll take a "let's evaluate that version before installing - we want the latest version, after all" attitude.
It will be far less embarrasing if a department doesn't use it then to have it screw up our productions.
There's a lot more to this story, though, but I don't feel at liberty to discuss it. It goes beyond having to simply install AOL software.
But if it doesn't do the job (or does it poorly), then why use it?
As far as i see it, both Sun and Microsoft are trying to force employees down a these-are-the-skills/tools-you-must-use approach. not good for the company, not good for the employees.
In the case of Microsoft refusing to allow their employee the option of using a Mac, they lose out on cross-technology pollenation.
The employee loses out because they have to use a GUI that they don't feel comfortable using and that doesn't work the way their mind does.
I agree, but for several more reasons than the one you state. Workstation variation in the workplace is a recipe for distressed admins. The only way this is not going to be a headache for them is if they never have to get involved in building workstation hardware/software for employees and if employees are responsible for making sure they can connect with server software in a meaningful way-- which seems like an incredible waste of employee time when paying a single admin to do all this is probably more efficient.
Second, I can't imagine anyone outside of R/D at Microsoft or AOL wanting to plunk down hard-earned company profits to buy software from some other company. They get their own software at no charge. In the case of AOL mail, I'm surprised they don't let people use Netscape mail, but from what I understand AOL mail has a unique server component to it, whereas Netscape Mail relies on mailboxes. AOL probably already owns servers running AOL Mail, whereas they'd have to set up extra/different servers to allow some other mailboxing scheme. This is inefficient.
Finally, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves. I mean, what good is your G4 with Yellow Dog Linux, when I'd much rather have Windows 2000 on a Pentium machine? I guess we'll have to throw it away. How economical!
, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves
My employer reckons that the cost to replace a trained engineer (who'd be likely to be making such choices) is in excess of $40k (i.e. they want me to retain my cadre of geeks). You'd be as well to let them take their boxen with them when they leave, for all the difference it'd make. Of course, in the real world, I have to fill in a huge loss form for every pissy little $20 mobile phone charger that disappears.:(
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
No you're totally correct. Developmental employees in MS, for example, have to install the latest builds of the O/S on their dev machines, this is under the theory that if something's wrong they will have more incentive to fix it.
Picture it from the companies point of view:
We currently have an unsupported e-mail system that isn't meeting our needs. We can either (a) pay $$$$$$$$$ for another companies software, or (b) pay $0 and use our own, plus we give the employees more incentive to make it better.
From a management perspective, it doesn't seem like a bad choice to me.
Notice how they said "primary email"? You're allowed to use whatever you want, but you need the AOL software for company related stuff. We're forced to use notes here, but I just have it set up via POP3 to use Eudora, and I launch notes whenever I need to use some of the functionality (not that often). So it's not a big deal. It makes a lot of sense.
"...and that doesn't work the way their mind does..."
My mind works better on the beach. My mind works better with a 40" flat-screen. My mind works better if I get to smoke at my desk. My mind works better while stoned or drunk.
Since when is a company exerting some control over its processes not good for the company? If I owned a Jaguar dealership, and one of my employees bought a Mercedes because he doesn't feel comfortable in a Jag, I'd help him find a job that was more comfortable for him. I would do this by firing him from his current job.
Call me a tyrant, but an employee has a responsibility to support the company he works for by at least using the products that company makes at work. Use whatever you want after hours, but on my time it's my products.
-- If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Also.. even profesionals can not resist the urge to write optomised code when coding in house.
If they were using a Unix/Sendmail system the code would be optomised for sendmail on Unix... Unlikely they'd ingrane into the exact Unix but it's equally unlikely they'd consider supporting a diffrent mail server than what your using.
(There is a greater chance of moving from BSD to Linux or Linux to Solarus than there is from Sendmail to something else)
And for running on Windows you really want to ingrain your code in the exact software you are using.
-- I don't actually exist.
News flash.. Workers at Microsoft do NOT..
by
Felinoid
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· Score: 1
Quite a few Microsoft employees use Unix or some other platform and Microsoft dosen't seem to mind one bit.
There is confadence in your product and then there is lunacy.
Ford dosen't expect to deliver it's cars using Ford trucks.
Apple used Crays in connection with Macs...
Cray did same..
I remember seeing a non-Commodore computer being used to test a Commodore 64 on the asembly line.
You don't need to get so wrapped up in your own company you forget the product isn't perfict.
Even Microsoft knows better...
AoL/TW however....
-- I don't actually exist.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
Qube
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· Score: 1
The place I've worked at for the last 9 months uses GroupWise, and I'm very impressed with it. Been testing GroupWise 6 recently and from an admin's point of view, it's excellent - much better controls on message/mailbox sizing, more encryption stuff (both in transport and for users to encrypt/sign messages), and easier to backup.
The problem? The client still really sucks. It does things in a nice reliable way most of the time, but the UI and general slickness of the thing is years behind Outlook. They've apparently added loads of new stuff for this release, but none of it actually _looks_ like they've done any work on it, and this is the area that Novell really need to sort out. It's no good just making excellent products, they have to be noticed.
PHBs like to _see_ improvements, and when you're planning an upgrade for 250 users (a not insignificant amount of money), it would be nice for the users to actually notice. Make things look better, nicer, different and suddenly it's money well spent from their point of view.
What people? Someone who takes a job as a programmer for Turner Studios, which is simply a small part of Turner Broadcasting, which then gets bought by Time Warner, which then gets bought by AOL...my job hasn't changed, I do the same thing, I don't cow-tow to any AOL/Time Warner mega-lords. I come in in the morning and I write my code.
Or maybe you mean the secretaries, or the people who worked hard to build up Turner Broadcasting - you may not like Ted, but you have to admit he created a TV empire from a single station. How long did it take NBC to create a news channel?
I didn't join the MPAA, I didn't join the RIAA, I've never used AOL in my life - even when they offered it for free to us.
Just as well, it's just a story - I don't want anybody's sympathy, but I have sympathy for all the secretaries and accountants and managers in my department, all of whom have done wonderful jobs for years before we were bought by TW. For all these years, things have just gone on as usual. For all their talking, and all the bad things you hear, I still come in in the morning to sit at my SGI or NT box, write code, go home at the end of the day. As far as I know, I will NOT be forced to use AOL if I can justify why I shouldn't have to.
I've heard that the programmers at MSFT were using some kind of proprietary in-house development environment, not the commercially available Visual Studio. This was true a few years ago; perhaps it's no longer the case.
--
--
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
True, but that's a function of the pop/imap protcols, not the client. Pretty much every workgroup/business-oriented email system I've ever seen (Exchange, Groupwise, Banyan Mail) has supported the features you list for ages.
It would be nice to have a common, open mail protocol that supported these features, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd like it for large-scale internet mail. All that extra messaging going back and forth generates additional network traffic, uses more resources on the server, and generally creates the oppurtunity for a lot of stupid exploits, security holes, and general flakiness.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
AstroJetson
·
· Score: 1
The people that I know that use AOL LOVE AOL, in a way that nobody LOVES their ISP, My experience is just the opposite. Everybody I know that uses AOL hates it, but is afraid to change because: a) the Internet is hard to use, b) they don't want to change e-mail addresses, or c) just plain inertia. Caveat: I don't use AOL, and never have, so I don't speak from personal experience, just what I hear others say.
-- Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Most large companies (actually, all that I can think of) require that their employees use the "approved" groupware, including calendar, email, etc. The fact that AOL has developed their own system is sort of irrelevant here. In the end, if their system is poor, perhaps making everyone use it will incent then to improve it.
Not at all. First of all, they could use Macintoshes. Second, they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook. At the place I used to work, Outlook was a "must" but people used it over the web from Linux and SGI boxes, plus from Mac's..
Which is all well and good, except that the web interface to Outlook is riddled with security holes
Got any facts to back that up?
It's funny you say that...
by
macdaddy
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· Score: 2
...because I don't use X. I might export my display to another machine once a month or so but other than that, I don't use X. Ever. The command line is what I prefer. Oh, and did I mention that I'm also a Mac guru. Yes even I like the command line.
Actually, AOL has IMAP support for employees mail, as well as SMTP service for it. There's also a way to access AOL mail via Netscape 6's mailer with a different authentication path to make it easy for people.
It's not particularly hard to read your AOL mail with pine if you like. I used to do it all the time while I was there, especially since I ran the SMTP servers in question and liked to know that they were working well.
scott
Re:They're not forced to use it
by
scrain
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· Score: 2
Actually, aol.net addresses are just aliases to either an employee's own workstation or to another host to read/spool their mail, or in many cases *gasp* to someone's aol.com address.
In any case, AOL has IMAP and SMTP gateways available for employee use. (I should know... I used to run the SMTP ones...) so really, they could use any IMAP software out there.
AOL execs tend to do a lot of their own, as that's the way the culture has always been. No one there's really special enough to not have to deal with the bulk of their own email, except for the high-high-up people like Steve Case and Bob Pittman.
Actually, there's a pretty simple way for employees to address mail that prevents it from dropping into the mailbox of someone who isn't an employee... I won't go into the details of how it works, but it's simple enough that a lot of AOL employees did it by default
The mail never touches the external net. It all would transit inside AOL's system, except in the case where an employee would be accessing AOL via TCP over someone else's system... like their home dialup.
I can see benefits - if those who develop the policies and software for AOL are forced to use it, they'll likely understand customer issues a lot more quickly. Ease of use, spam, filtering for content might get a lot more attention internally.
Here's a piece about using your software in house - Juno had such a good email client that everyone was using Outlook.
Re:Just goes to show..
by
Simon+Brooke
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· Score: 2
Oh, for $DEITY's sake!
I think the article made that clear. Sun doesn't use MS office, but it hinders their productivity and makes it more difficult for their customers. MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
The only thing the article suggested was a problem for Sun employees with StarOffice was exchanging files with shops which used other proprietary 'office productivity' programs, specifically MS Office. The lesson is, don't use proprietary file formats.
No 'office productivity' suite enhances office productivity, rather the opposite. Nothing in the article (or in anything else I've seen) suggests that a StarOffice shop is more (or less) productive than an MS Office shop. Interchange of proprietary data formats has always been a problem. The solution is not to use them.
Put it another way: if it isn't raw ASCII or valid SGML or XML, sending it out of your shop to another shop is just asking for trouble, and it's your fault.
-- I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
pstorry
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· Score: 2
Being a Lotus Domino bigot, I'd recommend that over AOL any day.
But it is, as has been pointed out, not just the email client that's the problem.
The lack of any kind of calendaring and scheduling system is provbably what will hit them hardest operationally. If they weren't using it already, it won't be so bad - but decent calendaring and scheduling can save a company lots of time - and therefore lots of money. Imagine having to email each person individually to find out when they're free, and then collate the results and send out invitations...:-(
I'd hope that the AOL servers are reliable - they run a large chunk of their business, after all. But can they handle the scalability issues that may come up? Joe Bloggs with his consumer AOL account can afford to pull his email down from the server onto his PC - so indexing the mailbox is a simple affair. But for the Time Warner employees, it's not so neat a proposition... Firstly, I'd want my mail stored on a central server for backup purposes. Secondly, there's that "access from out of the office" that's touted in the article - that's nice, but it's only going to work for new mail unless they keep mail on the servers.
And have you ever seen how much email businesses can generate? More than AOL are comfortable with a normal user having in their inbox, certainly. After a year or two, some of their people may have a few thousand business emails - all of which they need to keep for legal reasons etc...
Finally, I suppose I'd like to wheel out the managability issue. I have no idea what AOL's back end is like, but I'm willing to bet it's probably not set up for global business usage. It's set up so that Joe Bloggs can get his email reliably. How do they plan to manage this system without either causing problems for their customers or for their employees? How do they plan to have a company address list? AOL have lots and lots of accounts. Will the next John Smith hired by Time Warner have to be jsmith264@aol.com?
This just seems wierd. The report is very vague on the back end, but I hope they're implementing a seperate one to their normal systems. Otherwise they're going to be the laughing stock of business...
Unfortunately not. If you're heavily depedant on rules, as i was at a previous job, my solution was to use our citrix server to load outlook through a ICA connection.
If thats not an option, you could always just ask them to enable the internet mail connector's IMAP functionality;)
Re:Whoopee! I Can't Wait!!!
by
lurking
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· Score: 1
This is an obvious flame. A real AOLer would have posted in all CAPS!;-)
The finest in Slashdot sensationalism
by
Dwonis
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· Score: 2
From the article:
AOL Time Warner is in the process of
switching all employees to America
Online as their primary corporate e-mail
program, and not everyone is happy
about the change.
.
.
.
In the case of AOL Time Warner, even
employees who acknowledge that their
previous e-mail system "isn't very good" are not convinced that America
Online is the best choice for a corporate e-mail program. "AOL got
popular because it's really simple and easy to use," said a writer at a Time
Inc. magazine. "But when you're in a workplace, it's just not very full
featured."
. . .
AOL is not the only technology company that expects a certain
esprit de corps from its employees. A spokeswoman for Sun
Microsystems, Elizabeth McNichols, confirmed that the company did not
use any products made by its competitor, Microsoft, including
Microsoft's popular Office suite. Instead, workers at Sun use the
company's StarOffice system, which Ms. McNichols said was capable of
translating documents created with the more common Microsoft
programs.
In other words, AOL/TW is not being a bunch of `email nazis' or anything of that sort. They simply changed their internal mail system. Heck, it doesn't even say they banned other systems.
------
All that matters is that they've decided that no Motorola-chip using computers will be used inside Motorola.
How's that for the ultimate in negative adversiting for a product? Even the company that produces it won't use machines that use it.
Personally, I think all us employees should follow their example and buy competitor's phones. After all, we're just taking our cues on how to "support" the company from the higher ups... ---
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Hmph... "Intelligence Everywhere" except in managment? I think that's about how it's going now. (I could go on and on about how much sense it makes to require the engineers to empty their own trash, to clean the bathrooms, what, once a week, to remove the plants, and all sorts of other penny-saving "cost reduction" plans that probably reduce morale more than costs. But perhaps that's their solution to preventing more layoffs? Encourage people to leave? though that's going to target the ones that they'd want staying around... I better shut up now:)
Yes, I would say that file definately has double meaning. At least I'm still working in an area which we're all using Suns and the like. ---
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I don't know why we don't use Macs here. All I know is that the people in charge of the computing resources decided on this "OneIT" policy that can be summed up in one word : Microsoft. We switched e-mail infrastructures from unix systems to MS Exchange recently - and had our mail quality and reliability drop. And they're encouraging people to go to Intel/MS platforms everywhere possible.
There were Macs being used, and I know there still are some around. However, support is minimal, and they won't replace any of the ones that go bad with another Mac, but instead with an MS-compliant PC.
And while I didn't write back after the phone comment, I know a lot of people did comment on the whole Mac/PC issue - and interestingly, the whole issue was dropped really quickly. Though I did watch a bunch of people get into quite the debate/war on an internal newsgroup about whether Mot employees should always choose Mot phones that just seemed to get people upset at each other. (One person blamed the employees who have non-Mot phones as partially responsible for the layoffs, even) ---
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
How's this for irony? Microsoft doesn't require people to use Windows, but the company I work for (which I will not name) is standardizing on the Intel/MS windows, to the point they don't support anything but the "official" software - MS Windows, MS office, Outlook (and web Outlook for us using Sun machines for development). The most amusing part? This is the same company that produces the chips for the Mac! (Along with lots of cell phones)
That's right... while we saw a nice message from the CEO about how all employees should be using our phones, not a competitor's, we refuse to use computers that use our chips. And people wonder why our stock and market shares seem to keep decreasing... (though what I'm working on is actually a good product, and everyone involved gets one of those phones for free, though I wish they'd give us those newly-released Java-enabled handsets...) ---
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
tak+amalak
·
· Score: 1
There is a Mac version of Outlook you know. Version 8.22 sucks badly but the beta of Outlook 2001 isn't half bad.
-- Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Good motivation for them to block more AOL spam
by
kriegsman
·
· Score: 5
When every Time-Warner employee starts getting an AOL-sized portion of breakfast spam every morning, maybe they will be better motivated to improve AOL's anti-spam filters.
I can see it now... "MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78!"
-Mark
Re:Good motivation for them to block more AOL spam
by
ocbwilg
·
· Score: 3
When every Time-Warner employee starts getting an AOL-sized portion of breakfast spam every morning, maybe they will be better motivated to improve AOL's anti-spam filters.
Well, that's actually what I was thinking too. AOL mail sucks. Speaking as someone who has used Outlook/Exchange, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and AOL mail, I have to say that AOL mail doesn't support 1/10th of the features found in the least capable of the other three. You don't even have to get into the whole "spam" argument before you start to question somebody's sanity in making this decision.
However, if you think about it logically, they probably aren't going to be using strictly AOL mail. I dunno because I couldn't get to the article, but I imagine that they'll be using an enhanced version that is aimed more towards a business environment. Heck, maybe they're working on a Netscape Communicator/AOL mail hybrid. But realistically they can't use AOL for all the workers at each site, even from just a performance standpoint. They'll want/need local mail servers at each location (anoyone who has tried accessing a mail server over a WAN link will understand why...don't even think about attachments), and AOL Mail probably won't do that very well. AOL mail has none of the groupware features common to all of the business oriented email solutions, and a mail migration of that size would cost millions of dollars. I'm sure that would give AOL/TW all the incentive that it needs to start making improvements in the mail system.
Re:Good motivation for them to block more AOL spam
by
Rogerborg
·
· Score: 2
MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78
You're assuming that ChrmnSteve78 knows how to read email. More likely it'll be filtered and printed off by ScrtryStacey42.;)
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I work there, doing data in the magazine area -- they're switching us, slowly, but they haven't taken away our ability get pop3 -- i keep the netscape mail client pointed at my personal isp's mail server open all day. to go to yesterday's question of whether son-aol meant that all ps2 owners are now lusers, the answer is no, but all time warner employees now are;)
Will they change the mail message?
by
wowbagger
·
· Score: 3
Given that may in Atlanta will be converted, will they change the message to:
All y'all gots mail!
I know it's a minor thing the the grand scheme of the universe, but that little error in grammar annoys me as much as anything else in the AOL commercials. It should either be "You have mail" or "You've mail", not "You've got mail."
As a general rule, any sentence that uses "got" is probably grammatically in error.
Re:Will they change the mail message?
by
elfbabe
·
· Score: 1
When I visited an elementary school in southern Spain this spring, I had a chance to sit in on a lot of English classes for very young kids. I noticed that when they were doing possession, they were all taught to say "I've got a red ball", etc. I and all of the other Americans there thought this was really bizarre, but we did notice that they were learning British English - does anyone have firsthand knowledge of whether this construction is considered ok in the UK?
Marissa
I'm not really an elf, I just play one in AD&D.
Re:Will they change the mail message?
by
e-Motion
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· Score: 1
Given that may in Atlanta will be converted, will they change the message to:
All y'all gots mail!
Don't be silly. That's redundant. It is proper to say "Y'all gots mail", unless there is confusion as to who the y'all applies. "All y'all" clarifies ambiguity, showing that you meant all of y'all, and not some of y'all. See also "Coke: soda".
Re:Will they change the mail message?
by
Compenguin
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· Score: 1
I live in upstate new york and we often used the contracted 2nd person present perfect of to get (You've got...) doesn't seem strange to me
Actually, the "ideal" outcome pretty much describes what's been going on. A lot of behind-the-scenes work has been done to make the AOL mail system more suitable to TW - which, in the end, can make it more suitable for everyone. Is it there yet? No. But there's a LOT more than is exposed by the current AOL client, or even NetCenter.
You don't have to use the AOL client; Netscape 6 works with AOL mail over IMAP. And CompuServe 2000, running on the same back end, works with many IMAP clients. I'm not sure how SecurID works with these yet, but I'm seeing more and more support for it in general applications like ssh, so hopefully it will spread to the mail world - and 70,000 desktops could be an incentive to support it.
The criticisms of the AOL client in the article were interesting, since it was clear the people had no experience with AOL. It has many shortcomings, but quoting is not among them. AOL has one of the best reply-quoting systems; you highlight the part you want, you click reply, it quotes it. Internally it uses a nice, paragraph-oriented HTML quoting scheme (since AOL mail is paragraph-oriented), and if you send it out to the external net, it automagically becomes carets. Compare that to OE, Outlook, or Netscape, all of which can either quote the entire message or nothing at all. I don't remember what Eudora and Pegasus do; I had too many problems using them in IMAP mode and uninstalled them.
As for attachments, all the current AOL clients support seamless multiple attachments via ZIP, and they interchange pretty cleanly with the outside world via MIME. Intra-AOL attachments are much less likely to accidentally turn into text than some of the poorly-formatted MIME attachments that OE, for one, creates.
The lack of auto-reply is indeed frustrating; having just gone on a three-month sabbatical, I feel their pain. Perhaps that will be one of the changes that comes out of this. As for SecurID: Yes, it's a pain. No question. It's also really important, and any company with an externally-accessible mail system should really have some kind of strong, multi-factor authentication.
I wasn't personally involved in the decision to migrate to AOL mail, but I think it's a good one. Short term, there will be a lot of headaches, as there are with any migration. Then I wouldn't be surprised to see the TW needs driving more feature development to fill in the gaps. Long term, it'll be a more reliable, supported system than what TW had, with more features than either the old system or the current AOL system - and it will help connect the two disparate halves of the company.
AOL mail has none of the collaborative groupware features of any of the major commercially-oriented email solutions.
To me, that's probably the biggest drawback - not the client, not SecurID. Some of the threads here reported alternative groupware that they'll be using, and we'll see how that works out.
Whoohoo!! You mean I get 15 free hours!?!?:) Hehe.. how many free hours are they on now, like 700??? They really have been increasing that number in very tiny increments since the beginning of time, haven 't they??
1000 free hours that you can use only within the trial period (45 days). If I'm doing my math correctly, there are 1080 hours in 45 days, so they're basically giving you unlimited access for 45 days. Well, unlimited AOL access, which isn't quite the same as unlimited Internet access, since you get more ads and more AOL-specific content.
-- The shareholder is always right.
All your Email are belong to us!
by
JEDi_ERiAN
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· Score: 2
AOL to Time Warner:
"All your email are belong to us!"
oof.
E.
-
--
- This Post has been brought to you by the letter "E".
about sending documents around
by
andi75
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· Score: 1
The article mentions that Sun employees have trouble reading word documents since they only use
StarOffice.
I don't see the need to send documents around
in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files
are just as useful, and there's excellent readers
for every platform.
PDF files can easily be created using Adobe's tools
or GhostScript.
Re:about sending documents around
by
Zeinfeld
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· Score: 2
I don't see the need to send documents around in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files are just as useful, and there's excellent readers for every platform.
It is kind of hard for one of your co-workers to edit a file if you sent it in PDF. In fact most uses of PDF these days appear to be to attempt to prevent editing of the finshed document.
I shocked one of our legal folk by taking a pdf document and editing the source. Time for digital signatures.
Most companies exchange Word and PowerPoint internally as the unit of information exchange. XML may one day be an alternative but I have yet to find an XML editor anywhere close to Word for a reasonable price. Yeah I know that vi is open sauce... yada yada yada...
I hate AOL for the same reason I hate the Mac, it is a user interface where the single overriding design objective is to support use by pin heads. UNIX goes too far the other way, it is entirely possible to support power users without the Richie & Thompson philosophy of writing 'user-hostile' software.
--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I could understand this if it was Micro$oft making employees use exchange, or IBM making employees use Lotus notes, but why the hell would anyone want to use AOL mail for business? Is it not designed more for home use than for interoffice mail? Somehow I doubt it compares with better stuff that has productivity in mind (Of course, it might actually be great, I do not know because I do not want to install it.).
Hopefully this will hamper employees at least enough to cut profits.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
hellfire
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· Score: 2
Okay lets stop drawing parallels with Linux and arguing that point and lets actually stick to the topic of TimeWarner using AOL email.
Its stupid, period. And your argument falls on its face because AOL is a consumer product. Its not a corporate product. Corporations by default need something relatively easy to use but they also need lots of features. Thats why lots of larger companies use Outlook and not outlook express. Outlook express is for HOME use, as is AOL.
And to go back to your linux parallel, if it was all about ease of use, companies would have switched to Macintoshes a long time ago. However thanks to "compatibility" and "features" Windows helped dominate because there were more choices to configure systems to do some of the really odd things corporations needed to get done.
If AOL-timewarner really wanted to increase their consumer base (because someone with some importants HAS to know that their email program sucks compared to corporate powertools like Outlook) they would take the carrot approach as mentioned in the article, by giving incentives to employees to use it for their personal email service.
This is why I like working for companies that don't sell directly to consumers:)
--
"All great wisdom is contained in.signature files"
Actually, I do config management, and I've heard the same thing...
#define __RANT I do know that VSS is probably the _worst_ SCC system currently available today - anyone using it for a project of any significant size and complexity should have their head checked.
Your mailing address is automatically added to half the world's E-mail filters. I don't know anyone who has an AOL account and I get a shitload of spam from there so I just added it to my procmail filters. I'm sure a lot of other people have, too.
On the plus side, you could have real fun trying to find a unique address. Some suggestions:
employee147528876@aol.com
wespent50billionandalligotwasthislousyaddress@ao l. com
mrnipples@aol.com
assrapedmonkey@aol.com
l4m3r@aol.com
l0s3r@aol.com
6@aol.com
--
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Or maybe they weren't fundamentalist idiots about operating systems - like the average slashdotter is - in the first place? Just a thought.
-- Mmmm.. Donuts
upgrade not completed...
by
Dugh+Daren
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· Score: 2
despite the fact that we are *migrating* to aol mail, it isn't complete. despite my employer (aoltw... megacompany...) and the fact that i'm not looking forward to getting aol mail, i think i will prefer it to the idiocy of the ccmail system currently in use. enterprise it may be, but what a pain.
rollouts of the aol mail system have started in NYC HQs and aren't going so well. the rest of us subject companies were slated for june rollouts, and that is steadily getting pushed back.
is it a conincidence that NY is so similar to NT? Then it has to suck!
-- The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
deviator
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· Score: 1
Actually, Novell GroupWise is an excellent product and has been since version 5.2 (released several years ago). It is too bad more people haven't had more hands-on experience with it as the "geek set" would probably really appreciate it.
It is very efficient compared to Exchange, very scalable and extremely reliable. Plus, the agents that make up the system are cross-platform, available for Netware, NT, UNIX, etc.
The WebAccess is excellent--far better than Outlook Web Access.
The back-end is completely encrypted and compressed...
... and it does everything Exchange does (+ a REAL document management system) and everything you can get Notes to do (with some work) right out of the box!
I run a 650-user WAN and am also the primary GroupWise administrator... I (alone) spend about 5-10% of my time doing ANY maintenance on our GroupWise system, which has about 20 post offices. It is that good. (Most of the maintenance I do is preventive). We have had GroupWise servers in the field with uptimes of 200+ days or more.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
deviator
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· Score: 1
I really like the GroupWise client - but, alas, Outlook is much prettier than GroupWise, even though the GW client is more functional in some ways.
Outlook is a HUGE hog - I've done some testing and it generally takes up twice as much RAM as the GroupWise 32-bit client. But again, Outlook is prettier... I usually turn off that button bar anyways, and then it looks strangely like GroupWise.
You have a great point about making things look "improved" on the surface; MS seems to be the only company to have mastered this. GroupWise 6 would probably sell like hotcakes if it had some sort of futuro-retro interface.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
deviator
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· Score: 1
Oh - I should also note that you can use Outlook against a GroupWise backend nowadays.
I work in the cable industry and so work with a number of people @ Time Warner NYC. Most of the guys there are using netcom as an ISP on their own dime currently. The group just recently completed a switch to GroupWise and now have to abandon it for AOL.
As you can imagine they are not happy but they are used to it. Apparently AOL/Time Warner doesn't consider email an important tool. It has gone through so many changes that no one really relies on it. The business cards I have even have their private netcom addresses on them.
Actually, from what I've heard, there is no such directive at Microsoft. Employees can use whatever they like, as long as they don't sacrifice the ability to work with their teammates.
Whoa!
That's pretty damn progressive thinking!
What's with it with that behemoth megacorp?
Are they finding it necessary to create a nice working environment or something?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
-- "Provided by the management for your protection."
What company in their right mind would use and publicly accessable network for their internal correspondance. If I was a shareholder I'd be against this.
-- People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Okay, since nobody here actually WORKS for AOL and has seen the internal AOL client, they don't know what they're talking about. The Internal AOL client is very different than the external, and are surprisingly high-security. I think that you should consider this before going off about TW employees being told to use @aol.com email addresses. Dude, before you go off about this, maybe you should know the facts, you know?
Actually, they tried to get us to use AOL at home, first, by giving it to us free. When no one wanted it (well, when very few people wanted it), then they made it mandatory.
Either that, or they were trying to get us accustomed to it before cramming it down our throats.
I'll be lauging when some technician walks in, wanting to install it on my computer, and I point to an SGI and tell him I that's the machine I use for email.
Exactly what can't you do with AOL Mail? I'm asking - I really don't know, I haven't used it, but if I can get an email that says "there's a meeting at 9:00am on Monday in the conference room", then what's the problem?
I mean, what is "real" email, anyway? It's just text messages. Any email program can do that. The only other issues might be address lists and so forth, but please explain what "real" work can't be done on AOL Mail - considering that 99% of the users will be management and secretaries, and 99% of the mail will be simple text messages?
My supervisor sending out an email saying "We're having a meeting at 9:00am on Monday" is most certainly a function of email.
It's far more efficient for all the small departments to work that way then to go to a separate application, schedule a meeting in some other software package, and define who's invited.
It's far easier for him to click "compose" on his already open email client, click on "", and type "Meeting at 9:00 on Monday".
Most departments in my division are the same way, we don't have fifty meetings a week, we have a streamlined process which doesn't require us to constantly "message" each other, or work with calendar programs. That's all overkill, and would end up wasting more of our time.
9:00am in what time zone? In which conference room? In which building.
How so? We are all right next to each other. I could have spend a few minutes walking down the hall, opening everybody's door, and yelling in "meeting on Monday at 9:00am". We only use one conference room. We are all in the same building.
I'm not saying it doesn't get more complicated than that, but if you want to be pedantic:
Meeting on Monday, May 21, at 9:00am Atlanta time, in the XXXX building, conference room 21.
A calendar program might be nice, but a calendar program is NOT email - it's a calendar program. So if you're going to complain about AOL Mail (and go ahead - again, I haven't used it) then complain about AOL Mail - not some missing application that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with email...electronic mail...where you type a message and electronically send it to someone else...
If we need collaberation software, we can just use netscape's, although I've never used that either. Just go to CNN.com to see what I'm talking about - it's right there on the top. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of us started using that instead of AOL.
All I'm saying is "real" email sends text messages electronically. A nice collaberation system might include a lot of nice features, but that's not email. So, if you want to complain that AOL Mail is not conducive to collaberation efforts, then say that - but since my department has never used those features, it's no loss. We do have scheduling software, which does a similar thing, but since that's not going away the whole calendar issue is a moot point for 95% of the people here.
Dude, I work there. And while I can't speak for everybody, for the most part, every department is a self contained unit.
Sometimes those units interact with other units, but normally it's one person from one department who meets with one person from another department.
Just because we're a large business does not mean we are an army of suits who come into work and only go to meetings, most of us work for a living. I go to a departmental meeting once a week. Anything besides that is out of the ordinary. If my supervisor has a question, he emails me and asks. That's EMAIL. Then he has a supervisor, and so on.
99% of email sent in my whole division is simple text memos and questions and "let's go to lunch" stuff, much like most companies, I'd imagine.
If there was a cross country teleconference meeting it'd go beyond some simple calendar program helping to schedule it - there would be a secretary assigned to get things in order. I don't know how people picture large businesses, but no one has teleconferencing in their office - or even in every conference room. In fact, I think we have one teleconferencing setup for our whole campus (all the Turner entertainment networks). Yes, you have to schedule it - by calling a department and reserving it.
I wonder if they have to use AOL for ALL of their email or just their unsolicited get rich/skinny/sex quick scheme email.
I hate to see where this is going, Road Runner (owned by time warner) is already slower than hell in answering their email. ____________________ Remember, not all/. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
--
Prevent linux based DDOS's! http://linux.denialofservice.org/
This means that people actually in the position to have their opinion heard will be able to give input to the development of AOL products. In the long run this means that the products will work better and satisfy the needs of more users.
This is akin to what most other companies already do - have the employees be the most critic users.
This means that people actually in the position to have their opinion heard will be able to give input to the development of AOL products
True only if the actual strategic decision makers at AOL-TW read their own mail and manage their own calendars. Beyond a certain level in some large companies, Stacey Secretary handles all that for you. Anyone know for a fact that the top brass at AOL-TW handle their own communications?
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Too bad they don't give a rat's ass what we think. I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to value our input. We ARE forced to use it, period.
I like the car after thought at the end...
by
NewOrder
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· Score: 1
Yeah, it's like that with my GF's parents. They drive fords. I drive a 93 XJ jeep ( a little modified) and an Audi TT Roadster 225 when it's nice out. And I have to put up with this stuff cuz I park in the driveway. I just tell them, If you like to walk that walk, put your money where your mouth is and we'll take SUV vs truck and Sports car Vs sports car to end this argument:) Naturally that F150 2wheel drive isn't a chance. even for towing. And that mustang GT. pfffffft come on:) The jeep vs GT is a better comparision:)
-- --
Jason...
Re:I like the car after thought at the end...
by
NewOrder
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· Score: 1
You must be one cranky and very close mined person.
Last time I checked, fuel costs were close to double in Europe what they are in the states... although that may not be the case with our current crunch.
It is a GOOD analogy. Manual transmissions are more fuel efficient, and therefore, if you care about fuel costs, you get them. Higher fuel-costs => bias towards manual transmissions.
A Linux corporate desktop (I'm sorry, but bleah... MS owns this one, Mac is a bit behind, and the Linux solutions aren't close... know what market you're good in, and corporate desktops ain't it) is less expensive than a MS one (cheaper hardware needs, and price out: W2K, O2K-Pro, Visio, Exchange CAL, NT CAL, random shareware utilities to be able to open, say, a zip file, etc., other software... $1000-$2000/workstation). So in an environment where these costs matter more (either lower margin business, or country with a bad exchange rate with the dollar) than the productivity difference, you go with that solution.
Fuel costs are not comparable - i'll bet if you add in all the US tax subsidies that go to road maintenance, you'd find that they'd be almost the same.
Somebody has to pay for the road. It's either in the gas tax (Europe) or general income tax (us). We here in the US like to subsidize our drivers, we do.
Idjit.
-- Reboot macht Frei.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
alexhmit01
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· Score: 4
Notice the FIRST line: Windows 2000 machine (for accessing corporate resources, gotta have Smart Scheduler and Clarify)
That is mandating Windows. You have a corporate workstation for corporate resources. If you need additional machines, fine. However, I'm certain there is a bias for the 12 MS employees that aren't coding to do MS only.
However, in the AOL Time Warner case, while AOL does have a massive e-mail system, it isn't a corporate groupware system. I'm actually shocked that AOL employees use AOL internally. I had assumed that while the company grew, a corporate system was put in place.
In all honesty, I think that AOL has an impressive product. The people that I know that use AOL LOVE AOL, in a way that nobody LOVES their ISP, and the way that some of us LOVED the BBSes we used to call. And it isn't a AOL=Internet thing, they run AOL at the office. They use a real web browser, but they like to check their AOL e-mail, IMs (don't like AIM for whatever reason), maybe pop into a chat room, who the hell knows.
Some people REALLY love AOL, but it still isn't a corporate system.
Alex
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
smyle
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· Score: 1
I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever.
Why not?
$ man mail -----snip-----
INTRODUCTION
Mail is an intelligent mail processing system...
-----snip----- --
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
At least they don't have to use Outlook...
by
tjgrant
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· Score: 1
...that TW eployees are now going to be subjected to the same "Horny naked teens" unsolicited mails that all the other AOL users get every day?
--
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
Temkin
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· Score: 1
Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products
iPlanet messaging server is not simply Netscape mail re-badged. It was merged with Sun Internet Mail (SIMS), and now sports a real MTA, domain hosting, with delegated administration, and a bunch of other features. That said, it seems to garner more support in ISP and telco environments, not typical enterprise applications. Why AOL doesn't use it is something of a mystery, although I'd imagine the migration issues alone are enough of an excuse.
Temkin
And we complain about Micro$oft!
by
meckardt
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· Score: 2
Bad as some some of Microsoft's stuff is, at least it works (usually). AOL provides crappy software that doesn't even pretend to do what I need it to.
technological solutions
by
paulschreiber
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· Score: 2
If you don't want to use AOL to check AOL mail, you can always use Netscape 6 or Claris Emailer (if you can find it).
My father works for a small division of Time Warner called "Time Distribution Services", which basically distributes all the magazines that Time Warner publishes.
Anyways, back in December all employees were given a special version of AOL that would give them and their family free access for as long as they're an employee. They were told to immediatly install and get comfortable with the software because they'd be using that exclusivley in the near future.
Well, last week when I went home to visit my parents I asked my dad how things were going since the merger. He said mostly things are good, he hasn't noticed alot of things change, but they are starting to make the switch from Lotus cc:Mail to the AOL platform. He said they're supposed to abandon cc:Mail totally by July/August and rely totally on AOL's system, IIRC.
There you have it... an inside scoop from an AOL-Time Warner son.
The device they mention generates a new key every few seconds. It has an ID that is matched on a server inside the AOL corporate firewall. When the user attempts to connect to the internal AOL server, they receive the extra login prompt mentioned in the article. They have to enter their ID and the number currently being displayed on their device. This is checked against what the server thinks the number ought to be for that user at that moment. Thus, there is not only a password protection, but a physical protection involved. ---------------------------------------
Change the notification sound...
by
Eggplant62
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· Score: 2
I remember several years ago finding wav files recorded by the same guy who did the "You've got mail!" wav for AOHell. Best one of the bunch was, "You want fries with that?!"
Rich
Re:Change the notification sound...
by
gwizah
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· Score: 1
Its rather bad PR for a company to create a product and then go "but it really sux so we don't use it internally". This goes for all companies, you can bet that IBM uses the Lotus series of services for corporate communication and HP would have used its series of communications software (until they discontinued it which I think they did).
The number two benifit of having your employees use software that you develop internally is licencing. You basically get to ignore the whole concept of keeping track of licences if you wrote the software in the first place.
The third thing and a very important one is you can get your employees to find bugs for you. Make it a quazi mandate that everyone has to use the beta (or newly released) version of your product internally and you will generate a ton of bug reports.
All in all I agree with the originator of this thread, its not terribly incredible that a company would ask its employees to use company products. I think that extends to other areas of industry as well. If you work at John Deere and drive a toro tractor, or work at Ford and drive a Chevy you will probably get your ass kicked by coworkers. In fact you are probably in more danger using a competitors product in those cases than in the software world.
--
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
"You've got mail" is grammatical in ISO English
by
yerricde
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· Score: 2
not "You've got mail."
I'll parse "You've Got Mail®" using traditional ISO English grammar: "You": pronoun, subject; "'ve got": verb, present perfect of "get"; "mail": noun, object; "®": YOU'VE GOT MAIL is a registered trademark of AOL Inc. Literally, it means "You have received mail"; it's not redundant because the "got" specifically refers to the act of receiving a message.
Re:"You've got mail" is grammatical in ISO English
by
ocbwilg
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· Score: 3
Literally, it means "You have received mail"; it's not redundant because the "got" specifically refers to the act of receiving a message.
Break out the contraction. "You've got mail" translates to "You have got mail." It should be either "You have mail" (if referring to the potential status of mail's existence) or "You have gotten mail" (when describing an action). That condenses to "You've gotten mail" or "You've mail." However, I'm pretty sure that you are not supposed to use the "have" contraction unless there's another verb in after it. I don't think that you are allowed to contract the active verb from "have" into "'ve". And even if you are, it sounds goofy as all hell.
"Have got" is grammatical
by
yerricde
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· Score: 2
"You have got mail." It should be either "You have mail" (if referring to the potential status of mail's existence) or "You have gotten mail"
Except "have got" for "have received" is valid English. Some dialects don't even have a word "gotten."
And even if you are, it sounds goofy as all hell.
Especially when Big Bird sings it at the beginning of the song "Everyone Makes Mistakes": "I've a special secret children ought to know..."
300 million Europeans can't all be wrong
by
rpjs
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· Score: 1
To draw an analogy, choosing Linux is like choosing to drive a car with a stick shift.
Over on this side of the Pond, almost all of us drive cars with gear sticks...
Re:300 million Europeans can't all be wrong
by
ttys00
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· Score: 1
It's not just Europe, Australians drive manual cars too, not automatics. Only having an automatic licence is akin to only using AOL.
And Americans wonder why the rest of the world thinks they are stupid and lazy...
Re:300 million Europeans can't all be wrong
by
Burgundy+Advocate
·
· Score: 1
And look where it's got you.
Behind the U.S. in almost every way.
If you would look beyond your silly traditions, you would realize the need to grow up and take on the world's standards. Politically, that means that of the United States. For computers, that means Microsoft. Otherwise, you will just be trampled in the dirt.
--
-- Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
The Ideal outcome- Yes, AOL mail has some shortcomings; however, I imagine that a few months of in-house usage could really help them find and eliminate a lot of problems with the program.
The Likely outcome- AOL will fall far short of employee's requirements, productivity will plummet, and AOL/TW will spend millions trying to make it work, followed by more millions going back to the old system.
Are they expecting employees to use the "home" version of AOL or is there a new corporate version?
As others (including actual Microsoft employees) have pointed out on this thread, its true that employees are expected to use Windows, because like many another company around the world they use Outlook and Exchange scheduling services. What isn't enforced, however, is a requirement to keep Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever off the second box on their desk.
This program is for idoits.
We'll test it on our employees.
(read: We think our employees are idiots.)
-- Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
fetta
·
· Score: 1
The other possibilities would have been Lotus CC:Mail or Novel Groupwise which are both far past their prime and either in need of being severely overhauled, or End-Of-Lifed by their companies.
Aren't you forgetting about Lotus Notes?
-- ** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I'll go you one more - Given the fact that people hate dealing with multiple passwords, it is likely a HUGE portion of their workforce will use the same passwords for the AOL access as they do for access to internal (corporate) resources.
And seeing that SOOO many companies use PPTP VPNs, (or heck...most any VPN) authenticating against NT domains, you're just asking for every AOL employee who has more than 1/2 a clue to have a peek into your network. Not to mention those more clever types who 0wn AOL.
If I was the security manager at Time-Warner I would pissed enough to probably just start sending out my resume.
sedawkgrep
-- Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
How credible would technical advice be comming from bigstud@aol.com? Even the email address of techsupXX@aol.com does not provide an air of confidence.
As a rule, the company's own employees should use their products. But, what happens when the product undermines the confidence of a of the customers. Think of passing out at the circus and the doctor at Ringling Brothers is wearing a clown outfit.
Notes is at least designed for work-related stuff, and it's got less of a virus problem than Lookout. However, AOL is too childishly simple to do anything that doesn't involve granny sending pictures of her cat w/ her brand new 320x240 digital camera.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
"(what kind of oppressive regime do you work under?)"
A fairly small tech-writing firm with contracts from some very big companies. There are many writers here with great engineering, electrical, and mechanical skills; I'm one of only a couple with a computerish background. I write software procedures, edit manuals, do SGML conversion, etc. (and fix hardware when the SA's not available.)
It's amazing the damage that smart people who aren't computer literate can do. I don't blame management, really, and they did start allowing me a lot more leeway once I showed I could be trusted to not destroy things on a regular basis.
It still rankles though.
"True, but it is also easy for those who aren't complete dolts to use whatever they feel like."
That's jumping off the cliff of conclusions with both feet.:)
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
"AOL is (I assume, since I have never used it) using some type of POP3 setup, with the added bonus of SecureID carded passwords. Big deal."
Indeed. Not germane to the question though.
"Big deal. Simply install your favorite email program (for windoze, my personal favorites are Pegasus or Eudora - there are other one just
as good and just as free, as well as for Linux or Macs)."
Uh huh. And when management comes around to check your settings, your answer is...? I may use pine at home, but at work, they say Outlook, I cuss and use Outlook.
"No thanks - I'll use the email proggy I want, and keep *my* mail on the workstation I was assigned, not on the server (for the world to read or delete)."
Good luck in your next place of employment.;)
Seriously, it's great if there's enough leeway for you to do what you want. But if there are rules that higher-ups Really Don't Want Broken for whatever reason, it's dumb to break them just for the halibut when your job's on the line.
It's not uncommon practice for an employer to dictate the software it wants its employees to use. Management likes things to be 'uniform', which looks tidy on paper, but invariably doesn't please everyone.
I have to use Outlook for email at work (don't even get me started); this, despite several virus problems work has had over the past year. And yes, they check to see what you are using.
BTW, those spare AOL CDs make cool mini flowerpots when you melt them in the microwave.
~sabine
Re:Would it kill them...
by
Grishnakh
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· Score: 1
I used to use Kmail at my current Outlook employer until my laptop HD crashed (watch out for Toshiba notebook drives). No one actually checked to see what I was using (what kind of oppressive regime do you work under?), but I still had to fire up Lookout to do calendar stuff since there's no open-source program that can do that. At least I could run Lookout under WTS and not worry about my computer crashing.
They grumble, and adapt. I'm forced to use Lotus Notes for internal mail -- and internal databases -- and it's heinous, but the job is good, otherwise. We don't like Notes, and we bitch about it incessantly, but it hasn't gotten us qmail with IMAP ability yet, and it's not going to earn us that, either. Infrastructure operates under Newton's Law of Inertia, and the body is at rest.
-- MCH/VO S* W- N+++++ PEC+++ D(s++/r) A a+>+++ C* G++(++++) Q+ 666 Y
Re:Would it kill them...
by
uniquemac
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· Score: 1
"... we live in a sad sad world"... exactly *when* did you first notice this?:-)
I think this is kinda dirty pool on AOL/TW's part... I bet the real reason they're doing it is to save on QA and regression testing - after all, if their entire employee base is testing their product day in and day out, it will mean they can pinkslip all those useless Quality Assurance people...
Oh, wait, I forgot - from the way their products run, it's pretty obvious they never had anyone QA their software and email systems.
So if I understand you correctly, over here in Europe we're all specialists? I mean over here the majority of people have a stick-shift car! According to your analogy, Europe will be a Linux refuge in few years time:-)
Microsoft should have FIRED Andrea Jenkens...
by
imagineer_bob
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· Score: 1
...the B1tch mentioned in that article who whined because she had to use a machine running the Windows operating system when she got a job at Microsoft (instead of her precious Macintosh.)
They should have slapped her silly, until she stopped thinking different!
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
imagineer_bob
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· Score: 1
I think AOL Mail is a great idea for AOL--but that's just because I work for their competition!
Rules like this come from Execs who are out of touch with the day-to-day working procedures. I'm sure the Admins of the top execs at Time-Warner simply print out any important email for them and have it waiting in a nice yellow folder that sits on their desks as they come in. (Or is waiting for them in their corporate jet.)
I used to work for a Large Software Company whose IS department FORBID anyone from using any version of Windows other than Windows 95 (this was several years ago.) If they discovered NT on a machine, they'd reformat it. The trouble is--the ENGINEERS were supposed to make the products work on NT as well, but the company wouldn't support PCs running that operating system. Of course the execs in charge (who didn't program computers since the days of punch cards) had NO CLUE as to what the problem was.
Re:She shouldn't have taken the job...
by
imagineer_bob
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· Score: 1
It's not MACINTOSHES I don't like, it's WHINY MAC *USERS*!
(Linux folks had better be careful not to whine too much, or they too will sound like Whiny Mac Users!)
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
imagineer_bob
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· Score: 1
If you agree to have your hands tied, that is your choice.
I never said I had my hands tied by these policies--I just ignored them! I was humored by them, that's all.
And I've *never* been laid off, in 20+ years of working full time in high tech!
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
decesare
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· Score: 1
Microsoft also practice this 'eat your own dogfood' approach, and look how successful they are.
That doesn't mean the quality of the dogfood is improving any.
The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'.
I suppose that explains why Mac OS X ships with a terminal emulator now?
Ya know, I wonder if Levin is kicking himself in the backside right now. If he had waited a year or so, TW probably could have bought AOL for chump change, instead of being taken over by them. I really wonder how far AOL's (overly inflated, IMO) stock price would have tanked had they not acquired TW when they did.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
CoreWalker
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· Score: 1
Most of your post seems to revolve around how linux is not the proper solution. I didn't read anything about linux in that article. I don't even think the majority of posts here on slashdot said that they should switch to linux. The point seems to be that they were using something that previously worked, but they are now going to switch to something that has an awful lot of risk involved. Nothing here is about anyone being tech savvy. Is CC:Mail only for the tech savvy? How about MS Exchange? You are right that pine or elm probably wouldn't fulfill they're email needs, but (according to many of TW/AOL employees) neither does AOL mail. AOL client software is created to be used at the consumer level by novices. Corporate email places much higher demand on sophisticated features, reliability, and security than what the AOL client was designed for. Unless there is some new Enterprise AOL Client, they are just setting themselves up for costly headaches including drops in productivity, declining employee moral, and bad press.
You shouldn't listen to me, though; I drive a 5-speed, therefore, I am a "specialist". I'm out of touch with the common folk.
You do know there is a version of Windows NT for the motorola, don't you?
Granted, it's an old version of NT (4.0 is the latest version, I think...), but it is a Microsoft operating system..
RoadRunner employees have to use aol mail, it reflects poorly on the isp when employees uses a different isp for email. Second departments like nullsoft make *nix software also and use the FreeBSD sever for mail. 3rdly netscape, it reflects poorly on thier product to use an different e-mail client than their own.
-Compenguin
glad I don't work at...
by
enrico_suave
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· Score: 1
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
SgtAaron
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· Score: 1
Only in the USA. The rest of the world is dominated by manual gearboxes...
I've no idea what that guy is talking about. Most people I know (and have known) own cars with manual transmission. Not to say there aren't a lot of automatics, but manual is hardly a "specialist interest," whatever that means. I do prefer manual myself. So I'd have to say, based on 29 years of being American, that comparing linux to stick-shifts in the USA is a flawed analogy.
I wasn't refering to AOL Mail client, rather it's email infrasructure (mail servers, etc.). Personal short email aside, in business you need to be sure your mail will be delivered fast and securely. Will AOL give priority to Warner email going through it's network?
It's far easier for him to click "compose" on his already open email client, click on "", and type "Meeting at 9:00 on Monday".
Of course that's pretty much the whole point of integrated packages such as Outlook and the Outlook clones being developed under *nix. Integrate the package and your scheduling program is already open along with the email program. It's no easier in Outlook to compose a new email than it is to schedule a meeting.
Granted integration isn't always the key. That integration of everything microsoft is the key to a virus writers wet dreams.
I've never used it myself...i've seen the screen, but almost heart attack seeing it.
Can you hit Alt-S to send a message in it? You can't do it in Netscape mail...I HATE THAT..
If I have to pick up the mouse when I don't need to, I want to shoot myself.
.kb
-- Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet.
Let's also not forget the security risk of having your corporate email share the same domain with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got a "700 free hours" CD in the mail. When you consider the namespace saturation of AOL's account pool, the odds of accidentally misdirecting an email go up rather sharply. When that misdirected email might wind up with someone who isn't even at the company, you're just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, since AOL has open registration, if someone discovers the AOL accounts of various "higher ups" (not too hard -- I'm sure most employess would have access to this information), they could easily register nearly identical accounts. This would be easily easy given the frequent numeric tags seen at the end of account names -- transpose two numbers and wait for someone to get it wrong.
AOL should use Netscape Mail Client
by
seaan
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· Score: 1
A few eons ago (in internet time), I recommended AOL to my unsophisticated relatives. I decided to get an AOL account too, more for familiarity to help out my relatives (back when my work had no problem with personal emails). Than my company got sold, and the new company had a "no personal email" policy.
Has anyone tried to use the AOL mail client for "normal" amounts of mail (Slashdot normal anyway)? It is very painful, I recommend trying something else for fun, like being dragged behind a car.
The first and most obvious problem is the lack of filtering. All 200+ messages a day come right into the same folder. The address book is really lousy, and has no easy "import" or "export" methods (forget sync with a PDA). Perhaps even worse are the games AOL plays with attachments. Incoming attachments get downloaded into a separate folder, and some files get transformed (into the dreaded ART format). Outgoing files get mangled in unexpected ways too. Just horrible!
At it happens, they have an adequate mail client within the corporate empire. The Netscape mail client has never been my favorite, but I've used it a number of times and it is at least reasonable. It does most of the things I want (including pda sync, calendar functions, and support for SMIME emails).
Actually, from what I've heard, there is no such directive at Microsoft. Employees can use whatever they like, as long as they don't sacrifice the ability to work with their teammates.
IANAMSE (I am not a microsoft employee), so this is not firsthand.
Better spam for the journalists...
by
mizhi
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· Score: 1
I would think the main objective in this mandate would be to maximize the "@aol.com" domain in all email correspondence. So wouldn't it be less painful and more efficient to just assign aol.com aliases to all employees and make that compulsory instead? Granted, it doesn't have the indoctrination value of having everyone use the same mail system, but at least it's a policy that can be deployed instantly with a miminum of backlash and dissent.
Forcing employees to use AOL?
by
Jodrell
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· Score: 1
Doesn't this count as "cruel and unusua punishment"? I smell a law suit here;)
Notice the FIRST line: Windows 2000 machine (for accessing corporate resources, gotta have Smart Scheduler and Clarify)
That is mandating Windows. You have a corporate workstation for corporate resources. If you need additional machines, fine. However, I'm certain there is a bias for the 12 MS employees that aren't coding to do MS only.
For what it's worth, there are terminal servers available internally to run customer tools as Wes descibes. If you are creative enough, you probably don't *HAVE* to run Windows for anything here really... but realistically, why the hell wouldn't you? I love being able to run the latest-greatest betas of MS products!
Re:You expect me to use this crap I make?
by
overturf
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· Score: 1
This story actually reminds me of the one where Microsoft purchased Hotmail, tried to convert it to MS Servers, failed miserably since they couldn't scale, and reverted to using the original UNIX servers. In that we see a case where a company had to use another's product because theirs wasn't good enough.
That never actually happened, you know. It's just an urban legend. Plus, Hotmail's front-end is all W2k/IIS5 now, FWIW. Back-end is still proprietary storage of some sort, I believe.
I wonder how would AOL mail client handle
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org originating posts
Speaking of the first time your sound card
overloaded and caught on fire! =)
I imagine this is, at its core, a tactic to find some practical use for the several thousand CD's the post office couldn't deliver due to bad addresses.
I was looking through my mom's garage yesterday and found an old 3.5" floppy with a label that said, "AOL NEW VERSION 3.0!!!! 15 FREE HOURS!!! The easiest just got easier!!"
Whoohoo!! You mean I get 15 free hours!?!?:) Hehe.. how many free hours are they on now, like 700??? They really have been increasing that number in very tiny increments since the beginning of time, haven 't they??
I remember seeing more free hours in a month than there are in the month of February (800 Free Hours I think...)
More Recently I think I've seen 1500 Free Hours in 2 months or 1000 Free Hours in 1.5 Months... Annoying as hell... But at least now you get a free DVD Case... It was annoying when they switched from floppies to CDs because I had grown use to a steady supply of free floppies...
Tim
-- Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
milo_Gwalthny
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· Score: 1
I agree you shouldn't have to exclusively use your own product. Of course, we all occasionally used AOL to garner competitive intelligence. Our conclusion was that noone would willingly use them and that they would go out of business (this was 1995). I guess we had the competitive part down, just not the intelligence part.:-/
-- Milo
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
milo_Gwalthny
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· Score: 2
Microsoft *should* force them to use Windows. Then maybe they would be motivated to make it work better.
Seriously, I worked at an ISP. We made all the employees use the service because we wanted them all to know exactly what our customers were seeing. If they hated it, then our customers probably did also, so they were motivated to fix it.
For more irony, I believe Intel designs its processors on PowerPC based AIX boxen.
I could be wrong though.
I'm 99% sure you are wrong. One funny thing I saw at Intel was the 'Sun Lab' full of Sparc 5's and 10's for people to use (I never got access to the lab, but I could see it through a window). All of their design is on Wintel boxes last I checked. Of course I've been out of the loop a while now!
--
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
"You've got pink slips!"
by
tenzig_112
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· Score: 5
Here are some of the new policy "guidelines" for the Warner-Bros./Time/Warner/AOL crime family- er, corporation:
All employees must sign up for the American West series of books from the Time/Life library (only $19.99 per month- cancel any time)
Employees are "strongly encouraged" not to troll the MSN message boards posing as teenage girls- but use AOL in future.
All employees are required to watch the WB prime time line-up. A Dawson's Creek quiz will be distributed during break the following business day.
All news about the corporation will come to employees via CNN. Anything you see on Dateline is a lie.
Yeah, I made a mistake. What I should have said was that Sun using Star Office hinders their productivity by not providing an easy way to exchange formats with their customers. I didn't mean to imply that using Star Office in itself caused poor productivity. (Though that's what I said.)
However, as much as I hate it, Word.doc is the standard document format right now, and is the only document format for most companies.
I'm all for using ascii or HTML for document sharing. I'd even accept RTF. But that's not the way things work in the US. I'm forced to provide and accept MS Word formated documents to do business with customers.
More importantly laying the blame on your customer does nothing good for you as a business. As your customer, you'ld better be willing to accept the document format I have, or I'll find someone who will. Lay the blame on the customer if you wish, but be prepared to lose business.
Just goes to show that the correct response is to use the best tool for the job, not the in-house brand.
I think the article made that clear. Sun doesn't use MS office, but it hinders their productivity and makes it more difficult for their customers.
MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
It seems to me the best shop would be one that had different computers for different jobs. End users will probably get Windows, because that's what they're used to and that's what will make them most productive. Servers might be Unix or Windows, based upon need. Designers might get Macs. Admins or competent users might choose Solaris 86 or Linux (Or Windows with VMWare running Linux, as I do) based upon corporate need and individual desire.
Use it because it makes sense, not because of some misplaced loyalty.
MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
But beyond a certain level, execs are free to ignore such petty inconveniences - some of the Word documentation that comes out of M$ has MacOS Word stamps in the metadata. That's why I suspect that the AOL-TW execs who could actually make a difference won't bother their arses changing over to using AOL.
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This sounds just like HP: from what I've read, they exclusively use Windows/Outlook for all their corporate stuff, including their website! They also use Exchange for their mail. This is instead of using their own HP-UX systems for their website and other infrastructure, and their OpenMail product (which is fully Exchange-compatible, including the calendaring). So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
I'll bet Sun at least uses their own stuff internally. If I ever get to make or influence a decision to buy HP or Sun Unix hardware, I'm definitely picking the company that at least believes in what they make.
If this trend continues...
by
ackthpt
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· Score: 5
Hormel workers will only be allowed to receive Spam!
-- All your.sig are belong to us!
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:If this trend continues...
by
Tech187
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· Score: 1
Hormel makes many other products. They even have (or used to have) a product that came in a can labelled 'Potted Meat Food Product.' It was MUCH WORSE than Spam! I remember trying to get rid of it by feeding it to a stray cat. The cat wouldn't have anything to do with it.
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
damiangerous
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· Score: 1
Actually, from what I've heard, there is no such directive at Microsoft. Employees can use whatever they like, as long as they don't sacrifice the ability to work with their teammates.
Well, you didn't hear that from the article, which you apparently failed to read.
It says:
Microsoft has its own technology preferences. Andrea Jenkins, formerly creative director at Microsoft's Sidewalk San Francisco Web guide, said when she showed up for her first day at work, she was surprised to learn that she would have to use a computer running Microsoft Windows, as opposed to a Macintosh computer
So apparently MS employees do have to use Windows.
Indeed. We call it "eating your own dog food". At my firm, we have a similar edict: everyone should be using our groupware tool (except the designers, who are on Macs; our tool is Windows Only...)
If I don't use the tool that I'm building, why should anyone else?
Of course, you shouldn't have to exclusively use your tool, OS, or whatever. Competitive intelligence, right?
//jbaltz
--
-- I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Productivity drops like a stone!
by
sirgoran
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· Score: 1
While waiting for "new artwork" to be downloaded each time they log-on, and getting bumped due to not having enough modems, and slow connection speeds.
They should be out of business in six mothns for sure!
Goran
-- Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
-- -"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
This will be fun to see.
by
AFCArchvile
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· Score: 1
So which TimeWarner cable channel will get hacked first by script kiddies using their mom's AOL account?
-- "Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Re:This will be fun to see.
by
onepoint
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· Score: 2
Well, interestingly enough I think that AOL might have to provide virus scanning. The AOL email going directly into the Time Warner systems is exposing them to a new batch of security problems. could you imaging if they start using the chat client also?
Time Warner is going to open new doors for hackers.
ONEPOINY
-- if you see me, smile and say hello.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
ChuckDivine
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· Score: 1
Time and again the Linux crowd forget that normal people DO NOT USE LINUX BECAUSE IT HAS A COMMAND LINE. The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm
and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS
for 'the rest of us'. Until then like the stick-shift automobile, it will remain strictly a specialist interest.
This statement implies that people are forced to use the command line in contemporary Linux. I don't think this is true.
At home I run Red Hat 6.2. I use my home machine for the following:
E-mail (Netscape mail works just fine for my use.)
Browsing the Web (Netscape again)
Writing. Wordperfect for printed stuff. Use vi, emacs for Web pages, but that's just because I got used to that approach. Could use other, more user friendly tools.
Creating art with the GIMP.
And, oh, because I am a bit of a geek, writing a bit of code in C and C++. Yes, I use vi or emacs, depending upon my mood.
In short, for the things ordinary people do, Linux appears to be as friendly as other OSes. No reason to get rid of vi, emacs, xterm and the like.
To use an automobile analogy, Linux today is not like having a difficult to use race car versus an easy to drive generic mass production vehicle. It's more like having a garage with room for a race prepared Corvette, a Malibu for family transportation and several other vehicles for various uses. Windows is like having a station wagon -- great for going to the supermarket, but a sure loser on the race track.
-- "Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
Let me get this straight, a company wants to use its own product inside the company ? Stop the presses ! As the article well points out, LOTS OF OTHER COMPANIES DO THE SAME THING. And though they point to the Gap and Ford as counter-examples, while the Gap may not force its employees to wear Gap clothing, I will bet that they are NOT allowed to wear non-Gap tops (and probably bottoms) with labels of any sort. Sure, Ford doesn't force people to drive their cars, but that's when they are not working. Do you think Ford managers have any leeway as to what type of cars they are allowed to buy for their own fleet ?
I wonder whether it would be newsworthy if RedHat or VA Linux switched everyone over to mutt ? I wonder why the article (and Slashdot) didn't mention what the users are resisting switching from (likely Microsoft Outlook) ??
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
hillct
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· Score: 2
I'm glad to hear it. It'm not a big fan of MS Exchange, and it's good to know that Groupwise is beind dusted off and revamped. My first experience with GroupWise was probably 5 or 6 years ago, and then it disappeared from my radar until a friend of mine took a job as a place the uses it. He's not real impressed, as I wasn't back when I was using it. I'm glad to see that it may come into the spotlight again. It's important that there be a corporate groupware alternative to Microsoft's solution (independant of all the snazzy OpenSource solutions I've seen).
Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think Not
by
hillct
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· Score: 5
Is AOL mail really a corporate calibre product? It doesn't seem so. It is targeted tward the technical novice, providing few features and poor integration with scheduling and other groupware features. A Time magazine employee summed it up best, in the NY Times Article itself:
even employees who acknowledge that their previous e-mail system "isn't very good" are not convinced that America Online is the best choice for a corporate e-mail program. "AOL got popular because it's really simple and easy to use," said a writer at a Time Inc. magazine. "But when you're in a workplace, it's just not very full featured."
Another concern is security. Well it seems that they have that one covered, although SecurID is a cumbersome system. It's neat for the geek in all of us, to have a card with a rotating numerical pin for security, but it is no more secure than many of the more recent advances in this field, and it's tremendously inconvenient. Again, from the article:
Another issue is the added level of security that will be required for employees to retrieve their e-mail. Rather than logging on to the network by typing in a name and password, employees will also need to type in a number that appears on a digital card. Because the number changes every few seconds, the device adds a level of security to the e-mail system, but it also creates headaches for employees.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to realize how much of a 'headache for employees' it really is. At my ompany, a large telecom equipment manufacturer, we chose do do away with securid (implementing other solutions) because the inconvenience outweighed the benefit.
As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft has one of the best Enterprise email systems right now. Granted, it doesn't scale vary well and it's tremendously expensive when compared to SMTP based systems, but it does have comprehensive groupware features. The other possibilities would have been Lotus CC:Mail or Novel Groupwise which are both far past their prime and either in need of being severely overhauled, or End-Of-Lifed by their companies.
The final class of mail system are those new.com outsourced enterprise mail solutions such as was offered by Mail.com and others, although I believe that company has just gone through some restructuring, where the enterprise email services were re-branded and spun off from the free personal email service (If someone can enlighten me here I'd appreciate it).
In any case, AOL has chosen the worst of a set of halfway decent possibilities - Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products -. There is something to be said for promoting your own products (at my company we use the telephones we produce, and the switching systems we produce) but in cses where use of your own company's product will impact your productivity, or otherwise negitively impact the work of your employees, it would be a severely misguided decision.
I knew a consulting firm who has forced its employees to use AOL three years ago. I can see why. The company doesn't need to invest any money for the infrastructure. You have a simple and consistant interface for both internet connection and email (especially if your employees are travelling a lot). Your stupid employees has less chance of screwing things. The email is kept at the server and multiple computers easily can be used to access it. There is aol instant messenger coming with the package. The company doesn't need to buy an expensive IM solution and teach it to it employees. You don't need to have a lot of internet experience to use AOL software. It is more reliable than hotmail. At least you are paying for it.
Somebody commented that AOL mail software misses some features. That is not true. It does some things differently but it doesn't miss any crucial features (there is a send button)
So, the bottom line is, it saves a lot of headaches for a company and it works.
No, they are pretty good consulting company all over US (Handling the mainframes and its security of Wells Fargo Bank for example). I can't answer why they use AOL, why they don't care about security. It is just email, do they really care much about security. Maybe they should.
So, we can see that streatypes not always represent everybody's needs.
Somebody commented that AOL mail software misses some features. That is not true.
Actually, it is true. AOL mail has none of the collaborative groupware features of any of the major commercially-oriented email solutions. Things like appointment scheduling, calendars, discussion threads/groups, contact management, etc. Those things may not mean much when you just wanna email your mom in Tuscaloosa, but they are very much critical tools in almost any large business environment.
They LOVE AOL? Not anybody I know, and I'm including my non-technical friends. As soon as they're visiting and see what a regular 56K connection can do, they ask for help in dumping AOL ASAP.
Maybe if the AOL user has never seen what they're missing it's a different story, but I'd say most detest the service even before they come around here. Perhaps seeing what they can't do well (or at all) on AOL finally gives them the impetus to lose AOL?
Re:Having an AOL address doesnt mean using AOL cli
by
andypflueger
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· Score: 1
Just get a few people to work in different areas to leave there speakers on a little too loud, then subscribe to the linux kernel mailing list. Then, YOU'VE GOT MAIL 300 times a day or so.
I understand a company being able to dictate what software/hardware/email system you use at work, but I'd be interested to see the legal ramifications of forcing an employing to use a specific software/hardware/email system at home.
RA7
-
-- "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Time warner employees must use icq to communicate with other employees, marketing procedures have also changed to allow only the distribution of cheap cds.
SURE it's a dumbass move
by
Mr.+Foogle
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· Score: 1
see, this looks really grim fFor people like me, who have time warner's cable modem system.I swear, if i *ever* am fForced to use that acursed hell-spawn AOL, i will drop my subscribtion to roadrunner so fFast it'll make their heads spin!!I'm basically okay with paying the corporate structure that fFeeds into AOL -- it's hard to avoid, and the bandwidth is nice -- but if time-warner starts making all users of all their subordinate services use that crappy system.. well, i've still got the T1 connection at work fFor al my big-pipe needs!
A couple of choice quotes from further down the article (a bit off topic for the/. story, but here goes anyway...)
But an executive at a software company that does business with Sun said his experience was plagued by incompatibilities. "Anything we sent to them involved some kind of trauma," he said. "And the onus was on us to somehow prepare a file they could read."
Damn right it is, and it's just plain courteous to
make sure that you're using some kind of public, or at least commonly-agreed, standard. These people would soon kick up a fuss if I sent them documents in LaTeX format.
"I used to tell my girls, if your boyfriends come over and it's not a Ford product they're driving, they'd better park it in the street."
Now that's just sad.
-- Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
To: SteveCase29375@aol.com
re: AOL usage #s!!!!!!!!!1
kewl!!!!!1 LOL!!!!!!!11
gtg k?
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
Sven+Tuerpe
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· Score: 3
Time and again the Linux crowd forget that normal people DO NOT USE LINUX BECAUSE IT HAS A COMMAND LINE. The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'.
That's bull^H^H^H^Han oversimplification. Though it is true that a command line interface is not appropriate for the average user, pure existence of a command line is by no means a sign of user-unfriendlyness. There is not even a contradistinction between command oriented user interfaces and graphical ones. The paradigm of graphical user intarfaces rather includes all the less powerful paradigms invented before, e.g. command oriented, forms based, and menu based interaction, and adds further means of expression (direct manipulation, visual affordances, etc.) for the designer as well as for the user.
This is the major reason why GUIs survived for 20 years -- they do not inhibit experienced users by forcing them into newbie-style interaction, but provide expert-friendly interfaces which are learnable to newbies; at least the better ones do. And there is the only flaw of command line interfaces: they require a huge amount of learning and don't help the user with it.
Oh, by the way, the Windows 2000 thing that came with my laptop computer has a command line, too. Are there people who do not use it because of that?
except in the case where an employee would be accessing AOL via TCP over someone else's system... like their home dialup.
That's exactly the concern. If anyone can get to the email server from the public net (ie, it's not behind a firewall), it's vulnerable to hacking. These PIN-calculators make hacking tougher, but they aren't a substitute for a good firewall.
Now, if you tell me that TW mail is not stored on the external net, and is instead available only to those inside the firewall (or those with VPN connections), then there's much less to worry about.
It's not just that your ability to access your company's e-mail is being placed in the hands of people you do not know and will never meet.
Ok, but slow down there a second. I'd agree with you completely here, but we're talking about AOL/TW's own corporate email. If they want to store their mail on a silly external system (that they own), it's not hurting anyone but them-- unless you count employees' using their corporate account for personal mail, in which case it's hard to argue that personal mail deserves corporate security.
Outsourcing of corporate email is nothing new, and nobody's forcing companies to do it. I'm just surprised that a major corporation like AOL/TW would be crazy enough to put something as important as corporate email on an external network, no matter how great the password protection. And for all the talk about PIN calcs, the server will still never be as secure as one on a private network.
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet. Unless they're using some sort of private, enterprise version of the AOL server software, running behind a firewall, it sounds very risky to put all that information on the external net with nothing more than (even very good) password protection. I couldn't quite tell if this was the case from the article.
"if world society is mostly openly controlled by corporations instead of governments, dissidents (that's what they'll be called) will point to this sort of thing as one of the steps that led to the situation."
No, people who oppose governments the US doesn't like are called "dissidents". People who oppose corporations (or the US government) are called "terrorists".
There's no such thing as a generic tool that will plug into Microsoft applications. Microsoft screws with the standards so much you end up having to write custom interfaces just to talk to them. Not to mention implementing workarounds for all the bugs left in the MS software. No, writting a generic tool for Micrsoft is not a feasible solution.
Windows 2000 server (E2k test box, gotta test what I support)
Really? I always thought WINDOWS was a recursive acroynm for "Windows Is Not Developed On Windows Systems".;)
-- If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This could accelerate Mozilla/Netscape development
by
Artifice_Eternity
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· Score: 1
I've not used AOL mail, tho I know it's pretty clunky. But one somewhat positive possible side effect of this that nobody seems to have mentioned: this could spur AOL to put more resources into their own browser and POP mail client...y'know, Netscape/Mozilla.
I don't know that the current AOL mail system has any connection to the developing Mozilla codebase. And I don't know if Mozilla's mail client is currently being developed to have Outlook-type functionality. But a lot of employees (including techies) bitching about AOL mail's weaknesses could lead to internal pressure for a switchover to some kind of Mozilla-based solution.
And this would be a Good Thing[tm], in the long run. What better situation could we imagine that could lead to the development of an open-source Outlook killer?
So if I read this right they are forcing professional people to use their own AOL, Moron proof Email client because that is the only way to get anyone with more intelligence than your average Amoeba to use it??
Seems to me that AOL should solve their problem by writing and marketing better and more powerful apps.
And since when can Star office read M$ office documents properly?? Whenever I try to do that it F***S the document up completely. The scary part is that my employer may just start doing alot of work in close cooperation with Sun. And this article seems to indicate that I will be hug drawn and quartered for using Koffice instead of Star Office??
-- Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
And yet, there is something to be said for keeping a close eye on the competition. Case in point: One of my least favorite IDEs for programming under Windows is Visual Studio. It simply sucks. Yes, I've used worse, but still...
And yet, I'm continually running into programmers who swear it's great, but who also have never seriously used anything else. Most of the time, if I can talk them into trying other development environments, they see the deficiencies of Studio.
The point being, of course, that if you never have experience with anything else, you're going to be satisfied with what you have. This might counter the theory that using what you make will automatically lead to better software. Sometimes the only way to notice a problem is through comparison with products that don't have the problem.
If you read the original article, they mention a web designer who started work at M$ and was forced to use Windows, even thought she preferred the Mac. Now that she's left M$, she's using a Mac again, and recommends it to everyone. -----------------
Re:Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think
by
global33
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· Score: 1
No, it certainly isn't an Enterprise Calibre solution... I'd say it's hardly a legally-sane calibre solution. But this is a technical decission made with no technical rationale whatsoever. This was made as a business decission. While that is obviously not the way to look at things, it is the way they did look at things... and looking at them that way, their choice makies emminent sense. Using your own product in-house is a good (if not the only) idea on SO many levels, from morale to culture to image to press to marketing to compatability... while they asked the wrong question, they answered it right.
While I certainly believe that AOL is evil, I fell that, to a degree, the complaints regarding its implementation are somewhat hair-splitting. I find, for instance, Sun's prohibition of M$ Office a much more damaging business decission.
Using AOL for AOL-TW's corporate email is obviously not the best technical decission. It is not, however, a hellaciously bad technical decission. And it's a very good business decission.
michael
--
michael /global33/
Fuck bloated officeware Re:Won't last
by
RevDobbs
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· Score: 1
True dat. I pine for the days of, err, pine, when email was plain text and you didn't have to worry about some idiot sending you a HTML email with a megabyte of images attached, or a VB-script worm. Seven years when "Good Times" first was being circulated, I told everybody unequivocally that "you can't get a virus reading your email". I hope no one remembers me saying that...
I dread the fact that in future versions of Outlook you will be forced to use Word as your email editor; soon we'll have to worry about VBScripts and Macro viruses?. When I Grow Up, my company will be a *NIX shop...
God bless those Albino Ninjas...
Whoopee! I Can't Wait!!!
by
jjjpinkojjj
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· Score: 5
im and aol tyme warder employie, and i thinks this is a ggood move. aol is soo kewl! i here you can get on the internet with it! and the web too! aol is just the most teknologicly advanced company in the hole world!
and i don't apreciate the remark above about "eating our own dogfood". i've never seen any dogfood here in the 8 years that ive worked for the company. whoever said that is obvoiusly not an employie and should not be alowed to post on slash-dart.
yay! i just got mail! i'm ecspecting a reply back from some company that promised i wood get rich if i just sent them my credit card number. cood be them!! gotta go!
Ok. I presume that you are a programer from your comment. I have done both in my time, and the stress factor of being in internal support is much greater than creating a product. And, I was not saying that I like the software that I use to be dictated to me. (i would much rather run linux at work than win2k, trust me on that one). I was saying that it is not unique to aol.
-CrackElf
-- "Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
andrewscraig
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· Score: 1
Er, Windows has a command line (not a particularly good one though), Win9x is even Command line based until a call to 'win.com' to open up a GUI screen (kinda like a poor-mans X, don't you think??)
Also - since when has a stick-shift automobile been a specialist interest vehicle? Probably about 80% of the cars here are stick-shift (a.k.a. manual gearbox). Granted, in the U.S., this may be the case - but believe it or not, the world doesn't stop at New York and start again at Los Angeles:)
Because the NY Times requires a Login, I though I would post some of the logins that I have found work:
---Login:Password---
subscriberid:password
12345678:12345678
AFAIK, Microsoft allows you to have non-Microsoft boxes, they just don't have any infrastructure or support for them. That pretty much means that most people at Microsoft end up using Windows for their work, whether it is the technically best platform for their job or not (many people in MS research come from UNIX environments). I think that policy makes perfect sense, btw.
That's wrong. Microsoft's mantra is (and I quote) "Eat your own dog food". Except for developers doing work for Mac and Unix, MS people use Windows at work. They use Visual Studio to code in, and Outlook to check their email. They use Visio and Project to do design and project management. Anything else doesn't make sense, and is bad for business. Of course, the Office for Mac team has Macs, and the IE for Unix team has Unix boxes (Sun, I think). Any time you use a competitive OS/product at Microsoft, you'd better have a good business reason to be using it.
-- If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
That makes sense, except that MS makes VS, which adds an additional layer to the argument. MS developers use VS-specific features in their work, like SourceSafe integration, MS-specific add-ins, etc. If one or two developers used a competing product, not only would they be spending money they don't have to and abandoning their company's core product suite, they might impact release schedules. There are copies of just about every competing product known to man in the MS labs, just not in day-to-day use by the programmers. How do you think MS found out about Visio, or FoxPro?
-- If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Reading your email is MUCH faster in the black window.
Sorry It took me song long to respond.
by
aol
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· Score: 1
It is necessary for the safety of all Time Warner employees that they use AOL not only in the office but also at home also.
Using competing products only sends mixed messages to the friends and family of our employees.
There are many benefits to using AOL in the corporate world, such as;
Email Filtering, (no spam in the corporate inbox)
Buddy Lists and chat, (your co-workers and clients can send you instant messages any time you are online, you can use chat to create your own chatrooms to colaborate on your projects).
Privacy, (I am sure you are all aware of our excellent track record on privacy issues).
Web Filtering, Keep employees off of adult websites, (or websites that disagree with any corporate policy) Stability and security, (AOL on the WIN32 platform is world famous for it rock solid stability and unbreakable security).
Thank You for using AOL on your desktop.
Being a former AOL employee...
by
EvilStein
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· Score: 1
(FYI, I quit shortly after the AOL/TW merger)
Using AOL with a SecurID card isn't that big of a hassle at all. It binds your account name to the card, but it's in no way a big hassle at all. It's been set up that way for a looooong time now, too.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
deaddrunk
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· Score: 1
Microsoft also practice this 'eat your own dogfood' approach, and look how successful they are.
This of course explains why Windows is such a dog's breakfast of an OS.
-- Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Perhaps an AOLTW employee could tell us if they are getting AOL.com email addressed, in which case looks like everyone's going to have email addressed like BernardShaw666@aol.com, or is there some plan to use.net. It seems reasonable that AOL would have set aside some sort of mechanism to separate employees from customers, like any reasonable ISP. I know that when I worked at a company that offered email addresses, we used.net for the customers and.com for the employees (though most places seem to do the opposite.) Why wouldn't AOL just do the same? That way there would be significantly less chances of name collisions.
What was they're preexisting policy toward user addresses vs. employee addresses?
Oh, wait, AOL isn't a reasonable company...
The truth about the grammar
by
shobadob
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· Score: 1
The truth is the following:
"You've got mail" is simply incorrect. The correct form is "You've gotten mail."
Also, "You have mail" is correct.
However, "You've mail" is not correct, even allowing for contractions. The verb 'have' can only be put into a contraction when it is being used as a helping verb. In this case, have is an action verb, so it must be separated.
If you're using formal English, contractions aren't allowed at all, but since when have AOL users used formal English?
AOL/Time Warner employees will be forced to disconnect their computers from the LAN at 20-minute intervals.
Terminated employees will be told, "You've got Fired!"
Every other interoffice memo will read either "MAKE $$$ FAST!!!" or "HOT HORNY COEDS ARE WAITING FOR YOU."
They're not forced to use it
by
jhill
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· Score: 5
They're not forced to use the AOL Client, they can do things inside the company that will allow them to get an aol.net account which will allow them to use an SMTP and POP3 server so that they can choose whatever mail package they want. Don't feel sorry for them b/c they have to use it, because they don't.
I always got a headache when I heard that stupid comment.
And now the Time Warner employees will all be less productive and generally irritable:op
i'd call that pretty relevent. Oi.
What happens if one of the employees gets "Banned" (My brother did once for disagreeing with one of thier "guides" about who was a better baseball player). Do they get fired?
-- "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Sounds like the days of old and the Company Store. How long until they start issuing TW/AOL script in place of paychecks?
You expect me to use this crap I make?
by
SloppyElvis
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· Score: 1
You'd have to think, if AOL employees are forced to use the garbage they produce, then maybe that garbage will become more useable. As a software developer, I believe it is important for those who write the programs to use the programs they write (when appropriate, as in this case), however, it seems unusually cruel to force the whole company to use such a crappy product. It is as if the AOL moguls want to say, "look our product is so good, we use it ourselves"
The problem is, their product is not good.;)
This story actually reminds me of the one where Microsoft purchased Hotmail, tried to convert it to MS Servers, failed miserably since they couldn't scale, and reverted to using the original UNIX servers. In that we see a case where a company had to use another's product because theirs wasn't good enough.
Although I see the point of using your own stuff, maybe a company should seriously evaluate the quality of their product before strong-arming their employees into using it full-time. Perhaps, this could lead to a better product, but in AOL's case, I seriously doubt it.
If code is broken, but nobody ever uses it, is it still broken?
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
--
$ man touch
--
-- Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Now force em to watch Timewarner films only, and you've got a nice self sufficient corporation. A close knitted community too! They'll all be able to share views on the pics they say the night before.
---
Living is a way of life...
--
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
If you want to dump Microsoft, use Domino?
by
christoofar
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· Score: 1
IMHO that is a silly silly silly architecture change. There is no possible way that AOHellTW will reduce cost by dumping Microsoft. Basically, they are doing it to make a passing "cheap shot" at Redmond when it began feeling around for the pros and cons of allowing the AOL environment to use Mozilla for its renderer and the continuing bruhaha over IM.
Face it. Yahoo has a better (and free) groupware solution. IBM/Lotus don't put out a shabby product. The latest rev. of Notes and Domino offers all the functionality that you need from Exchange 2000 except for perhaps the virtual IFS into the Notes database (wouldn't be surprised if that came along soon someday).
You want Groupware? If you hate MS why would you choose anything but Lotus? Helllllooooo!!! IBM and Lotus have been investing time and $$$ into groupware since Xerox PARC and the first release of PROFS (aka OfficeVision).
If you want to keep your server assets and still take a sh** on MS, why not just wipe off Exchange and replace it with something that has similar function? Don't ruin your productivity by taking away features you depend on and then spending tons of dough to build a replacement system that offers no benefits.
Corporate America - reinventing the wheel since 1876.
AOL's mail system, much like their own web server, is in house proprietary (no surprise there).
The bigger surprise is that the servers are Tandem. That's right, Tandem (now a div. of Compaq). Because of the select clientele that can afford to have one computer but 2 or more of everything, it (supposedly) provides unheard-of availability records.
The only bummer is that there isn't much software or the proprietary Non-Stop kernel, but you do get a decent C development environment and can port your Unix applications over to it, much like how EMX for OS/2 Warp goes about it.
AOL's decision to use such an odd choice for an email server probably stems from the infamous outages early in AOL's history when it was duking it out with CompuServe (which H&R Block later dim-wittingly sold to AOL to boost its stock price and focus on the oversaturated financial-planning market).
When you consider that most of America's unwashed heathenlive off of AOL's mail system to swap massive amounts of pr0n, spam, and other senseless drivel, there is no way that a featureful groupware system can be added to the service easily and cope with the transaction load that the service currently endures.
Should AOL mail be scrapped? Probably not. Since AOL'ers are paying a fortune anyway for a shabby product, why not charge them a small convienence fee to "enrich" their email and and scheduling, database, forms, etc? Just build a seperate system or a small farm of Notes-Domino/390 and you got yerself uh system.
AOL might even rake in those mindless corporate druids by cooking up some synch tools for PalmOS, ActiveSync, AvantGo, whatnot.
And added bonus would be getting rid of that damned AOL Adapter &%^*(%^%&^%)%.
Eating your own dog food
by
Ratbert42
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· Score: 1
It's about time. If a company doesn't use it's own products internally, that's got to be a big red flag. That's one area where I've got to give Microsoft credit. If you wandered the halls of RedHat, how many Windows machines do you think you'd see?
But they're in for trouble. Everyone I know that uses AOL has problems with attachments. Good luck being productive without attachments.
AOL is trying to become a monopoly........just look at all the cds they send out evry month with 50 free hours It seems to take the free time to keep updating all of their upgrades geeeeeezzzzzz
Slashdot Mirror
I can't get at the article at the moment, so can anyone tell me:
Are they being forced to use AOL mail at work or at home?
If it is at work then it sounds pretty reasonable - most companies have standard software. I, for example, am compelled to use outlook although I would never dream of using it at home...
If, on the other hand, they are being told what they are allowed to run on their own computers, then they should tell their employers to mind their own bloody business!
You mean we have to install this POS (piece of software) on the machines? Our LAN is working fine now, and the computers run.
Imagine AOL taking over your computer, and useless network traffic as they logon to AOL and get more than just email. Ads, artwork updates, new sounds, AIM chat, and other useless bandwidth hogging stuff from AOL.
How are they going to get user names for everybody? Or will everybody have a number in their email address? Would you believe that mike_peterson331@aol.com really works for TimeWarner?
(New Turner AC)...our old turner.com addresses (john.smith@turner.com) will map to our jsmith2343@aol.com addys. But I think (no ones really using it yet), that new outgoing email will show the aol.com as the From:) (though we may have a reply-to: option...don't know yet)
> AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail
WTF? The "standard" for email is plain-text!
Cripes I hate llamas who send out html emails...
That's nothing - the latest ad campaign, "Intelligence Everywhere", is being circulated as the file "intel_everywhere.ppt". Yes, by the very people responsible for advertising Motorola. Yet we're laying off engineers instead. The mind boggles.
Forcing Time-Warner employees to use AOLmail is a GOOD THING because it will give them an incentive to produce software that isn't crippled and mind-numbing. In fact, I think it's generally a good idea to force a corporation to use it's own software.
Also, a good friend of mine discovered that by Windows, they mean 95 and its descendants. They don't like NT and won't install on it. They probably won't support it either. I can imagine how popular DSL will become in a big hurry around here if they ever do anything that breaks their support for non-Windows users.
What's worse than a computer with Windows on it? A computer with Windows and AOL!
Not completely true. (and yes, I'm a AOLTW employee). To qualify for a aol.net account in our division, you've got to be in "engineering", which includes server operations folks, dbas, etc., but NOT rank-and-file, or many people in the IT groups. Our IT project managers, developers, etc., do NOT have the option of using anything other than AOL Mail.
I work at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta and we have been dreading this conversion for a long time. Unlike Time Inc, we have been using Outlook + Exchange for almost a year now. AOL's mail is a serious joke, they have no idea how dependant we have become on Outlooks calendar and meeting tools. (In fact, alot of our in-house applications have been developed to work with exchange, oh well back to the drawing board...) So far they have pushed back our conversion to AOL mail because we are too dependant on Outlook and our managment would grind to a halt (turner has been firmly partnered with Microsoft since before the merger!). To make up for it, they are developing somesort of calendar + meeting thing using netscapes webserver. But I haven't heard much about it. Also my email address will be @aol.com so forget about geting my real name as a username. I'll end up as like JoeSmi543879879@aol.com. Hows that for professionalism? Much better than Joe.Smith@turner.com! (not my real email btw!)
Well at least I get one of those cool badges....
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Ford makes a line of heavy trucks...I've rarely seen a car carrier loaded with all Fords that wasn't being pulled by a Ford (most likely independent carriers drive whatever they want though).
1 - We must use the ISO9000 documents, and if we see a problem with them, we must seek to change them rather than violate them. We must follow what they say even if we know it will cause a failure, we just need to mention the problem first so that when it fails it's not our fault. (We can point at the protest and say, "see - I told you so", and that will lend a lot of weight to getting the official policy in the ISO9000 document changed.)
2 - All ISO 9000 documents will be stored in Exchange as if they were discussion groups, so comments can be attached to them.
So, adding 1 and 2 together gives us the result that we MUST have exchange up and running 100% of the day so we can get at the ISO 9000 docs, which means we must be running Windows. This was excessively stupid since we wrote 90% of our software in Unix. When I had to give up my linux box at work and isntead reformatt it for windows full-time, by productivity dropped because my only access to unix systems was through terminal programs, instead of having one natively on my box. (I'm not trying to dis Windows here, but understandably A unix system is better to develop unix programs on than a windows one.)
That made me quit the place, not just because I hate using Windows (I do), but because the management instituting a policy that screwed over 90% of the programmers, making their lives harder so that the managers' lives were easier, was an indicator to me that they didn't give a rat's ass about their programmers.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
9:00am in what time zone? In which conference room? In which building.
That's the problem.
Only in the USA. The rest of the world is dominated by manual gearboxes, and an automatic is an expensive option that's rarely used except by the elderly and lazy businessmen.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
than Lotus notes .....
with which you're forced to send Attachments, HTML mail, where the mail ID are changed when received by the server
none Yet.
This makes no sense. The whole point of business is to get the most productivity out of your people. So you make things streamlined. You make your man-hours count. I can understand Microsoft having their employees use windows. Lots of companies do that. I can understand them requiring the use of Exchange/Outlook. Wouldn't want important email to go down with the user's computer. I just can not understand using AOL for email. Yeah that is great that your company makes software for home users that is easy to use. But for your company it wastes valuable time to have a whole online service software open just to read mail. Are they talking about AOL web email? Or do they have to have the AOL application loaded? It would waste resources and time.
IRNI
Hey fire the employees you resist. They aren't there to complain about something stupid like an email setup. If they don't like it that much either quit or shutup about it. After all time warner/aol is paying them to be at work. It's about what the boss wants you to do, not what you would perfer....
-ZiN-
My girlfriend works at Warner Bros, and because the "Don't want to pay the fees for Microsofts Exchange Server", which they have already purchased, they are being forced to use AOL Mail for email, iPlanet for groupware + another program that escapes me at this time. Yes, 3 seperate programs, just so they don;t have to pay for Outlook and Exchange. So, no more syncing to palm pilots (visor's and WinCE), plus the cost of retraining THE ENTIRE COMPANY to use three seperate applications. Pardon my french, but it's fucking stupid. AOL is fucking up TimeWarner. I dount if anyone did the cost of productivity and money lost in training and using these CRAPPY applications.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
I'm curious why you *don't* use your own chips. Is it because you all got burned from the apple clone business? Or is it more the whole "how many executives would fly an airplane their company wrote the control software for" deal?
And if you'd been really ballsy, you could have written galvin back about the pcs after he made that phone crack. (cc'ing everybody, of course..)
So turn off sound. Sometimes with linux you even get that for free.
(however, I'm quite happy with my old-school Ensoniq 1371)
What kind of messed-up implementation of Notes does your company have? Notes/Domino can do things a generic IMAP server and client can only dream of. Efficient synchronization! Single-message stores! Support for structured data beyond plain email messages! A really nice web interface! Workflows!
If you want to give up all of this (or maybe your company doesn't use any of it), you're welcome to connect to a Domino server with your favorite plain IMAP client, and do user lookups with the little LDAP search gadgets in Outlook Express or Netscape 4.x or such.
Or were you thinking more in terms of an Emacs interface? [smirk]
Time to dump AOL/TW stock. I mean, shoot, AOL e-mail is even worse than POP3. At least with POP, you can easily save, archive and organize all your messages permanently and move them from machine to machine. AOL mail? Old messages disappear after an arbitrary number of days and you have to manually put messages you want to keep in your system's local "personal filing cabinet" which isn't exactly rich in organizational and search features.
AOL doesn't quite support standard HTML e-mail; instead, it's got its own hobbled rich-text format made from a subset of HTML, so it has a rough time with email from other modern mail clients like, say, 1996-vintage Netscape or 1997-vintage Outlook Express and Outlook.
Send more than one attachment to the outside world, and it gets zipped if you send it from a PC and Stuffed if you send it from a Mac, and godspeed the PC user who gets a binhexed Stuffit file from someone who has no idea this happens automatically.
The whining about use of SecurIDs is a bit of bellyaching, though. More companies should do things like that if they open mail access to machines outside their private network.
Then again, I'm not sure if any of the "AOL Anywhere" clients for access via WAP phones, Palm VIIs, Blackberries and whatnot support SecurID authentication. It sure would suck if all those tens of thousands of employees had no way to retrieve mail from a device smaller than a laptop.
Anyone know if AOL gives employees the ability to do mail forwarding or set vacation messages? AOL customers sure can't.
As a former employeee, I can attest to the fact that yes, AOL likes to use the AOL Service to do MOST of its business functions. All employees are/were required to use AOL for corporate email. They did have some inhouse SMTP/POP3 type applications for answering questions submitted via email... but honestly, all they did was cut and paste generic answers to complex problems.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I subscribed to AOL for three years, and I can testify that the people who "love AOL" like that are the ones who can tolerate the piss-poor interface and implementation because they don't know any better.
What they love is the community, the other people they've grown close to. Some of these people are even technically literate, but they place more value on their friendships rather than having a more efficient email system or being able to browse the web like a net_god...
Now, that's not a defense. I can't stand most of these people. They're generally ostrich-minded, single-issue people who you can't talk to without them working in that one pet topic that rules their lives, be it guns or Tolkein... And what's most scary that there are so many of them!
The AOL software is adequate for these people. But you put it in the hands of 86,000 serious, workaholic businesspeople - journalists, many of them - and they're going to scream bloody murder. I predict that within two years, the impact on their business will be such a burden that they will either 1) abandon it, or 2) rewrite it.
And based on my experience with AOL, if they choose 2), it will not be a solution, because management will move on to another "solution" before they get this one right.
I can see the fnords!
It's NOT that cumbersome. It's a smart card that fits in your wallet, like any credit card. When you need the passcode, you whip out the SecurID, type in the number it displays, and you're on your way.
I can see the fnords!
--
Another news flash: Workers at Microsoft have to use Windows!
Must be a slow news day.
[sigh]
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
No. Although HP uses Windows internally for email, all of its large, external facing websites run on HPUX. You think everyone at IBM logs in to AIX boxes?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
A few years ago, Netscape made a big "enterprise" sales push for it's messaging/calendar platforms. It just so happened that Microsoft and IBM/Lotus were also having a huge sales war at the same time (mostly because there was millions of old ccMail and MS-Mail seats out there ripe for the Y2K picking).
Anyway, Netscape came in a distant 3rd (or perhaps even 4th behind Novell) in that fight, which is one of the big reasons they aren't an independant company anymore.
The platform pretty much requires Netscape Communicator clients, and it's fuzzy how some things like the Calendar will work with Mozilla. Maybe AOL doesn't want to force Netscape onto their own employees..
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It depends. I've worked in environments that get along just fine with the "Meeting at 9AM Monday" e-mail. However, if you are using some program with scheduling, it more polite to send a meeting invitation because the reciever gets an automated notification and they can just push "I Accept" or whatever, and not have to manually update whatever schedule book or software they're using.
There's also the issue of getting executive types to show up at these things, and that almost always demands sending some sort of invitation. Even back in the old days, we'd have to fire up a 3270 emulator and send IBM PROFS invitations to get certain people to show. (We were all happily on a POP3 system.)
There's definately different philosophies at play. Linus somehow manages the whole Linux Kernel project out of his Inbox, but I've found that my life is much easier with groupware tools and much less e-mail.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
There no such thing as a "generic" calendar solution, period.
Sure there's RFCs 2445-7 (iCalendar), but who the hell has product support? The fact is, if you are developing a scheduling application, you pretty much only have a choice between Outlook (Windows and sorta Mac) and Lotus Notes (Windows and Mac and sorta Unix). That's an ugly reality, and sitting on your butt waiting for a open platform is a stupid business decision, because you'd have been waiting for about 15 years now.
It's also pretty much impossible to create "generic" workflow mail routing applications either (no RFCs that I know of!), etc, etc for other groupware type stuff.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange
Actually, I think most of the posts are saying that sticking with Outlook/Exchange is better than moving.
Personally, I think that a UNIX mail server (sendmail, or qmail for those nervous about security) with Eudora on the client side is the best choice. MS's mail servers have serious problems with resource use/responsiveness under moderate to heavy loads. The mail server here goes up and down like a yo-yo (probably due to a memory leak in the shiny new MS kerberoes mail authentication). On the other hand, because many people here use pine as their client, I've recieved one email worm (from an external source).
Recently (after yet another Outlook Email virus), a friend asked me what client he should use. He wanted something that would run in windows, and more user-friendly than pine in a telnet session (my initial reccomendation). For people who don't like pine, Eudora is probably the best client out there. It's much more secure than MS's offerings, but a lot easier to use than pine/mutt.
UNIX server with Eudora client is the way to go (of course, if you're 'leet enough for pine...).
In a recent article about document version control, the allegation was made that Microsoft actually uses Rational's ClearCASE (a commercially available product) internally for large projects. I don't know if that's true or not. I would be surprised to see Microsoft using a proprietary system internally; surely if it's good enough for their projects, it's good enough for them to sell?
Of course, the whole ClearCASE thing might just be a rumor.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Could be worse - they could spend millions trying Exchange before going back to their old system :)
Although according to the article their old system (some sort of Notes system) is no longer going to be supported, which helped motivate them to switch. I'd be nervous about trying to run a corporate email system on AOL, but I guess if AOL can use it internally, it must not be as bad as I would have thought.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The only person who's forgetting something here is you - you're forgetting that Linux has changed since '97 or whenever you looked at it last. Although maybe you're writing from some future time when Windows no longer has a command line? Do drop us a line on how LNUX and RHAT turn out, will you? I'm sure ZicoKnows will be interested in that too :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
.exe-based mail systems for some kind of web-based "groupware" that could more easily be integrated with their web presence, supply chain, and so on. They obviously have the talent and the resources, and it would seem to make more sense from an ROI perspective than the "swallow the string" routine that MS applications represent.
I keep wondering if the trend away from in-house developed custom systems will continue, or if someone will finally realize that it's a better investment to pay the salary of N programmers to develop/maintain an application that meets 100% of your business needs vs. licensing software that meets less than 100% of your business needs.
You use them because they are, overall, the most cost-effective tool for producing whatever it is you produce. Presumably your business management has done homework on what capital investments they can make which will yield the greatest return.
HP has undoubtedly done this analysis as well and has decided that the best ROI is to use an x86 email system -- staffing, software, hardware, compatibility, all represent hard or soft costs to the company that need an ROI.
What surprises me is why one of the big boys hasn't ditched ALL
Which is all well and good, except that the web interface to Outlook is riddled with security holes. Where I work (Bellsouth.net), they just turned off Outlook web access because of the security risks. Our security was being audited and we were told we wouldn't pass while leaving that Outlook web interface running...
Too bad for all the UNIX engineers who couldn't get their mail (no POP or IMAP access to our corporate Exchange server, either). The UNIX engineers have had to get laptops running Windows just to do corporate communications.
That's efficiency for you -- buying $2500 laptops for employees who don't even WANT to use Windows, just to do e-mail and have group scheduling. [sigh]
But, we all still have jobs. And right now, that's looking pretty damn skippy!
Oh, for chrissake.
In the few dozen posts that were up at the time, I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever. Mostly, when they've suggested anything, they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange. And the majority of those criticizing the move aren't suggesting a specific alternative: they're just saying that AOL sucks.
And at some level, it's hard to argue with that. In the spectrum of features vs. usability, AOL mail is slanted pretty far towards the latter. That's great for people who don't know anything about applications, but at the corporate level, one hopes (perhaps against hope) that folks can at least, you know, use Office.
You don't have to be a Linux zealot to think that using AOL for corporate e-mail is a dumb-ass move.
I've thought about "switching over" like this, but I have all of my mail sorted out into dozens of folders with rules that tell them where to go when they arrive. Can you manage this with Outlook Web Access (Exchange 5.5)?
Since all of the NT admins are gone due to layoffs - that means I'm the one to enable it :).
I suspect it's cc:Mail that's not being supported.
;-)
Let's just say I have a few years of experience with cc:Mail
As far as I am aware, Notes are still supported.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
That's why I talk to executives if I disagree with their decisions. I knew every exec personally but I didn't know my users. Guess what kind of impact a few words said to the right person can have.
Try it some time, send your favorite non-technical exec an invitation to have a brief meeting with you so you can voice some concerns.
Communication is the #1 problem in companies. If you agree to have your hands tied, that is your choice. I prefer to get things done and help the company attain its business goals.
Someone made a business decision to lay me off and the people I was in touch with were pretty upset about that. Unfortunately, not much they could do at that point.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
...Time-Warner reports a productivity drop of 25% .wav file, a stupidified excuse for a crappy mail client, the nastiness of another protocol layer, and all the horrible, horrible things that the AOL client software does to a Windows PC.
This is so spectacularly dumb that the words to describe how spectacularly dumb it is don't exist.
I mean...they're giving up flexible filtering, the platform-independance of POP3/IMAP, properly-formed headers on messages, and speed...
...for a
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
You spam 16,000,000,000 and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt!
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Also.. even profesionals can not resist the urge to write optomised code when coding in house.
If they were using a Unix/Sendmail system the code would be optomised for sendmail on Unix... Unlikely they'd ingrane into the exact Unix but it's equally unlikely they'd consider supporting a diffrent mail server than what your using.
(There is a greater chance of moving from BSD to Linux or Linux to Solarus than there is from Sendmail to something else)
And for running on Windows you really want to ingrain your code in the exact software you are using.
I don't actually exist.
Quite a few Microsoft employees use Unix or some other platform and Microsoft dosen't seem to mind one bit.
There is confadence in your product and then there is lunacy.
Ford dosen't expect to deliver it's cars using Ford trucks.
Apple used Crays in connection with Macs...
Cray did same..
I remember seeing a non-Commodore computer being used to test a Commodore 64 on the asembly line.
You don't need to get so wrapped up in your own company you forget the product isn't perfict.
Even Microsoft knows better...
AoL/TW however....
I don't actually exist.
The place I've worked at for the last 9 months uses GroupWise, and I'm very impressed with it. Been testing GroupWise 6 recently and from an admin's point of view, it's excellent - much better controls on message/mailbox sizing, more encryption stuff (both in transport and for users to encrypt/sign messages), and easier to backup.
The problem? The client still really sucks. It does things in a nice reliable way most of the time, but the UI and general slickness of the thing is years behind Outlook. They've apparently added loads of new stuff for this release, but none of it actually _looks_ like they've done any work on it, and this is the area that Novell really need to sort out. It's no good just making excellent products, they have to be noticed.
PHBs like to _see_ improvements, and when you're planning an upgrade for 250 users (a not insignificant amount of money), it would be nice for the users to actually notice. Make things look better, nicer, different and suddenly it's money well spent from their point of view.
... I'm finding it very hard to feel _bad_ for these people.
// EvilJohn
// Java Geek
Less Talk, More Beer.
No mandate on Windows here, you just have to be able to work with your co-workers (at least on a technical level).
---
I've heard that the programmers at MSFT were using some kind of proprietary in-house development environment, not the commercially available Visual Studio. This was true a few years ago; perhaps it's no longer the case.
--
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
In my opinion AOL is not a robust enough e-mail client due to it's instability, but it does have key advantages. AOL mail allows you to unsend. AOL mail tells you when a user has sent their mail, and when it has been read. You can't do that with pop/imap.
True, but that's a function of the pop/imap protcols, not the client. Pretty much every workgroup/business-oriented email system I've ever seen (Exchange, Groupwise, Banyan Mail) has supported the features you list for ages.
It would be nice to have a common, open mail protocol that supported these features, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd like it for large-scale internet mail. All that extra messaging going back and forth generates additional network traffic, uses more resources on the server, and generally creates the oppurtunity for a lot of stupid exploits, security holes, and general flakiness.
The people that I know that use AOL LOVE AOL, in a way that nobody LOVES their ISP,
My experience is just the opposite. Everybody I know that uses AOL hates it, but is afraid to change because: a) the Internet is hard to use, b) they don't want to change e-mail addresses, or c) just plain inertia. Caveat: I don't use AOL, and never have, so I don't speak from personal experience, just what I hear others say.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
For more irony, I believe Intel designs its processors on PowerPC based AIX boxen.
I could be wrong though.
AOL is not POP3 or even IMAP.
Most large companies (actually, all that I can think of) require that their employees use the "approved" groupware, including calendar, email, etc. The fact that AOL has developed their own system is sort of irrelevant here. In the end, if their system is poor, perhaps making everyone use it will incent then to improve it.
Not at all. First of all, they could use Macintoshes. Second, they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook. At the place I used to work, Outlook was a "must" but people used it over the web from Linux and SGI boxes, plus from Mac's..
Got any facts to back that up?
--
if the employees of Red Hat, Caldera, and Turbo Linux have to run Linux at work?
Best Slashdot Co
Actually, AOL has IMAP support for employees mail, as well as SMTP service for it. There's also a way to access AOL mail via Netscape 6's mailer with a different authentication path to make it easy for people.
It's not particularly hard to read your AOL mail with pine if you like. I used to do it all the time while I was there, especially since I ran the SMTP servers in question and liked to know that they were working well.
scott
Actually, aol.net addresses are just aliases to either an employee's own workstation or to another host to read/spool their mail, or in many cases *gasp* to someone's aol.com address.
In any case, AOL has IMAP and SMTP gateways available for employee use. (I should know... I used to run the SMTP ones...) so really, they could use any IMAP software out there.
AOL execs tend to do a lot of their own, as that's the way the culture has always been. No one there's really special enough to not have to deal with the bulk of their own email, except for the high-high-up people like Steve Case and Bob Pittman.
Actually, there's a pretty simple way for employees to address mail that prevents it from dropping into the mailbox of someone who isn't an employee... I won't go into the details of how it works, but it's simple enough that a lot of AOL employees did it by default
Actually, AOL employees have access to calendaring and scheduling software on the intranet that interfaces with the mail system.
Sure, it's not in one big bloated MS client, but it works, and it works pretty well.
scott
The mail never touches the external net. It all would transit inside AOL's system, except in the case where an employee would be accessing AOL via TCP over someone else's system... like their home dialup.
this is like working for UPS, and not being
allowed to send a package through the Post
Office.
I can see benefits - if those who develop the policies and software for AOL are forced to use it, they'll likely understand customer issues a lot more quickly. Ease of use, spam, filtering for content might get a lot more attention internally.
Here's a piece about using your software in house - Juno had such a good email client that everyone was using Outlook.
Oh, for $DEITY's sake!
The only thing the article suggested was a problem for Sun employees with StarOffice was exchanging files with shops which used other proprietary 'office productivity' programs, specifically MS Office. The lesson is, don't use proprietary file formats.
No 'office productivity' suite enhances office productivity, rather the opposite. Nothing in the article (or in anything else I've seen) suggests that a StarOffice shop is more (or less) productive than an MS Office shop. Interchange of proprietary data formats has always been a problem. The solution is not to use them.
Put it another way: if it isn't raw ASCII or valid SGML or XML, sending it out of your shop to another shop is just asking for trouble, and it's your fault.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Being a Lotus Domino bigot, I'd recommend that over AOL any day.
:-(
But it is, as has been pointed out, not just the email client that's the problem.
The lack of any kind of calendaring and scheduling system is provbably what will hit them hardest operationally. If they weren't using it already, it won't be so bad - but decent calendaring and scheduling can save a company lots of time - and therefore lots of money. Imagine having to email each person individually to find out when they're free, and then collate the results and send out invitations...
I'd hope that the AOL servers are reliable - they run a large chunk of their business, after all. But can they handle the scalability issues that may come up? Joe Bloggs with his consumer AOL account can afford to pull his email down from the server onto his PC - so indexing the mailbox is a simple affair. But for the Time Warner employees, it's not so neat a proposition... Firstly, I'd want my mail stored on a central server for backup purposes. Secondly, there's that "access from out of the office" that's touted in the article - that's nice, but it's only going to work for new mail unless they keep mail on the servers.
And have you ever seen how much email businesses can generate? More than AOL are comfortable with a normal user having in their inbox, certainly. After a year or two, some of their people may have a few thousand business emails - all of which they need to keep for legal reasons etc...
Finally, I suppose I'd like to wheel out the managability issue. I have no idea what AOL's back end is like, but I'm willing to bet it's probably not set up for global business usage. It's set up so that Joe Bloggs can get his email reliably. How do they plan to manage this system without either causing problems for their customers or for their employees? How do they plan to have a company address list? AOL have lots and lots of accounts. Will the next John Smith hired by Time Warner have to be jsmith264@aol.com?
This just seems wierd. The report is very vague on the back end, but I hope they're implementing a seperate one to their normal systems. Otherwise they're going to be the laughing stock of business...
End of discussion.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Outlook Web Access works great for those of us (like me) who use their Ultra 5 at work (like i do).
Almost all the functionality of Outlook, cross-platform. Speed is sacrificed, but, it beats the alternative.
:)
Unfortunately not. If you're heavily depedant on rules, as i was at a previous job, my solution was to use our citrix server to load outlook through a ICA connection.
;)
If thats not an option, you could always just ask them to enable the internet mail connector's IMAP functionality
Sorting rules are generally client-only.
This is an obvious flame. A real AOLer would have posted in all CAPS! ;-)
In other words, AOL/TW is not being a bunch of `email nazis' or anything of that sort. They simply changed their internal mail system. Heck, it doesn't even say they banned other systems.
------
Doesn't matter.
All that matters is that they've decided that no Motorola-chip using computers will be used inside Motorola.
How's that for the ultimate in negative adversiting for a product? Even the company that produces it won't use machines that use it.
Personally, I think all us employees should follow their example and buy competitor's phones. After all, we're just taking our cues on how to "support" the company from the higher ups...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Hmph... "Intelligence Everywhere" except in managment? I think that's about how it's going now. (I could go on and on about how much sense it makes to require the engineers to empty their own trash, to clean the bathrooms, what, once a week, to remove the plants, and all sorts of other penny-saving "cost reduction" plans that probably reduce morale more than costs. But perhaps that's their solution to preventing more layoffs? Encourage people to leave? though that's going to target the ones that they'd want staying around... I better shut up now :)
Yes, I would say that file definately has double meaning. At least I'm still working in an area which we're all using Suns and the like.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I don't know why we don't use Macs here. All I know is that the people in charge of the computing resources decided on this "OneIT" policy that can be summed up in one word : Microsoft. We switched e-mail infrastructures from unix systems to MS Exchange recently - and had our mail quality and reliability drop. And they're encouraging people to go to Intel/MS platforms everywhere possible.
There were Macs being used, and I know there still are some around. However, support is minimal, and they won't replace any of the ones that go bad with another Mac, but instead with an MS-compliant PC.
And while I didn't write back after the phone comment, I know a lot of people did comment on the whole Mac/PC issue - and interestingly, the whole issue was dropped really quickly. Though I did watch a bunch of people get into quite the debate/war on an internal newsgroup about whether Mot employees should always choose Mot phones that just seemed to get people upset at each other. (One person blamed the employees who have non-Mot phones as partially responsible for the layoffs, even)
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
How's this for irony? Microsoft doesn't require people to use Windows, but the company I work for (which I will not name) is standardizing on the Intel/MS windows, to the point they don't support anything but the "official" software - MS Windows, MS office, Outlook (and web Outlook for us using Sun machines for development). The most amusing part? This is the same company that produces the chips for the Mac! (Along with lots of cell phones)
That's right... while we saw a nice message from the CEO about how all employees should be using our phones, not a competitor's, we refuse to use computers that use our chips. And people wonder why our stock and market shares seem to keep decreasing... (though what I'm working on is actually a good product, and everyone involved gets one of those phones for free, though I wish they'd give us those newly-released Java-enabled handsets...)
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
There is a Mac version of Outlook you know. Version 8.22 sucks badly but the beta of Outlook 2001 isn't half bad.
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
When every Time-Warner employee starts getting an AOL-sized portion of breakfast spam every morning, maybe they will be better motivated to improve AOL's anti-spam filters.
I can see it now... "MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78!"
-Mark
I work there, doing data in the magazine area -- they're switching us, slowly, but they haven't taken away our ability get pop3 -- i keep the netscape mail client pointed at my personal isp's mail server open all day. to go to yesterday's question of whether son-aol meant that all ps2 owners are now lusers, the answer is no, but all time warner employees now are ;)
god is just pretend.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does this mean that all corporate mail from AOL/TW will be in ALL CAPS FROM NOW ON?
there goes my karma...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
All your user-bases are belong to us!
Make your time.
Time Warner AOL has this huge business segment that has a huge amount of resources devoted to (wait for it)
Managing Email!!!
(Which is most of what AOL does...)
So they want to eliminate redundant mail servers and the attendant infrastructure support costs.
Do any of you guys actually ever see the bills for the stuff you use? This makes sense.
The scary thing is that Mozilla actually prints "Y'all got mail" on stdout when it receives mail...
Besides, "All Y'all" is no more redundant than "You've got".
www.eFax.com are spammers
I know it's a minor thing the the grand scheme of the universe, but that little error in grammar annoys me as much as anything else in the AOL commercials. It should either be "You have mail" or "You've mail", not "You've got mail."
As a general rule, any sentence that uses "got" is probably grammatically in error.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Could you work on making my i1000's battery last for more than 1 day *grumble*
Actually, the "ideal" outcome pretty much describes what's been going on. A lot of behind-the-scenes work has been done to make the AOL mail system more suitable to TW - which, in the end, can make it more suitable for everyone. Is it there yet? No. But there's a LOT more than is exposed by the current AOL client, or even NetCenter.
You don't have to use the AOL client; Netscape 6 works with AOL mail over IMAP. And CompuServe 2000, running on the same back end, works with many IMAP clients. I'm not sure how SecurID works with these yet, but I'm seeing more and more support for it in general applications like ssh, so hopefully it will spread to the mail world - and 70,000 desktops could be an incentive to support it.
The criticisms of the AOL client in the article were interesting, since it was clear the people had no experience with AOL. It has many shortcomings, but quoting is not among them. AOL has one of the best reply-quoting systems; you highlight the part you want, you click reply, it quotes it. Internally it uses a nice, paragraph-oriented HTML quoting scheme (since AOL mail is paragraph-oriented), and if you send it out to the external net, it automagically becomes carets. Compare that to OE, Outlook, or Netscape, all of which can either quote the entire message or nothing at all. I don't remember what Eudora and Pegasus do; I had too many problems using them in IMAP mode and uninstalled them.
As for attachments, all the current AOL clients support seamless multiple attachments via ZIP, and they interchange pretty cleanly with the outside world via MIME. Intra-AOL attachments are much less likely to accidentally turn into text than some of the poorly-formatted MIME attachments that OE, for one, creates.
The lack of auto-reply is indeed frustrating; having just gone on a three-month sabbatical, I feel their pain. Perhaps that will be one of the changes that comes out of this. As for SecurID: Yes, it's a pain. No question. It's also really important, and any company with an externally-accessible mail system should really have some kind of strong, multi-factor authentication.
I wasn't personally involved in the decision to migrate to AOL mail, but I think it's a good one. Short term, there will be a lot of headaches, as there are with any migration. Then I wouldn't be surprised to see the TW needs driving more feature development to fill in the gaps. Long term, it'll be a more reliable, supported system than what TW had, with more features than either the old system or the current AOL system - and it will help connect the two disparate halves of the company.
- Jay, the mail guy, speculating only for himself
What features does Hotmail have that you think AOL doesn't?
AOL mail has none of the collaborative groupware features of any of the major commercially-oriented email solutions.
To me, that's probably the biggest drawback - not the client, not SecurID. Some of the threads here reported alternative groupware that they'll be using, and we'll see how that works out.
Whoohoo!! You mean I get 15 free hours!?!? :) Hehe.. how many free hours are they on now, like 700??? They really have been increasing that number in very tiny increments since the beginning of time, haven 't they??
1000 free hours that you can use only within the trial period (45 days). If I'm doing my math correctly, there are 1080 hours in 45 days, so they're basically giving you unlimited access for 45 days. Well, unlimited AOL access, which isn't quite the same as unlimited Internet access, since you get more ads and more AOL-specific content.
The shareholder is always right.
AOL to Time Warner:
"All your email are belong to us!"
oof.
E.
-
-
This Post has been brought to you by the letter "E".
I don't see the need to send documents around in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files are just as useful, and there's excellent readers for every platform.
PDF files can easily be created using Adobe's tools or GhostScript.
I could understand this if it was Micro$oft making employees use exchange, or IBM making employees use Lotus notes, but why the hell would anyone want to use AOL mail for business? Is it not designed more for home use than for interoffice mail? Somehow I doubt it compares with better stuff that has productivity in mind (Of course, it might actually be great, I do not know because I do not want to install it.).
Hopefully this will hamper employees at least enough to cut profits.
Okay lets stop drawing parallels with Linux and arguing that point and lets actually stick to the topic of TimeWarner using AOL email.
:)
Its stupid, period. And your argument falls on its face because AOL is a consumer product. Its not a corporate product. Corporations by default need something relatively easy to use but they also need lots of features. Thats why lots of larger companies use Outlook and not outlook express. Outlook express is for HOME use, as is AOL.
And to go back to your linux parallel, if it was all about ease of use, companies would have switched to Macintoshes a long time ago. However thanks to "compatibility" and "features" Windows helped dominate because there were more choices to configure systems to do some of the really odd things corporations needed to get done.
If AOL-timewarner really wanted to increase their consumer base (because someone with some importants HAS to know that their email program sucks compared to corporate powertools like Outlook) they would take the carrot approach as mentioned in the article, by giving incentives to employees to use it for their personal email service.
This is why I like working for companies that don't sell directly to consumers
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Actually, I do config management, and I've heard the same thing...
#define __RANT I do know that VSS is probably the _worst_ SCC system currently available today - anyone using it for a project of any significant size and complexity should have their head checked.
-jerdenn
On the plus side, you could have real fun trying to find a unique address. Some suggestions:
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
Or maybe they weren't fundamentalist idiots about operating systems - like the average slashdotter is - in the first place? Just a thought.
Mmmm.. Donuts
despite the fact that we are *migrating* to aol mail, it isn't complete. despite my employer (aoltw... megacompany...) and the fact that i'm not looking forward to getting aol mail, i think i will prefer it to the idiocy of the ccmail system currently in use. enterprise it may be, but what a pain.
rollouts of the aol mail system have started in NYC HQs and aren't going so well. the rest of us subject companies were slated for june rollouts, and that is steadily getting pushed back.
time for some coffee...
is it a conincidence that NY is so similar to NT? Then it has to suck!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Actually, Novell GroupWise is an excellent product and has been since version 5.2 (released several years ago). It is too bad more people haven't had more hands-on experience with it as the "geek set" would probably really appreciate it.
It is very efficient compared to Exchange, very scalable and extremely reliable. Plus, the agents that make up the system are cross-platform, available for Netware, NT, UNIX, etc.
The WebAccess is excellent--far better than Outlook Web Access.
The back-end is completely encrypted and compressed...
... and it does everything Exchange does (+ a REAL document management system) and everything you can get Notes to do (with some work) right out of the box!
I run a 650-user WAN and am also the primary GroupWise administrator... I (alone) spend about 5-10% of my time doing ANY maintenance on our GroupWise system, which has about 20 post offices. It is that good. (Most of the maintenance I do is preventive). We have had GroupWise servers in the field with uptimes of 200+ days or more.
I really like the GroupWise client - but, alas, Outlook is much prettier than GroupWise, even though the GW client is more functional in some ways.
Outlook is a HUGE hog - I've done some testing and it generally takes up twice as much RAM as the GroupWise 32-bit client. But again, Outlook is prettier... I usually turn off that button bar anyways, and then it looks strangely like GroupWise.
You have a great point about making things look "improved" on the surface; MS seems to be the only company to have mastered this. GroupWise 6 would probably sell like hotcakes if it had some sort of futuro-retro interface.
Oh - I should also note that you can use Outlook against a GroupWise backend nowadays.
I work in the cable industry and so work with a number of people @ Time Warner NYC. Most of the guys there are using netcom as an ISP on their own dime currently. The group just recently completed a switch to GroupWise and now have to abandon it for AOL.
As you can imagine they are not happy but they are used to it. Apparently AOL/Time Warner doesn't consider email an important tool. It has gone through so many changes that no one really relies on it. The business cards I have even have their private netcom addresses on them.
/Duncan
Duncan Watson
Duncan Watson
Whoa!
That's pretty damn progressive thinking!
What's with it with that behemoth megacorp?
Are they finding it necessary to create a nice working environment or something?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
What company in their right mind would use and publicly accessable network for their internal correspondance. If I was a shareholder I'd be against this.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Either that, or they were trying to get us accustomed to it before cramming it down our throats.
I'll be lauging when some technician walks in, wanting to install it on my computer, and I point to an SGI and tell him I that's the machine I use for email.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I mean, what is "real" email, anyway? It's just text messages. Any email program can do that. The only other issues might be address lists and so forth, but please explain what "real" work can't be done on AOL Mail - considering that 99% of the users will be management and secretaries, and 99% of the mail will be simple text messages?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's far more efficient for all the small departments to work that way then to go to a separate application, schedule a meeting in some other software package, and define who's invited.
It's far easier for him to click "compose" on his already open email client, click on "", and type "Meeting at 9:00 on Monday".
Most departments in my division are the same way, we don't have fifty meetings a week, we have a streamlined process which doesn't require us to constantly "message" each other, or work with calendar programs. That's all overkill, and would end up wasting more of our time.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'm not saying it doesn't get more complicated than that, but if you want to be pedantic:
A calendar program might be nice, but a calendar program is NOT email - it's a calendar program. So if you're going to complain about AOL Mail (and go ahead - again, I haven't used it) then complain about AOL Mail - not some missing application that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with email...electronic mail...where you type a message and electronically send it to someone else...If we need collaberation software, we can just use netscape's, although I've never used that either. Just go to CNN.com to see what I'm talking about - it's right there on the top. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of us started using that instead of AOL.
All I'm saying is "real" email sends text messages electronically. A nice collaberation system might include a lot of nice features, but that's not email. So, if you want to complain that AOL Mail is not conducive to collaberation efforts, then say that - but since my department has never used those features, it's no loss. We do have scheduling software, which does a similar thing, but since that's not going away the whole calendar issue is a moot point for 95% of the people here.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Sometimes those units interact with other units, but normally it's one person from one department who meets with one person from another department.
Just because we're a large business does not mean we are an army of suits who come into work and only go to meetings, most of us work for a living. I go to a departmental meeting once a week. Anything besides that is out of the ordinary. If my supervisor has a question, he emails me and asks. That's EMAIL. Then he has a supervisor, and so on.
99% of email sent in my whole division is simple text memos and questions and "let's go to lunch" stuff, much like most companies, I'd imagine.
If there was a cross country teleconference meeting it'd go beyond some simple calendar program helping to schedule it - there would be a secretary assigned to get things in order. I don't know how people picture large businesses, but no one has teleconferencing in their office - or even in every conference room. In fact, I think we have one teleconferencing setup for our whole campus (all the Turner entertainment networks). Yes, you have to schedule it - by calling a department and reserving it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
If they have to you exchange's caladars to "work with their teammates" then they're going to have to use Outlook.. so they'll have to use Windows.
--
Free Mac Mini
I wonder if they have to use AOL for ALL of their email or just their unsolicited get rich/skinny/sex quick scheme email.
/. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
I hate to see where this is going, Road Runner (owned by time warner) is already slower than hell in answering their email.
____________________
Remember, not all
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
This is akin to what most other companies already do - have the employees be the most critic users.
Smart move.
it's in my head
Yeah, it's like that with my GF's parents. They drive fords. I drive a 93 XJ jeep ( a little modified) and an Audi TT Roadster 225 when it's nice out. And I have to put up with this stuff cuz I park in the driveway. I just tell them, If you like to walk that walk, put your money where your mouth is and we'll take SUV vs truck and Sports car Vs sports car to end this argument :) Naturally that F150 2wheel drive isn't a chance. even for towing. And that mustang GT. pfffffft come on :) The jeep vs GT is a better comparision :)
-- Jason...
You must be one cranky and very close mined person.
-- Jason...
It is a GOOD analogy. Manual transmissions are more fuel efficient, and therefore, if you care about fuel costs, you get them. Higher fuel-costs => bias towards manual transmissions.
A Linux corporate desktop (I'm sorry, but bleah... MS owns this one, Mac is a bit behind, and the Linux solutions aren't close... know what market you're good in, and corporate desktops ain't it) is less expensive than a MS one (cheaper hardware needs, and price out: W2K, O2K-Pro, Visio, Exchange CAL, NT CAL, random shareware utilities to be able to open, say, a zip file, etc., other software... $1000-$2000/workstation). So in an environment where these costs matter more (either lower margin business, or country with a bad exchange rate with the dollar) than the productivity difference, you go with that solution.
Alex
That is mandating Windows. You have a corporate workstation for corporate resources. If you need additional machines, fine. However, I'm certain there is a bias for the 12 MS employees that aren't coding to do MS only.
However, in the AOL Time Warner case, while AOL does have a massive e-mail system, it isn't a corporate groupware system. I'm actually shocked that AOL employees use AOL internally. I had assumed that while the company grew, a corporate system was put in place.
In all honesty, I think that AOL has an impressive product. The people that I know that use AOL LOVE AOL, in a way that nobody LOVES their ISP, and the way that some of us LOVED the BBSes we used to call. And it isn't a AOL=Internet thing, they run AOL at the office. They use a real web browser, but they like to check their AOL e-mail, IMs (don't like AIM for whatever reason), maybe pop into a chat room, who the hell knows.
Some people REALLY love AOL, but it still isn't a corporate system.
Alex
Why not?
$ man mail
-----snip-----
INTRODUCTION ...
Mail is an intelligent mail processing system
-----snip-----
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Stand Fast,
Stand Fast,
tjg.
...that TW eployees are now going to be subjected to the same "Horny naked teens" unsolicited mails that all the other AOL users get every day?
Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products
iPlanet messaging server is not simply Netscape mail re-badged. It was merged with Sun Internet Mail (SIMS), and now sports a real MTA, domain hosting, with delegated administration, and a bunch of other features. That said, it seems to garner more support in ISP and telco environments, not typical enterprise applications. Why AOL doesn't use it is something of a mystery, although I'd imagine the migration issues alone are enough of an excuse.
Temkin
Bad as some some of Microsoft's stuff is, at least it works (usually). AOL provides crappy software that doesn't even pretend to do what I need it to.
If you don't want to use AOL to check AOL mail, you can always use Netscape 6 or Claris Emailer (if you can find it).
Paul
Anyways, back in December all employees were given a special version of AOL that would give them and their family free access for as long as they're an employee. They were told to immediatly install and get comfortable with the software because they'd be using that exclusivley in the near future.
Well, last week when I went home to visit my parents I asked my dad how things were going since the merger. He said mostly things are good, he hasn't noticed alot of things change, but they are starting to make the switch from Lotus cc:Mail to the AOL platform. He said they're supposed to abandon cc:Mail totally by July/August and rely totally on AOL's system, IIRC.
There you have it... an inside scoop from an AOL-Time Warner son.
[Got Hosting?]
The device they mention generates a new key every few seconds. It has an ID that is matched on a server inside the AOL corporate firewall. When the user attempts to connect to the internal AOL server, they receive the extra login prompt mentioned in the article. They have to enter their ID and the number currently being displayed on their device. This is checked against what the server thinks the number ought to be for that user at that moment. Thus, there is not only a password protection, but a physical protection involved.-
--------------------------------------
I remember several years ago finding wav files recorded by the same guy who did the "You've got mail!" wav for AOHell. Best one of the bunch was, "You want fries with that?!"
Rich
The number two benifit of having your employees use software that you develop internally is licencing. You basically get to ignore the whole concept of keeping track of licences if you wrote the software in the first place.
The third thing and a very important one is you can get your employees to find bugs for you. Make it a quazi mandate that everyone has to use the beta (or newly released) version of your product internally and you will generate a ton of bug reports.
All in all I agree with the originator of this thread, its not terribly incredible that a company would ask its employees to use company products. I think that extends to other areas of industry as well. If you work at John Deere and drive a toro tractor, or work at Ford and drive a Chevy you will probably get your ass kicked by coworkers. In fact you are probably in more danger using a competitors product in those cases than in the software world.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
not "You've got mail."
I'll parse "You've Got Mail®" using traditional ISO English grammar: "You": pronoun, subject; "'ve got": verb, present perfect of "get"; "mail": noun, object; "®": YOU'VE GOT MAIL is a registered trademark of AOL Inc. Literally, it means "You have received mail"; it's not redundant because the "got" specifically refers to the act of receiving a message.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"You have got mail." It should be either "You have mail" (if referring to the potential status of mail's existence) or "You have gotten mail"
Except "have got" for "have received" is valid English. Some dialects don't even have a word "gotten."
And even if you are, it sounds goofy as all hell.
Especially when Big Bird sings it at the beginning of the song "Everyone Makes Mistakes": "I've a special secret children ought to know..."
Will I retire or break 10K?
To draw an analogy, choosing Linux is like choosing to drive a car with a stick shift. Over on this side of the Pond, almost all of us drive cars with gear sticks...
The Ideal outcome- Yes, AOL mail has some shortcomings; however, I imagine that a few months of in-house usage could really help them find and eliminate a lot of problems with the program.
The Likely outcome- AOL will fall far short of employee's requirements, productivity will plummet, and AOL/TW will spend millions trying to make it work, followed by more millions going back to the old system.
Are they expecting employees to use the "home" version of AOL or is there a new corporate version?
As others (including actual Microsoft employees) have pointed out on this thread, its true that employees are expected to use Windows, because like many another company around the world they use Outlook and Exchange scheduling services. What isn't enforced, however, is a requirement to keep Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever off the second box on their desk.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This program is for idoits.
We'll test it on our employees.
(read: We think our employees are idiots.)
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The other possibilities would have been Lotus CC:Mail or Novel Groupwise which are both far past their prime and either in need of being severely overhauled, or End-Of-Lifed by their companies. Aren't you forgetting about Lotus Notes?
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I'll go you one more - Given the fact that people hate dealing with multiple passwords, it is likely a HUGE portion of their workforce will use the same passwords for the AOL access as they do for access to internal (corporate) resources.
And seeing that SOOO many companies use PPTP VPNs, (or heck...most any VPN) authenticating against NT domains, you're just asking for every AOL employee who has more than 1/2 a clue to have a peek into your network. Not to mention those more clever types who 0wn AOL.
If I was the security manager at Time-Warner I would pissed enough to probably just start sending out my resume.
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
As a rule, the company's own employees should use their products. But, what happens when the product undermines the confidence of a of the customers. Think of passing out at the circus and the doctor at Ringling Brothers is wearing a clown outfit.
Fight Spammers!
-- Henry Ford
--
--
fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
Executive (to Time Warner Manager): Okay, here's the 500 AOL CDs that you'll need for your department.
Manager: Fine, but where's the coffee cups?
forth ?love if honk then
And at last they might fix that braindamaged attachment manager. Can you believe it's 2001 and AOL still can't handle multipart-mime?
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I think this is kinda dirty pool on AOL/TW's part... I bet the real reason they're doing it is to save on QA and regression testing - after all, if their entire employee base is testing their product day in and day out, it will mean they can pinkslip all those useless Quality Assurance people...
Oh, wait, I forgot - from the way their products run, it's pretty obvious they never had anyone QA their software and email systems.
+++++++++++++++++++++
The Digital Sorceress
So if I understand you correctly, over here in Europe we're all specialists? I mean over here the majority of people have a stick-shift car! According to your analogy, Europe will be a Linux refuge in few years time :-)
They should have slapped her silly, until she stopped thinking different!
Rules like this come from Execs who are out of touch with the day-to-day working procedures. I'm sure the Admins of the top execs at Time-Warner simply print out any important email for them and have it waiting in a nice yellow folder that sits on their desks as they come in. (Or is waiting for them in their corporate jet.)
I used to work for a Large Software Company whose IS department FORBID anyone from using any version of Windows other than Windows 95 (this was several years ago.) If they discovered NT on a machine, they'd reformat it. The trouble is--the ENGINEERS were supposed to make the products work on NT as well, but the company wouldn't support PCs running that operating system. Of course the execs in charge (who didn't program computers since the days of punch cards) had NO CLUE as to what the problem was.
(Linux folks had better be careful not to whine too much, or they too will sound like Whiny Mac Users!)
I never said I had my hands tied by these policies--I just ignored them! I was humored by them, that's all.
And I've *never* been laid off, in 20+ years of working full time in high tech!
Microsoft also practice this 'eat your own dogfood' approach, and look how successful they are.
That doesn't mean the quality of the dogfood is improving any.
The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'.
I suppose that explains why Mac OS X ships with a terminal emulator now?
Ya know, I wonder if Levin is kicking himself in the backside right now. If he had waited a year or so, TW probably could have bought AOL for chump change, instead of being taken over by them. I really wonder how far AOL's (overly inflated, IMO) stock price would have tanked had they not acquired TW when they did.
You are right that pine or elm probably wouldn't fulfill they're email needs, but (according to many of TW/AOL employees) neither does AOL mail. AOL client software is created to be used at the consumer level by novices. Corporate email places much higher demand on sophisticated features, reliability, and security than what the AOL client was designed for. Unless there is some new Enterprise AOL Client, they are just setting themselves up for costly headaches including drops in productivity, declining employee moral, and bad press.
You shouldn't listen to me, though; I drive a 5-speed, therefore, I am a "specialist". I'm out of touch with the common folk.
You do know there is a version of Windows NT for the motorola, don't you? Granted, it's an old version of NT (4.0 is the latest version, I think...), but it is a Microsoft operating system..
RoadRunner employees have to use aol mail, it reflects poorly on the isp when employees uses a different isp for email. Second departments like nullsoft make *nix software also and use the FreeBSD sever for mail. 3rdly netscape, it reflects poorly on thier product to use an different e-mail client than their own.
-Compenguin
Firestone...
=P
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Someone must have decided that this was a good trade off.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
got a ton of AOL cds if they need them.
I've no idea what that guy is talking about. Most people I know (and have known) own cars with manual transmission. Not to say there aren't a lot of automatics, but manual is hardly a "specialist interest," whatever that means. I do prefer manual myself. So I'd have to say, based on 29 years of being American, that comparing linux to stick-shifts in the USA is a flawed analogy.
I'm sure this was some stupid management descision. They'll soon see that AOL Mail couldn't possibly support employees doing "real" work.
"Ceilean Súil an ní ná feiceann..."
Let's also not forget the security risk of having your corporate email share the same domain with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got a "700 free hours" CD in the mail. When you consider the namespace saturation of AOL's account pool, the odds of accidentally misdirecting an email go up rather sharply. When that misdirected email might wind up with someone who isn't even at the company, you're just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, since AOL has open registration, if someone discovers the AOL accounts of various "higher ups" (not too hard -- I'm sure most employess would have access to this information), they could easily register nearly identical accounts. This would be easily easy given the frequent numeric tags seen at the end of account names -- transpose two numbers and wait for someone to get it wrong.
Has anyone tried to use the AOL mail client for "normal" amounts of mail (Slashdot normal anyway)? It is very painful, I recommend trying something else for fun, like being dragged behind a car.
The first and most obvious problem is the lack of filtering. All 200+ messages a day come right into the same folder. The address book is really lousy, and has no easy "import" or "export" methods (forget sync with a PDA). Perhaps even worse are the games AOL plays with attachments. Incoming attachments get downloaded into a separate folder, and some files get transformed (into the dreaded ART format). Outgoing files get mangled in unexpected ways too. Just horrible!
At it happens, they have an adequate mail client within the corporate empire. The Netscape mail client has never been my favorite, but I've used it a number of times and it is at least reasonable. It does most of the things I want (including pda sync, calendar functions, and support for SMIME emails).
IANAMSE (I am not a microsoft employee), so this is not firsthand.
"HOT TIPS HERE!" -- deepthroat@hotmail.com
Humorless sig goes here.
I would think the main objective in this mandate would be to maximize the "@aol.com" domain in all email correspondence. So wouldn't it be less painful and more efficient to just assign aol.com aliases to all employees and make that compulsory instead? Granted, it doesn't have the indoctrination value of having everyone use the same mail system, but at least it's a policy that can be deployed instantly with a miminum of backlash and dissent.
Doesn't this count as "cruel and unusua punishment"? I smell a law suit here ;)
TWAOL employees will now have so much spam to sort through that they won't be able to get any work done. I bet their stock drops.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That is mandating Windows. You have a corporate workstation for corporate resources. If you need additional machines, fine. However, I'm certain there is a bias for the 12 MS employees that aren't coding to do MS only.
For what it's worth, there are terminal servers available internally to run customer tools as Wes descibes. If you are creative enough, you probably don't *HAVE* to run Windows for anything here really... but realistically, why the hell wouldn't you? I love being able to run the latest-greatest betas of MS products!
That never actually happened, you know. It's just an urban legend. Plus, Hotmail's front-end is all W2k/IIS5 now, FWIW. Back-end is still proprietary storage of some sort, I believe.
I wonder how would AOL mail client handle
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org originating posts
Speaking of the first time your sound card
overloaded and caught on fire! =)
Simply being forced to use AOL is not near enough punishment.
I imagine this is, at its core, a tactic to find some practical use for the several thousand CD's the post office couldn't deliver due to bad addresses.
I agree you shouldn't have to exclusively use your own product. Of course, we all occasionally used AOL to garner competitive intelligence. Our conclusion was that noone would willingly use them and that they would go out of business (this was 1995). I guess we had the competitive part down, just not the intelligence part. :-/
Milo
Seriously, I worked at an ISP. We made all the employees use the service because we wanted them all to know exactly what our customers were seeing. If they hated it, then our customers probably did also, so they were motivated to fix it.
Milo
I'm 99% sure you are wrong. One funny thing I saw at Intel was the 'Sun Lab' full of Sparc 5's and 10's for people to use (I never got access to the lab, but I could see it through a window). All of their design is on Wintel boxes last I checked. Of course I've been out of the loop a while now!
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
This is almost as ridiculous as what some people plan to do about California's Impending Energy Craptasm.
Yeah, I made a mistake. What I should have said was that Sun using Star Office hinders their productivity by not providing an easy way to exchange formats with their customers. I didn't mean to imply that using Star Office in itself caused poor productivity. (Though that's what I said.)
However, as much as I hate it, Word .doc is the standard document format right now, and is the only document format for most companies.
I'm all for using ascii or HTML for document sharing. I'd even accept RTF. But that's not the way things work in the US. I'm forced to provide and accept MS Word formated documents to do business with customers.
More importantly laying the blame on your customer does nothing good for you as a business. As your customer, you'ld better be willing to accept the document format I have, or I'll find someone who will. Lay the blame on the customer if you wish, but be prepared to lose business.
Sean.
Just goes to show that the correct response is to use the best tool for the job, not the in-house brand.
I think the article made that clear. Sun doesn't use MS office, but it hinders their productivity and makes it more difficult for their customers. MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
It seems to me the best shop would be one that had different computers for different jobs. End users will probably get Windows, because that's what they're used to and that's what will make them most productive. Servers might be Unix or Windows, based upon need. Designers might get Macs. Admins or competent users might choose Solaris 86 or Linux (Or Windows with VMWare running Linux, as I do) based upon corporate need and individual desire.
Use it because it makes sense, not because of some misplaced loyalty.
Sean.
This sounds just like HP: from what I've read, they exclusively use Windows/Outlook for all their corporate stuff, including their website! They also use Exchange for their mail. This is instead of using their own HP-UX systems for their website and other infrastructure, and their OpenMail product (which is fully Exchange-compatible, including the calendaring). So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
I'll bet Sun at least uses their own stuff internally. If I ever get to make or influence a decision to buy HP or Sun Unix hardware, I'm definitely picking the company that at least believes in what they make.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, you didn't hear that from the article, which you apparently failed to read.
It says:
So apparently MS employees do have to use Windows.
If I don't use the tool that I'm building, why should anyone else?
Of course, you shouldn't have to exclusively use your tool, OS, or whatever. Competitive intelligence, right?
//jbaltz
--
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
While waiting for "new artwork" to be downloaded each time they log-on, and getting bumped due to not having enough modems, and slow connection speeds.
They should be out of business in six mothns for sure!
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Except for their Hotmail Servers that is!
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
So which TimeWarner cable channel will get hacked first by script kiddies using their mom's AOL account?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This statement implies that people are forced to use the command line in contemporary Linux. I don't think this is true.
At home I run Red Hat 6.2. I use my home machine for the following:
In short, for the things ordinary people do, Linux appears to be as friendly as other OSes. No reason to get rid of vi, emacs, xterm and the like.
To use an automobile analogy, Linux today is not like having a difficult to use race car versus an easy to drive generic mass production vehicle. It's more like having a garage with room for a race prepared Corvette, a Malibu for family transportation and several other vehicles for various uses. Windows is like having a station wagon -- great for going to the supermarket, but a sure loser on the race track.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
I wonder whether it would be newsworthy if RedHat or VA Linux switched everyone over to mutt ? I wonder why the article (and Slashdot) didn't mention what the users are resisting switching from (likely Microsoft Outlook) ??
I'm glad to hear it. It'm not a big fan of MS Exchange, and it's good to know that Groupwise is beind dusted off and revamped. My first experience with GroupWise was probably 5 or 6 years ago, and then it disappeared from my radar until a friend of mine took a job as a place the uses it. He's not real impressed, as I wasn't back when I was using it. I'm glad to see that it may come into the spotlight again. It's important that there be a corporate groupware alternative to Microsoft's solution (independant of all the snazzy OpenSource solutions I've seen).
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft has one of the best Enterprise email systems right now. Granted, it doesn't scale vary well and it's tremendously expensive when compared to SMTP based systems, but it does have comprehensive groupware features. The other possibilities would have been Lotus CC:Mail or Novel Groupwise which are both far past their prime and either in need of being severely overhauled, or End-Of-Lifed by their companies.
The final class of mail system are those new
In any case, AOL has chosen the worst of a set of halfway decent possibilities - Oh, an I almost forgot IPlanet.com which offers what used to be the Netscape mail and calendar products -. There is something to be said for promoting your own products (at my company we use the telephones we produce, and the switching systems we produce) but in cses where use of your own company's product will impact your productivity, or otherwise negitively impact the work of your employees, it would be a severely misguided decision.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I knew a consulting firm who has forced its employees to use AOL three years ago. I can see why. The company doesn't need to invest any money for the infrastructure. You have a simple and consistant interface for both internet connection and email (especially if your employees are travelling a lot). Your stupid employees has less chance of screwing things. The email is kept at the server and multiple computers easily can be used to access it. There is aol instant messenger coming with the package. The company doesn't need to buy an expensive IM solution and teach it to it employees. You don't need to have a lot of internet experience to use AOL software. It is more reliable than hotmail. At least you are paying for it.
Somebody commented that AOL mail software misses some features. That is not true. It does some things differently but it doesn't miss any crucial features (there is a send button)
So, the bottom line is, it saves a lot of headaches for a company and it works.
They LOVE AOL? Not anybody I know, and I'm including my non-technical friends. As soon as they're visiting and see what a regular 56K connection can do, they ask for help in dumping AOL ASAP.
Maybe if the AOL user has never seen what they're missing it's a different story, but I'd say most detest the service even before they come around here. Perhaps seeing what they can't do well (or at all) on AOL finally gives them the impetus to lose AOL?
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. :)
Long live the penguin...Linux rulez!
that Connie (AOL woman?) starts advertising Warner cinemas.
You've got mail. Pattern baldness. - Crow
Just get a few people to work in different areas to leave there speakers on a little too loud, then subscribe to the linux kernel mailing list. Then, YOU'VE GOT MAIL 300 times a day or so.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
I understand a company being able to dictate what software/hardware/email system you use at work, but I'd be interested to see the legal ramifications of forcing an employing to use a specific software/hardware/email system at home.
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Time warner employees must use icq to communicate with other employees, marketing procedures have also changed to allow only the distribution of cheap cds.
Display some adaptability.
Hello friends. This message is to let you know
that my email address is changing. Please update
your address list.
Prior address: glevin@timewarner.com
New address: glevin63195@aol.com
Thank you very much.
see, this looks really grim fFor people like me, who have time warner's cable modem system.I swear, if i *ever* am fForced to use that acursed hell-spawn AOL, i will drop my subscribtion to roadrunner so fFast it'll make their heads spin!!I'm basically okay with paying the corporate structure that fFeeds into AOL -- it's hard to avoid, and the bandwidth is nice -- but if time-warner starts making all users of all their subordinate services use that crappy system .. well, i've still got the T1 connection at work fFor al my big-pipe needs!
But an executive at a software company that does business with Sun said his experience was plagued by incompatibilities. "Anything we sent to them involved some kind of trauma," he said. "And the onus was on us to somehow prepare a file they could read."
Damn right it is, and it's just plain courteous to make sure that you're using some kind of public, or at least commonly-agreed, standard. These people would soon kick up a fuss if I sent them documents in LaTeX format.
"I used to tell my girls, if your boyfriends come over and it's not a Ford product they're driving, they'd better park it in the street."
Now that's just sad.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
To: SteveCase29375@aol.com
re: AOL usage #s!!!!!!!!!1
kewl!!!!!1 LOL!!!!!!!11
gtg k?
That's bull^H^H^H^Han oversimplification. Though it is true that a command line interface is not appropriate for the average user, pure existence of a command line is by no means a sign of user-unfriendlyness. There is not even a contradistinction between command oriented user interfaces and graphical ones. The paradigm of graphical user intarfaces rather includes all the less powerful paradigms invented before, e.g. command oriented, forms based, and menu based interaction, and adds further means of expression (direct manipulation, visual affordances, etc.) for the designer as well as for the user.
This is the major reason why GUIs survived for 20 years -- they do not inhibit experienced users by forcing them into newbie-style interaction, but provide expert-friendly interfaces which are learnable to newbies; at least the better ones do. And there is the only flaw of command line interfaces: they require a huge amount of learning and don't help the user with it.
Oh, by the way, the Windows 2000 thing that came with my laptop computer has a command line, too. Are there people who do not use it because of that?
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
That's exactly the concern. If anyone can get to the email server from the public net (ie, it's not behind a firewall), it's vulnerable to hacking. These PIN-calculators make hacking tougher, but they aren't a substitute for a good firewall.
Now, if you tell me that TW mail is not stored on the external net, and is instead available only to those inside the firewall (or those with VPN connections), then there's much less to worry about.
Ok, but slow down there a second. I'd agree with you completely here, but we're talking about AOL/TW's own corporate email. If they want to store their mail on a silly external system (that they own), it's not hurting anyone but them-- unless you count employees' using their corporate account for personal mail, in which case it's hard to argue that personal mail deserves corporate security.
Outsourcing of corporate email is nothing new, and nobody's forcing companies to do it. I'm just surprised that a major corporation like AOL/TW would be crazy enough to put something as important as corporate email on an external network, no matter how great the password protection. And for all the talk about PIN calcs, the server will still never be as secure as one on a private network.
While they mentioned one of the security measures being used with the new system (something like a PIN-calculator), they didn't mention the security risks of putting corporate email out on the public Internet. Unless they're using some sort of private, enterprise version of the AOL server software, running behind a firewall, it sounds very risky to put all that information on the external net with nothing more than (even very good) password protection. I couldn't quite tell if this was the case from the article.
There's no such thing as a generic tool that will plug into Microsoft applications. Microsoft screws with the standards so much you end up having to write custom interfaces just to talk to them. Not to mention implementing workarounds for all the bugs left in the MS software. No, writting a generic tool for Micrsoft is not a feasible solution.
Really? I always thought WINDOWS was a recursive acroynm for "Windows Is Not Developed On Windows Systems". ;)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I don't know that the current AOL mail system has any connection to the developing Mozilla codebase. And I don't know if Mozilla's mail client is currently being developed to have Outlook-type functionality. But a lot of employees (including techies) bitching about AOL mail's weaknesses could lead to internal pressure for a switchover to some kind of Mozilla-based solution.
And this would be a Good Thing[tm], in the long run. What better situation could we imagine that could lead to the development of an open-source Outlook killer?
So if I read this right they are forcing professional people to use their own AOL, Moron proof Email client because that is the only way to get anyone with more intelligence than your average Amoeba to use it??
Seems to me that AOL should solve their problem by writing and marketing better and more powerful apps.
And since when can Star office read M$ office documents properly?? Whenever I try to do that it F***S the document up completely. The scary part is that my employer may just start doing alot of work in close cooperation with Sun. And this article seems to indicate that I will be hug drawn and quartered for using Koffice instead of Star Office??
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
And yet, there is something to be said for keeping a close eye on the competition. Case in point: One of my least favorite IDEs for programming under Windows is Visual Studio. It simply sucks. Yes, I've used worse, but still...
And yet, I'm continually running into programmers who swear it's great, but who also have never seriously used anything else. Most of the time, if I can talk them into trying other development environments, they see the deficiencies of Studio.
The point being, of course, that if you never have experience with anything else, you're going to be satisfied with what you have. This might counter the theory that using what you make will automatically lead to better software. Sometimes the only way to notice a problem is through comparison with products that don't have the problem.
If you read the original article, they mention a web designer who started work at M$ and was forced to use Windows, even thought she preferred the Mac. Now that she's left M$, she's using a Mac again, and recommends it to everyone.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
No, it certainly isn't an Enterprise Calibre solution... I'd say it's hardly a legally-sane calibre solution. But this is a technical decission made with no technical rationale whatsoever. This was made as a business decission. While that is obviously not the way to look at things, it is the way they did look at things... and looking at them that way, their choice makies emminent sense. Using your own product in-house is a good (if not the only) idea on SO many levels, from morale to culture to image to press to marketing to compatability... while they asked the wrong question, they answered it right.
While I certainly believe that AOL is evil, I fell that, to a degree, the complaints regarding its implementation are somewhat hair-splitting. I find, for instance, Sun's prohibition of M$ Office a much more damaging business decission.
Using AOL for AOL-TW's corporate email is obviously not the best technical decission. It is not, however, a hellaciously bad technical decission. And it's a very good business decission.
michael
michael
/global33/
True dat. I pine for the days of, err, pine, when email was plain text and you didn't have to worry about some idiot sending you a HTML email with a megabyte of images attached, or a VB-script worm. Seven years when "Good Times" first was being circulated, I told everybody unequivocally that "you can't get a virus reading your email". I hope no one remembers me saying that...
I dread the fact that in future versions of Outlook you will be forced to use Word as your email editor; soon we'll have to worry about VBScripts and Macro viruses?. When I Grow Up, my company will be a *NIX shop...
God bless those Albino Ninjas...
im and aol tyme warder employie, and i thinks this is a ggood move. aol is soo kewl! i here you can get on the internet with it! and the web too! aol is just the most teknologicly advanced company in the hole world! and i don't apreciate the remark above about "eating our own dogfood". i've never seen any dogfood here in the 8 years that ive worked for the company. whoever said that is obvoiusly not an employie and should not be alowed to post on slash-dart. yay! i just got mail! i'm ecspecting a reply back from some company that promised i wood get rich if i just sent them my credit card number. cood be them!! gotta go!
I'd like to dip my balls in that.
Email progies and whatnot are dictated from the it department. So, I have to say eh? What is the big deal?
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Er, Windows has a command line (not a particularly good one though), Win9x is even Command line based until a call to 'win.com' to open up a GUI screen (kinda like a poor-mans X, don't you think??) :)
Also - since when has a stick-shift automobile been a specialist interest vehicle? Probably about 80% of the cars here are stick-shift (a.k.a. manual gearbox). Granted, in the U.S., this may be the case - but believe it or not, the world doesn't stop at New York and start again at Los Angeles
Because the NY Times requires a Login, I though I would post some of the logins that I have found work:
---Login:Password---
subscriberid:password
12345678:12345678
AFAIK, Microsoft allows you to have non-Microsoft boxes, they just don't have any infrastructure or support for them. That pretty much means that most people at Microsoft end up using Windows for their work, whether it is the technically best platform for their job or not (many people in MS research come from UNIX environments). I think that policy makes perfect sense, btw.
That's wrong. Microsoft's mantra is (and I quote) "Eat your own dog food". Except for developers doing work for Mac and Unix, MS people use Windows at work. They use Visual Studio to code in, and Outlook to check their email. They use Visio and Project to do design and project management. Anything else doesn't make sense, and is bad for business. Of course, the Office for Mac team has Macs, and the IE for Unix team has Unix boxes (Sun, I think). Any time you use a competitive OS/product at Microsoft, you'd better have a good business reason to be using it.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
That makes sense, except that MS makes VS, which adds an additional layer to the argument. MS developers use VS-specific features in their work, like SourceSafe integration, MS-specific add-ins, etc. If one or two developers used a competing product, not only would they be spending money they don't have to and abandoning their company's core product suite, they might impact release schedules. There are copies of just about every competing product known to man in the MS labs, just not in day-to-day use by the programmers. How do you think MS found out about Visio, or FoxPro?
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Reading your email is MUCH faster in the black window.
It is necessary for the safety of all Time Warner employees that they use AOL not only in the office but also at home also.
Using competing products only sends mixed messages to the friends and family of our employees.
There are many benefits to using AOL in the corporate world, such as;
Email Filtering, (no spam in the corporate inbox)
Buddy Lists and chat, (your co-workers and clients can send you instant messages any time you are online, you can use chat to create your own chatrooms to colaborate on your projects).
Privacy, (I am sure you are all aware of our excellent track record on privacy issues).
Web Filtering, Keep employees off of adult websites, (or websites that disagree with any corporate policy)
Stability and security, (AOL on the WIN32 platform is world famous for it rock solid stability and unbreakable security).
Thank You for using AOL on your desktop.
(FYI, I quit shortly after the AOL/TW merger) Using AOL with a SecurID card isn't that big of a hassle at all. It binds your account name to the card, but it's in no way a big hassle at all. It's been set up that way for a looooong time now, too.
Microsoft also practice this 'eat your own dogfood' approach, and look how successful they are.
This of course explains why Windows is such a dog's breakfast of an OS.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Perhaps an AOLTW employee could tell us if they are getting AOL.com email addressed, in which case looks like everyone's going to have email addressed like BernardShaw666@aol.com, or is there some plan to use .net. It seems reasonable that AOL would have set aside some sort of mechanism to separate employees from customers, like any reasonable ISP. I know that when I worked at a company that offered email addresses, we used .net for the customers and .com for the employees (though most places seem to do the opposite.) Why wouldn't AOL just do the same? That way there would be significantly less chances of name collisions.
What was they're preexisting policy toward user addresses vs. employee addresses?
Oh, wait, AOL isn't a reasonable company...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The truth is the following:
"You've got mail" is simply incorrect. The correct form is "You've gotten mail."
Also, "You have mail" is correct.
However, "You've mail" is not correct, even allowing for contractions. The verb 'have' can only be put into a contraction when it is being used as a helping verb. In this case, have is an action verb, so it must be separated.
If you're using formal English, contractions aren't allowed at all, but since when have AOL users used formal English?
AOL/Time Warner employees will be forced to disconnect their computers from the LAN at 20-minute intervals.
Terminated employees will be told, "You've got Fired!"
Every other interoffice memo will read either "MAKE $$$ FAST!!!" or "HOT HORNY COEDS ARE WAITING FOR YOU."
They're not forced to use the AOL Client, they can do things inside the company that will allow them to get an aol.net account which will allow them to use an SMTP and POP3 server so that they can choose whatever mail package they want. Don't feel sorry for them b/c they have to use it, because they don't.
I always got a headache when I heard that stupid comment. :op
And now the Time Warner employees will all be less productive and generally irritable
i'd call that pretty relevent. Oi.
What happens if one of the employees gets "Banned" (My brother did once for disagreeing with one of thier "guides" about who was a better baseball player). Do they get fired?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Sounds like the days of old and the Company Store. How long until they start issuing TW/AOL script in place of paychecks?
You'd have to think, if AOL employees are forced to use the garbage they produce, then maybe that garbage will become more useable. As a software developer, I believe it is important for those who write the programs to use the programs they write (when appropriate, as in this case), however, it seems unusually cruel to force the whole company to use such a crappy product. It is as if the AOL moguls want to say, "look our product is so good, we use it ourselves"
;)
The problem is, their product is not good.
This story actually reminds me of the one where Microsoft purchased Hotmail, tried to convert it to MS Servers, failed miserably since they couldn't scale, and reverted to using the original UNIX servers. In that we see a case where a company had to use another's product because theirs wasn't good enough.
Although I see the point of using your own stuff, maybe a company should seriously evaluate the quality of their product before strong-arming their employees into using it full-time. Perhaps, this could lead to a better product, but in AOL's case, I seriously doubt it.
If code is broken, but nobody ever uses it, is it still broken?
--
$ man touch
--
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Now force em to watch Timewarner films only, and you've got a nice self sufficient corporation. A close knitted community too! They'll all be able to share views on the pics they say the night before.
...
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Living is a way of life
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
IMHO that is a silly silly silly architecture change. There is no possible way that AOHellTW will reduce cost by dumping Microsoft. Basically, they are doing it to make a passing "cheap shot" at Redmond when it began feeling around for the pros and cons of allowing the AOL environment to use Mozilla for its renderer and the continuing bruhaha over IM.
Face it. Yahoo has a better (and free) groupware solution. IBM/Lotus don't put out a shabby product. The latest rev. of Notes and Domino offers all the functionality that you need from Exchange 2000 except for perhaps the virtual IFS into the Notes database (wouldn't be surprised if that came along soon someday).
You want Groupware? If you hate MS why would you choose anything but Lotus? Helllllooooo!!! IBM and Lotus have been investing time and $$$ into groupware since Xerox PARC and the first release of PROFS (aka OfficeVision).
If you want to keep your server assets and still take a sh** on MS, why not just wipe off Exchange and replace it with something that has similar function? Don't ruin your productivity by taking away features you depend on and then spending tons of dough to build a replacement system that offers no benefits.
Corporate America - reinventing the wheel since 1876.
AOL's mail system, much like their own web server, is in house proprietary (no surprise there).
The bigger surprise is that the servers are Tandem. That's right, Tandem (now a div. of Compaq). Because of the select clientele that can afford to have one computer but 2 or more of everything, it (supposedly) provides unheard-of availability records.
The only bummer is that there isn't much software or the proprietary Non-Stop kernel, but you do get a decent C development environment and can port your Unix applications over to it, much like how EMX for OS/2 Warp goes about it.
AOL's decision to use such an odd choice for an email server probably stems from the infamous outages early in AOL's history when it was duking it out with CompuServe (which H&R Block later dim-wittingly sold to AOL to boost its stock price and focus on the oversaturated financial-planning market).
When you consider that most of America's unwashed heathenlive off of AOL's mail system to swap massive amounts of pr0n, spam, and other senseless drivel, there is no way that a featureful groupware system can be added to the service easily and cope with the transaction load that the service currently endures.
Should AOL mail be scrapped? Probably not. Since AOL'ers are paying a fortune anyway for a shabby product, why not charge them a small convienence fee to "enrich" their email and and scheduling, database, forms, etc? Just build a seperate system or a small farm of Notes-Domino/390 and you got yerself uh system.
AOL might even rake in those mindless corporate druids by cooking up some synch tools for PalmOS, ActiveSync, AvantGo, whatnot.
And added bonus would be getting rid of that damned AOL Adapter &%^*(%^%&^%)%.
It's about time. If a company doesn't use it's own products internally, that's got to be a big red flag. That's one area where I've got to give Microsoft credit. If you wandered the halls of RedHat, how many Windows machines do you think you'd see?
But they're in for trouble. Everyone I know that uses AOL has problems with attachments. Good luck being productive without attachments.
AOL is trying to become a monopoly........just look at all the cds they send out evry month with 50 free hours It seems to take the free time to keep updating all of their upgrades geeeeeezzzzzz
Justice can come from unexpected places.