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.
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?
Yeah.. Time Waner Employee's are pissed!
by
DraKKon
·
· 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.
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.
Another news flash: Workers at Microsoft have to use Windows!
Must be a slow news day.
[sigh] --
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
Re:Wow. What a concept!
by
alexhmit01
·
· 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.
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.
If this trend continues...
by
ackthpt
·
· 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
Is AOL Email truly Enterprise Calibre? I think Not
by
hillct
·
· 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.
Re:"You've got mail" is grammatical in ISO English
by
ocbwilg
·
· 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.
Re:Its the right thing to do. Period. No arguments
by
Sven+Tuerpe
·
· 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?
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.
Whoopee! I Can't Wait!!!
by
jjjpinkojjj
·
· 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!
-- I'd like to dip my balls in that.
They're not forced to use it
by
jhill
·
· 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.
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."
Slashdot Mirror
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....
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.
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.
Another news flash: Workers at Microsoft have to use Windows!
Must be a slow news day.
[sigh]
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
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.
No mandate on Windows here, you just have to be able to work with your co-workers (at least on a technical level).
---
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.
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."
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 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
Absolutely. And since Fisher-Price produces toy telephones, all of its employees should have to use them for 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.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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
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
...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?
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?"
got a ton of AOL cds if they need them.
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!
This is almost as ridiculous as what some people plan to do about California's Impending Energy Craptasm.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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."