Slashdot Mirror
Can We Finally Ditch Exchange?
"With new releases on the way, like Mandrake 9.0 and the new Lycoris can we who try to use Free Software in business environments hope for any change? Do the commercial Linux distros have any plans to implement a free replacement for Exchange, including a Win32 client-side bridge? If not, why not? Do you feel it is too cost prohibitive to imitate Bynari in this case, or is it a decision more along the lines of 'we'd rather you used Evolution and Mandrake/Lycoris/Whatever, rather than OutLook and Win32'? If it's the latter I'd be severely disappointed, and I don't think I'm alone. Any discussion on this topic would be appreciated; but what I'd really love is a community push to get this done. Perhaps a running Web-A-Thon to raise the money to simply purchase the technology from Bynari? I personally think it would be a great move towards grabbing market share from some of the other distributions, some of which have the technology but choose to keep it closed, as well as from the Great Dragon. What do you think?"
Translation: "Me and a bunch of people got drunk, thought we could code, submitted the idea and produced a fancy web page. It's now two years later and the project has no files to download and is STILL on Stage 1, Planning."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
You can't admin an exchange server... Even the developers who worked on it stodd back as it was first run and held their breath. The first comment reportedly was "God help us all it lives!"
Ahem. The 'profile' link on your website is broken.
Maybe you could fix some time in your preferred scheduler tool to fix it.
Sendmail? Are you thinking of the same Sendmail that I am? The group of science rocketists who've given us *this*:
R$* $: $(dequote "" $&{client_addr} $)
R$-.$-.$-.$- $: $[ $4.$3.$2.$1.rbl.maps.vix.com $]
R$-.$-.$-.$-.rbl.maps.vix.com. $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: 550 no access from [$4.$3.$2.$1], see http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/
?
I can't think of a anyone, anywhere, less competent to write a complex, featureful, information interchange mechanism. They've had their chance, and that's as good as they could come up with? Egad!
And then, in a brilliantly ironic twist, I can't post those sendmail.cf snippets as text, because of Slashdot's indescribable "lameness" filter. It's the irresistible force versus immovable Taco, and we all end up losing. Figures.
'j
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I work as sysadmin on an Air Force base. We have a commercial support contract with Sun that specifies they get replacement parts to us in 4 hours. The other day a hard drive died, and I had the amusement of writing in the support request, "I know where Sun's headquarters are; get me a new hard drive in 4 hours or I call in an airstrike."
(Then I thought some more about it and erased that sentence. Damn humorless paper-pushers. (So of course it took six hours for the drive to get to me.) Oh well.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This is not trying to be a troll, but it seems there is always one more "clincher" in the movement away from MS products. IE / Office / Outlook / Photoshop you name it, but now it is Exchange.
This goes both ways, and it is a matter of what people are used to. Whenever I use Windows I think:
Where's Bourne shell???
Where's vi, sed, and egrep???
Where's UFS and NFS???
What happened to root's ability to do anything worthwhile???
How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???
How do I read a PostScript file???
I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually, but there is always one more thing I can't do on Windows that I'm used to doing in UNIX.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
As soon as my mom gets the hang of using the mouse and learns the difference between single-cliking and double-clicking, then she'll probably start working on a client app to meet her business's needs. ;)
Blackmail can really come in handy here. Find a photo of the boss, find a photo of a horse, work some magic with PhotoShop or GIMP, and you'll never again have to worry about unemployment. :-)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
The reason that Exchange/Outlook are #1, is because they do the most things that people want done, more OFTEN and naturally than its competition.
Bullshit. Exchange is #1 because Office (and hence Outlook) is #1. Nothing else.
The only thing difficult about making an Exchange replacement is the technical (and legal) difficulty of deciphering MS' proprietary protocols. If the Justice Department made MS disclose that interface you'd see Exchange's marketshare drop overnight.
Hell, I remember when Lotus Notes installs had to cross their fingers every time they sent an attachment.
Hmmm, I remember when MS shops had to reboot their Exchange servers nightly to avoid lockups. Oh wait, people still have to do that.
Please examine why you are running exchange. The most common reason is that some manager in your group decided that you NEED to run exchange for some reason X. X is the marketing tool used to sell more Micro$oft products to your company. And besides, Outlook is already installed on 99 percent of the desktops in every business, so why not take advantage if ITS features. You know, the calendar would be so cool and all. Those arguments have been swallowed whole by management since Exchange was first shipped, and they will continue to be, because IT management in corporate America is GROSSLY incompetant as a whole. That is why you are running Micro$oft products in the first place. It is NEVER for technical reasons, it is ALWAYS about contract obligations and software availability (which most managers now equate to: 'What product from MicroSoft does that?'). There is no need for Micro$oft Exchange, and there never was. If your company uses Exchange as your principle email handler, then you are suffering, even if you do not know it. But many here do. The company where I work has an Exchange system. The people who run it are so well trained that they do not know what IMAP and POP are, which must be turned on by default because they are running here. The have learned to push buttons to add users. Log into your NT domain and Outlook automatically knows you. So tell me mister support person, what is my login and ID for Exchange? "What, do you have trouble with Outlook?" No, I want to use IMAP from my UNIX system. "What is IMAP?" It is an email protocol and it is enabled on your system, I simply want to know what my userid and password are so that I can use it. "Well we do support MAPI, we can set that up now." I am not trying to use a windows program to access my email. "Well sir, I am not sure what you need from us." I just want to know what my user id and password is for the exchange server. "Are you having trouble with Outlook?" ...
And so it goes. There are now monkeys where people used to be, and I suppose that we are saving money that way, but I still cannot read my email. :(
I'm not ENTIRELY going to agree with the "easy to set up". Silly me wanted to grant access to certain newsgroups via the server and I must have done something wrong, because it tried to download the entire feed from news.wol.dk which is some 21+ thousand groups ...
... 21+ thousand times ...
...
How do you delete 21+ thousand groups from the server then? ONE BY ONE!!! You cannot select more than one group to manipulate.
ARGH!!!!!
[space] [delete] [y] [space] [delete] [y] [space] [delete] [y]
I killed a keyboard that weekend
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
"As soon as my mom gets the hang of using the mouse and learns the difference between single-cliking and double-clicking, then she'll probably start working on a client app to meet her business's needs. ;)"
Before or after the right click, left click quandry?