MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

Comments

People actually do this?

[Samir Gupta]

Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.

Re:People actually do this?

[ErikTheRed]

And a company thinking they can be fascist about everything risks losing their employees.

Geez, do you even know what the word "fascist" means? Hint: check Wikipedia, Dictionary.com or even Google. I'm pretty sure that a company wanting to protect its intellectual property and trade secrets hardly qualifies. As someone who has dealt with some corporate espionage cases, I can personally say that such policies are hardly paranoid or based on far-fetched situations. There are innumerable instances of employees taking product information, customer information, etc. to competitors when they switch jobs - or even outright working for a competitor before the switch. Keeping the e-mail in-house provides documentation of many such occurances. Yes, I know that it's easy to work around this. But the vast majority of the time, people are pretty stupid about such things. Sometimes it's worth prosecuting, but most of the time it just slides.

If employees want to have personal e-mail, they're perfectly free to do so - outside of the company network. Inside the company, the rule is that if it's created on our equipment and / or stored on our servers, we own it. There's plenty of legal precident for this (IANAL, do your own research / buy your own opinions).

In any case, if you're going to engage in name-calling, please do so intelligently. See George Orwell's rant on the subject here. It's getting to the point where the word "fascism" - a thoroughly vile and evil concept that has resulted in the deaths of tens (or possible hundreds) of millions of people over the last century has been watered down to the point where it's used to describe "something I don't like and lack the intelligence to properly rebuke, so I'll just engage in ridiculous hyperbole while demonstrating my massive ignorance."

Fuck, now everybody's going to call me a fascist :-)

Re:People actually do this?

[pluther]

Email is not a File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, Public Folders is not a File Server.

But people use it that way.

And, more importantly, gmail lets people use it that way, and supports it.

So if that's the way everyone wants to use it, doesn't it make sense to try to support that, rather than to try to convince users not to do it?

Bullshit

[TheCabal]

Learn to read, submitter. The "piffling 50-MB limit" is a corporate policy. Exchange has supported multigigabyte mailboxes for a long time. MS is trying to get companies to limit mailbox quotas to prevent users from bypassing corporate policy and forward mail to Gmail.

Good initiative, poor judgement

[silentounce]

It's not the mailbox size that is causing people to use Gmail. It's the features. Gmail is simple and useful. It takes a lot more training and digging through menus to accomplish similar tasks in Gmail. The search feature is universal and reliable. If I need to find all emails related to a specific project it will take about 5 seconds in Gmail. In Outlook it would take at least 10 times that. The use of filters, labels, etc is far superior to similar functions in Outlook. They need to look beyond storage space. I'd still use Gmail even if it supplied far less storage space. In my opinion, Outlook is overkill. I doubt that many of its features are used by more than 75% of users.