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Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source
Fjan11 writes "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."
As a former MAPI programmer (don't worry - I've largely recovered) I have to point out that this is utterly irrelevant.
The only compelling reason to use an Exchange compatible server is to support Outlook. The issue is that Zarafa charges for the Outlook connector. This is not a new business model, people, and truth be told its been a fairly common paradigm of 'Exchange-killers' for quite awhile now. Nothing is killed until the connector is free. Full stop.
So why doesn't anyone offer a free connector? Because it is ridiculous amount of work to build and it is something corporations are willing to pay for. It's not that replicating the server functionality is difficult, it's that Microsoft twisted and violated open standards into something utterly unholy known as Exchange to ensure that nobody but Microsoft could communicate with it. MAPI is Microsoft's obfuscation of traditional messaging protocols and is infamously poorly documented.
I wrote about this issue for Redmond magazine about 2 years ago and nothing's changed. The connector is still the kicker and, regardless of how nifty the back-end is, until an open-source Outlook connector appears Exchange will remain one of MS's top 5 products.
Nothing but PR to see here. Move along...
Well, the reality is that senior executives have always had personal assistants (used to be secretaries) who really opened all their mail, sorted it, and typed responses to the mundane, and took dictation for the serious ones.
The executives typically have 100% trust in their admin's and this feature is absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of a senior management team. It may seem like a security risk, but in the cases that I am aware of, both users are aware of their status, and it rally operates like it did in the pen and paper days.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Having others able to act on your behalf without using your login simplifies the process of proving that you did/didn't actually do something. The information about who logged in and did what on whose behalf can easily be logged. If, on the other hand, you have a system where your login has to be used to act on your behalf then the logs can only show your username no matter who actually used your account.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ. 99.9999999% of all companies just want to buy a tool that works. They don't want to build the fucking thing. They don't even want to fix it. That's why they buy the support license. This whole 'we can customize the code if we want' is a huge stinking load of specious crap. Companies of any size BUY their software because they don't want to customize software they don't have to. Like office software. Customizing a huge billing system is one thing (if you are a big enough company to warrant doing that), but why would an insurance company, or a local widget maker, or a medical clinic want to become an email server programming company???? Get a grip. They'll go out and buy exchange or lotus notes or whatever because they just want the frickin tool. And if it is buggy so what? It works for the most part and they don't have hire programmers or keep programmers around to fix bugs that said programmers introduced when they screwed around with the source code. It's cheaper to pay for the licence for a year than to pay for an unneeded programmer for a year.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If others can be delegated permissions to act on your behalf in specifically designated manners without logging in to your account, then, if the system logs who did what under what account, there will be accountability.
OTOH, if others can't act on your behalf without logging in as you, and you have a business need them to act on your behalf, you have no choice but to give them your access credentials (dongle, password, whatever) and then there really is no accountability, and no control over the manner in which they can act on your behalf.
So, rather than destroying accountability, supporting delegation enhances accountability (and security).
it's around 2,400-- but then you also require 25 outlook licenses.
once again, the price of the software is negligable compared to the cost of 25 employee's salaries...
go ahead, waste a week of each one's time teaching them whats different about the new program.
This is server software we are talking about here. The end users don't change their software (that's the entire point). So there is no cost for retraining end users.
You would obviously have to train the server administration staff, but even if you did put in a "Genuine Microsoft" Exchange server, you would probably still have to do this.
Besides, even if the front end did change, a week of training is a LOT. As it would be replacement software, the concepts are the same, it's only which button you push to do it that changes. So if you can't train them in a matter of hours, if not minutes, you really do need new employees.
Where I work, we use a non-MS stand alone calendaring solution. Our end user training takes a couple of hours.
How long do you think it would take to train users to use the new version of MS Office?
Ever stop to think
That's not to say that all protocols developed by open processes are wonderful, but on average they seem to be better.
The MS protocols are crufty because the direction of the design of them is left up to middle managers.
That should explain it fully to anybody curious.