Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps

Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"

Comments

You can use outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a great summary .... the article mentions the synchronization tool, so outlook can be the front end. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.html

Doesn't this make it a non-issue ?

Re:You can use outlook

[jo42]

The real issue, from a real business point of view, is that you would have to be totally fsckin' stupid to store your confidential company communication and data on Google's servers -- and in a foreign country if you are not in the US.

Re:You can use outlook

[GIL_Dude]

You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.

There are other issues too though:
Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)
Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access
Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.

There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.

Re:You can use outlook

[TheRaven64]

Most people are that stupid or, at least, sufficiently ignorant that they don't realise that it's stupid. Even if they run an in-house mail server, for example, a lot of companies use MSN messenger to discuss business matters. Most companies aren't technology companies, and don't have enough IT-related experience to realise why this is a problem.

Re:You can use outlook

[AHuxley]

Vs running on running your confidential company communication on MS?
The only way a real business will change is to read its mail in a newspaper or have it dumped on the net.
Until this generation gets Enigma 'ed or Crypto AG'ed they will blindly trust MS and Google.
Who would trust Google with its US gov seed money and NSA backrooms on every US (and friends) ISP pipe Google is connected via?
Who would trust MS with decades of closed source bugs?
By default *anyone* interested can get in as you turn on a MS product.

Re:You can use outlook

[Will.Woodhull]

Yeah!

For your business to store its data on Google's servers would be be as totally fsckin' stupid as storing its money in a bank! Much better to rely on your own security forces, strongboxes, armored cars, and safes!

Re:You can use outlook

[maxume]

Most small businesses would have trouble generating a page worth of sensitive information; the relationships they have with customers (not just the contact info) are the important part of the business (perhaps along with being reliable).

Re:You can use outlook

[ajs]

First off, I just want to say that the paranoia issue is moot. Google provides the same sort of assurances that any other outsourced IT organization provides. It's a matter of seeing successful businesses doing this for years that will convince everyone that Google isn't just that ad company they're so familiar with.

You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.

Not optional for any public company in the US, so a non-issue.

There are other issues too though:
Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)

Sure, you might expose yourself to increased downtime (though it's probably worth noting that you're referring to apps during its beta period). That's a valid down-side. Of course, you get global replication and disaster recovery for free, so you have to think in terms of not having to implement those VERY costly options which aren't optional for most corporations. If downtime were massive, then it still doesn't matter, but Google has had a few bad days during beta, which is vastly superior to my last company and about the same as my current one.

Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access

Sharepoint (and whatever MS's IM system is, which does quite a lot more than IM, and integrates deeply with SharePoint) is really what this article was getting at. I fully agree that this is a limitation of Google Apps, and while I think it's surmountable for most companies, those that are already serious MS shops will have significant end-user pain moving to something else. Google Docs + Google Talk (both branded and isolated to your company's domain through Apps) make up for some of the functionality, but certainly not all.

Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.

That's true ONLY of Google's default Gmail, not the Gmail that's part of Apps. If I recall correctly, you can limit access to your domain by IP. There's a lot of services for the upper-end that I'm not as familiar with because my domain is the freebie service, but I vaguely recall seeing this as a feature (along with S-Ox compliance and various other for-extra-pay features).

There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.

Of course, the real question is: are these significant enough issues that the big boys aren't going to have to deal with competing against leaner organizations that grow up from those smaller companies today. I honestly think that outsourced infrastructure is going to be the way almost all large companies go over the next 20 years. This is why I got out of sysadmin, in part.

Re:You can use outlook

[bemymonkey]

Does Google actually provide an equivalent to Exchange?

I'm no business user, but I'd love a way to sync my contacts, appointments and e-mail to my Gmail account. As it stands right now (IIRC), I can sync my Windows Mobile phone's appointments and contacts with Google Calendar and Gmail via the pseudo-Exchange server that they've set up, and/or sync my Outlook 2007 calendar with Google Calendar via the Google Calendar Sync application. Contact sync for Outlook 2007 is nonexistent, and all E-Mail has to be done over IMAP (which is a pain, because Outlook 2007's IMAP implementation sucks donkey balls).

Is there a better way to do this? I'd be (more than happily!) willing to ditch Outlook and Windows Mobile all together if there's another solution that provides contact/appointment/e-mail syncing in one package. Preferably no hobbled-together open source solutions that work half the time... Would Android get me where I want to go? Do their phones sync to Gmail/GCalendar properly? How about a desktop program that syncs seamlessly with Google?

Re:You can use outlook

[dkf]

Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.

If those employees are still using IE6 and old versions of Outlook (depressingly likely) then there's a fair chance that the corporate network is already deeply virus-infested and malware laden. Indeed, I know a number of people who allege that the most common piece of malware out there is McAfee...

Re:You can use outlook

[Enleth]

Just wait until Google starts to sell a Google Apps Appliance Box in the 2U 19" format, just like their search appliances. Actually, I'm amazed that they're not doing this now - if they added an Exchange gateway as a bonus, it would sell like fresh bread.

Re:You can use outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Intelligence agencies do cooperate with businesses, especially when national interests are concerned (defence, energy, banking, transportation...). If you are a non-US business, it makes it just a bit easier for the US to spy on you, especially if you store your data on the servers of one of the best search technology companies. I mean why bother with Echelon when Google will do it for you.

Re:You can use outlook

[marm]

The real issue, from a real business point of view, is that you would have to be totally fsckin' stupid to store your confidential company communication and data on Google's servers

Thus speaks someone who apparently has never been responsible for the email systems for a small company without a full-time IT department or its own rack. Who cares if the government or the hosting provider reads my email? What are they going to do with it? It's only competitors and casual snoopers that need to be worried about, and the risk for them is the same for hosted email as it is for in-house email given that the in-house email solution is going to have to be exposed to the internet anyway. In what real tangible way is the information security worse with a hosted solution, assuming the hosting provider is competent? In house email is going to take a lot more looking after though, and potentially a lot more infrastructure (servers, decent internet connection, reliable power) than the average small business has or can afford. This is assuming there is anyone in-house who has the skills to look after an email server, which in a lot of small businesses there isn't.

If you're large and important enough that foreign governments are going to be snooping on you and giving your data to their local competitors (think Airbus/Boeing) then sure, you want to be running your own email system. Or if you're a technical business in a highly competitive market. That's maybe 10% of all businesses though. The other 90% don't need the hassle.

Re:You can use outlook

[McFadden]

There are a lot more issues than just getting used to a new set of tools.

I recently set up a new small startup company. We have 4 staff, but 3 of us work a lot from home, coming into the office only once or twice a week. As an experiment I set us all up on Google Apps Premium. The email is great - no complaints. Gmail has always been my webmail of choice, and with POP/IMAP support my 2 Mac guys can use mail.app to their hearts content.

Calendar is so-so. Sharing calendars, particularly more than one seems a bit erratic, but it's just about good enough for us to use (we really need shared calendars do the the business we operate).

Docs is the main weakness. The office suite just doesn't have the feature set of any of the offline suites. Offline support is lacking. It frustrates me that Google make a huge thing of this being a set of "collaboration" tools and yet leave out (or don't implement) a really simple and obvious feature like folder-level sharing. If you want to share a folder containing sub-folders with other people in your group, you have to meticulously go through the directory structure and share all the bloody files in each sub-folder individually. Why the hell can't I just share the top folder and have it apply sharing to the rest of the tree?
What worries me more, is that when you go into the requested features forum, you can see that people have been asking for this for a long time now and it's not happened. Which makes me think that Google simply aren't putting a lot of resource into developing it. I don't like entrusting the future of my business into something that they might just drop like a stone if they feel like it. And without more feedback from the devs, and noticeable improvements over time, it certainly feels like they could.

The docs file manager tool itself seems completely brain-damaged at times. You can drag a file from one folder to another, and it disappears. The folder displays (2 items) but only 1 is visible. Where the fuck did it go, and why should I have to kill my browser window and re-launch to see it? I could go on, but I think a couple of examples are enough to suggest that there are what I would suggest are basic areas of functionality that simply aren't ready for prime-time yet.

Eventually we gave up and went back to an offline office suite. Google Apps is a nice idea, and I'm sure that when it's anywhere near fully functional it'll be a very handy for us. But right now it's not even close.

I apologize for the rather disorganized rant. If I'd had more time I'd have written a more organized critique, but given that I was on my way to bed, I banged out this comment in a quick 5 minute brain splurge.

Re:You can use outlook

[Runaway1956]

Exactly. Loss of control is a much greater factor than any number of employee's familiarity and/or comfort. If/when Enterprise migrates from the MS offerings, they will almost certainly adopt something that they can serve from their own machines.

Hell, as a private individual, I'm reluctant to store to much information on the web, and I certainly wouldn't store it in China, or Russia, or - ZIMBABWE!

Re:You can use outlook

[MrNaz]

"Does Google actually provide an equivalent to Exchange?"

Short answer, no.

As much as I dislike MS software and MS business practices, MS Exchange is a piece of software the likes of which does not exist elsewhere. Nothing else comes close to Exchange and its associated apps. Google Apps doesn't come close to Exchange's functionality. Forget the same ballpark, it's not even on the same planet.

Re:You can use outlook

[Runaway1956]

Uhhhhm. Business secrets are MUCH more valuable than money. Many business execs will shovel money at you, to avoid giving away a trade secret.

That said - business doesn't store it's money in a bank. There are more lucrative investments than any bank. Even my relatively small company only puts money in the bank once a week to cover payroll and expenditures. They keep a seperate account elsewhere with a nice tidy sum of money, and yet more assets are kept readily available for liquidation. But, the real money is kept working in the business.

Re:You can use outlook

[FrostDust]

Usually, you'd have some type of agreement with the bank that, if your money goes missing (hackers, bank robbery, whatever), you're covered.

I'm pretty sure Google's policy is, "Oops. Well, you have backups, right?"

Re:You can use outlook

[Macfox]

GA isn't for everyone, but it does fit well for small business, educational institutions and community organisations that seek flexible access to data, any time, any place or are under budget constraints.

There's a heap of US universities using the education edition of Google Apps. Some of them with massive deployments of >50,000 users.

The thing to keep in mind is that GA is very flexible and it's a trade off between cost, flexibility and security. You can choose which parts you want (email, calendaring, docs, chat, sites, video, etc) If you are concerned about confidential data and trade secrets, then it probably not for you. But to declares anyone who considers Google Apps or other SaaS providers, totally fsckin' stupid is pretty short sighted.

Re:You can use outlook

[fat_mike]

Um, corporate IT doesn't only consist of managing Exchange. There are enterprise virus/malware scanners that will isolate a machine from the network when something is detected which usually never happens cause there are also enterprise solutions that catch that stuff at the entry point to the network. All this stuff is run by, you know IT PROFESSIONALS WHO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

Re:You can use outlook

[westlake]

Much better to rely on your own security forces, strongboxes, armored cars, and safes!

Look around you.

I'm betting your employer has a vault.

Employs security guards - and - however rarely - an armed or armored courier.

His corporate bank account is a relatively sterile and isolated entry in a database. Documents provide context.

His bank has an institutional tradition of protecting its clients privacy. He has other and perhaps better choices than HSBC.

Google mines data for everything it can extract. Nothing else it has tried has shown a profit.
 

Re:You can use outlook

[anagama]

I'm using Darwin Calendar Server in my office: http://trac.calendarserver.org/ You can install it on a linux box and it's even in the Lenny and recent Ubuntu repositories if you don't want to deal with dependency hell. The only real "gotcha" is that you _must_ enable extended attributes in fstab -- without that, you'll pull your hair out wondering why it doesn't work. Sunbird will sync with it, although Sunbird always downloads all the data when it starts, so if your calendar is large (2-3 items per day spanning 2 years), it'll nail your calendar server's resources for about a full minute. After that, your server can get back to doing whatever else it does -- DCS uses very little resources while runnig. During this time when Sunbird is downloading everything in the calender, Sunbird is not responsive, so just let it sit for a minute or two after loading Sunbird. Sunbird will also completely fail to load the calendar beyond a certain size. This is BTW, the linux version of Sunbird. No idea if Windows version works better. With those exceptions, Sunbird works fine and Apple's iCal (if you have any Macs) works flawlessly of course. For remote access, just VPN into your office and sync.

Re:You can use outlook

[lukas84]

I've never seen really big companies with a well-managed IT deployment. Most of them have _extremely_ strict guidelines, often getting into the way of actually doing businesses. This is usually the point where departments start getting their own PCs and their own internet access, not managed by IT. And as soon as that happens, it's all downhill from there.

I've seen several small-to-midsize companies that ran a tight ship but never forgot why they're running IT (to help the business). These companies couldn't afford the latest high-end threat protection services (prince, low number of people), but the fact that most employees were actually working WITH IT and not against IT got them a better environment than the really big companies with fancy gadgets.

Re:You can use outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

While Google is safer than some notorious banks, Google is not that secure judging from their security track record.

Re:You can use outlook

[MrCrassic]

It's not about stupidity; it would probably be a huge compliance violation for many companies.

Re:You can use outlook

[Bert64]

Most of the issues are due to outlook only really supporting it's own proprietary protocols for most things... They are designed to lock you in to exchange. That's why their support for IMAP is lousy, and they have no support for anything like CalDAV at all.

Re:You can use outlook

[bemymonkey]

It's apalling, really... I've just loaded up Thunderbird and it switches IMAP folders (on Gmail) within a split second. Outlook needs 5 seconds, depending on how many messages are in the folder...

I think I've stumbled onto the most elegant PIM solution for Windows Mobile + Gmail users, though:

Thunderbird for e-mail with contacts synced from Gmail (which are in turn synced directly from the Windows Mobile device to Gmail via Google Sync), and Outlook 2007 for the rest. Outlook's calendar, notes and tasks aren't so excruciatingly slow that it'd bother me, and this way Thunderbird's address book is always updated with the newest contacts from Outlook and the Windows Mobile device...

Looks like I'll be sticking with this until someone finds me a better solution. :)

Re:You can use outlook

[Bert64]

I have seen a LOT of big companies which are doing everything you suggest, virus scanners on inbound email and the web proxy with no access to the outside world. They usually block the download or receiving via email of executables of any kind, or any kind of encrypted data (since they cant check the contents of it).. They also tend to either disallow removable devices entirely, or limit them to certain users and enforce virus scans on any inserted devices.

And yet these companies still get infected, new malware gets straight through their web filtering because it's newly written and the company providing the filter hasn't added it to their signatures yet... Lots of malware also gets through the email filter because it's embedded in proprietary formats like word and excel.. These files aren't blocked because external companies often send files in such formats, which are hard to parse and new malware is constantly being developed. All it takes is for one user to get infected, and their machine can be a source of infection for everything else... Most companies protect their borders, but the inside is extremely insecure. They use shared authentication schemes like active directory because they have large numbers of machines to manage, but still don't have the resources to ensure everything is up to date and securely configured so it's usually trivially easy to compromise a machine or two, make your way onto the domain (made easier by it running the same software and network visible apis as the member systems) and take the whole network very easily...

Re:You can use outlook

[Glonoinha]

Lotus Notes.
That said, using Notes makes the Outlook/Exchange experience look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Re:You can use outlook

[Will.Woodhull]

Taking the last point first:

That said - business doesn't store it's money in a bank. There are more lucrative investments than any bank.

Someone needs to learn about business money management.

A retailer grossing $7 million a year will typically run more than $20 million through its bank accounts during that year. There are the accounts that accumulate revenue from sales and collected recievables. Funds from these are periodically transferred to short term bank accounts like Certificates of Deposit until the accumulation is large enough to be worthy of a strategic investment decision. There are the checking accounts used to pay vendors, and often there are CDs or similar instruments used for managing known upcoming payables, like semiannual lease payments. There are the payroll accounts mentioned in parent post. There are discretionary funds accounts so that unexpected urgent expenses can be met (cost of opening the parking lot after the freak June snowstorm, etc), and to allow immediate exploitation of unanticipated opportunities (the freight company calls to say it has 5 trucks loaded with 150 palettes of silk scarfs that were destined for a business that has bankrupted; interested in buying these Right Now at cost of shipping, so it can free its trucks for other obligations?)

Perhaps this is what parent post meant when it said But, the real money is kept working in the business. It is kept working, in the business's many bank accounts.

At a minimum, each dollar earned by a company will go through at least one revenue accumulation account and at least one debt payable account, and the profits will go through additional accounts on their way toward long term investment or dividend payment. So for most businesses, you can basically multiply their gross revenue by 2+ to estimate how many dollars they are running through their bank accoputs each year.

And now the first shall be last:

Google's unique specialty is handling huge volumes of information in a secure and efficient manner. Data stored on Google's world-wide system of interconnected server farms is as secure as the gold in Fort Knox: it is safe from any natural disaster, it is safe from any unauthorized access or destruction. Since only the client corporation would have the key to Google's encryption, even if a blackhat were able to somehow get a copy of the data, they would need the resources of a government to make any sense of it. There is no way any company that is not a direct competitor of Google could provide an equivalent level of protection. No business could do this in house; it would bankrupt them (unless they turned it into a profit center, but then they would become a Google competitor).

Storing data in the cloud on Google or a competitor is a sensible business strategy, that would free up IT personnel to do the security work that still would need to done (making sure Windows machines are clean of keyboard loggers, screen scrapers and other malware; physically protecting the local net; monitoring for attacks and abuse, keeping a weather eye for news of the first Linux or Mac malware (bound to happen sometime in the next 10 years), and so on.

Re:You can use outlook

[Will.Woodhull]

... Google is not that secure judging from their security track record.

Citation please? Because I can't find anything through the search engines about Google ever losing client data, or client data on Google ever being compromised.

I did find stories about malware taking advantage of Windows vulnerabilities to capture data through some Google add-ons, such as the search bar. The stories I looked at indicated that this was not happening on Macs or Linux machines... it appears to be limited to compromised client computers running Microsoft software, and appears to be variants of known Microsoft vulnerabilities.

Re:You can use outlook

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not sure it can be properly said about Exchange alone, but it's more true when you look at the whole stack interacting together (i.e. Exchange + Outlook + Office Communicator + SharePoint).

Re:You can use outlook

[traveyes]

Likewise, but I also sync calendar using Lightning for Thunderbird with "Google Contacts" add-on and sync contacts (with gmai set up for this purpose) using "Provider for Google Calendar" add-on. On the Blackberry, like you, it is Google sync which syncs both the calendar and contacts.

Works well and glad I could finally ditch Outlook at work. We don't use Exchange.

Add-on links:
Provider for Google calendar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631
Google Contacts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/7307

Re:You can use outlook

[orngjce223]

I can eat fresh bread. I can't eat Exchange gateways. Try another simile.

Re:You can use outlook

[Rich0]

You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.

Not optional for any public company in the US, so a non-issue.

Uh, I don't follow you. For a large company good control of deletions is mandatory, but how that makes this a non-issue escapes me. Does gmail provide for guaranteed deletion?

Pretty much every large company is de-facto required to rigorously delete materials that aren't required by law to be kept. The penalty for not doing so is to be buried alive in discovery whenever you are sued (which probably happens about once a week for a big company).

If a law says that the accounting records used to create a quarterly statement needs to be kept for three years, then you want to keep it for three years (with no meaningful chance of loss), and then make every remote trace of them disappear completely one day later (or as close to this as possible).

This has nothing to do with covering up wrongful behavior. The fact is that you can comply with the letter of the law today, and then be second-guessed about some decision you made with perfect hindsight 10 years from now. So, unless the law states that those records must be preserved for 10 years, then you don't want those records.

As an analogy from the sysadmin world - consider system access logs at an ISP (something here most people would intuitively understand). If you are an ISP you want to keep your logs long enough to handle billing disputes or to be able to identify abuses, but you don't want a 10 year record of everything every one of your customers have ever done online. Then, when some man files a subpoena to find out when a relationship between his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her boyfriend started you can just say that your records only go back 30 days so that you don't have anything, instead of having to go digging through the vaults to find backup tapes, and then show up in court to testify about how those records were maintained (a cost you are not really reimbursed for except maybe a token fee).

Sure, it would be fairly cheap for a big company to save every email ever sent between two people who worked there. However, then whenever somebody gets injured by the company's products there will be some email somewhere between two people joking (or debating) about the product's safety and that will be the "smoking gun" that proves the company covered up the dangers. In every place I've worked the fact is that anytime a decision is made there is somebody who doesn't think it is a good idea - and these people are always praised as prophets when things go wrong. However, if you wait to have unanimous consensus whenever you make a decision nothing would ever get done. A jury has the luxury of not needing to make a profit, and usually fails to find the right risk balance.

Re:You can use outlook

[Sleepy]

The point you just made is "inability to control your data".
This is precisely why a lot of people want to move AWAY from Microsoft.

As for 'where' your data is located - but even then, there's no physical barrier preventing Microsoft to having the same access to your email as Google would. True, data kept on Google's server might "seem" easier, but Microsoft has played along with US government (and other governments, if it helps sell their systems elsewhere).

You might feel safe behind your LAN based Exchange server and ISA firewall, but if Microsoft "wants" to get your email, remotely fetching it is only slightly more difficult for them than it would be if you hosted mail on someone's servers. I am suggesting that neither Microsoft nor Google snoops this type of data, but you're suggesting only Google "could" while I am saying both could, easily.

If you want to "control" your data, you need open source systems, on hardened open source OSS, and you follow other best practices like sandboxing your servers. That's probably overkill for many, but it is misleading to suggest that a LAN based Exchange server might be more secure/private than something hosted on Google, and it is that point I am responding to.

Re:You can use outlook

[virtualXTC]

Your recommendation is simple, but not elegant; using Google as your server leaves you with no way to sync your "to-do" list. Just use syncML / Funambol for everything and be done with it.

Re:You can use outlook

[budgenator]

and they never heard of Jabber.

Re:You can use outlook

[Shamenaught]

Yeah, this is /., I believe a car analogy is customary.

Re:You can use outlook

[bemymonkey]

I actually tried Funambol (albeit half a year ago), and it sucked. Duplicate appointments, missing data in contacts, Appointments that were deleted in Outlook never got deleted in Google Calendar...

As for the elegance... meh :P

Re:You can use outlook

[Bigjeff5]

Er, bullshit?

I work for one of the largest companies in the world (like, top 25-50 big). It is set up on one massive domain trunk (which I think is crazy, but it works), I can access any server in the world from where I am sitting provided I have the right user access, with rather light protections against user installed software, and no restrictions on USB devices, etc. There are heavy user account restrictions and a computer not on the domain will go nowhere fast. We have had exactly one major malware outbreak in the last three years, and the only thing that warranted it as major was that it was very difficult to remove without interrupting service. It was not able to cause any damage at all.

With good IT tools (like active directory and utilities that facilitate automation) and strict MANAGEMENT regarding following IT policies it is trivial to secure and maintain the security of even a massive network involving hundreds of thousands of computers. About 30 people or so set the policies and ensure that they are being followed. This works because we use standard hardware with standard images and solid security templates, we leverage the local desktop support to fix machines that are, for one reason or another, not updating their templates or AV software or what have you, and IT has the authority to remove even a local executive's machine from the network if he refuses to allow them to bring it into compliance. If anything comes of it, the executive could easily find himself moved to a less desirable assignment if he is obviously wrong and refuses to follow policy.

The technical side of things simply requires IT staff that knows what the hell they are doing, and the authority to do what needs to be done. If a company refuses to A.) hire good people and B.) give them the authority to take appropriate action to secure the network, then the network will never be secure. What you are talking about is bad management, and not much more.

That's not to say IT runs things, nor should they, but they need support at the top executive level in order to do the job correctly. If they have to beg lower management to make any little change, then the network will not be secure. If local departments are permitted to buy their own equipment and actually put it on the corporate network, there is no way the network will be secure either. Ever. That's the kind of stuff you need to control to maintain security. Where I work, an unauthorized device could easily get you a visit from the local security guys, who also have the power to terminate your employment if the issue is a severe enough security threat. Nobody puts their own equipment on the network without permission first.

Re:You can use outlook

[Bigjeff5]

Exchange is easily the most powerful email server on the market. Nothing touches it so far.

Communicator is part of Exchange, it's not separate, you can't use the communicator client without an Exchange server. This means it integrates -very- tightly with Outlook. Sharepoint is separate but integrates tightly with Exchange as well, which allows nice integration into Communicator and Outlook. Live Meeting is tied in with all of them as well, and is becoming a very popular tool.

Gmail and Google Apps are cool, but they don't approach this level of facilitating communication. Microsoft makes things easy to the point that, if the backoffice side is set up properly, the user just says "Oh I just click here? Ok, that's easy".

Re:You can use outlook

[rsax]

This solution for Google Apps Premier accounts makes Outlook work pretty much as if it is in an Exchange environment: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync

Re:You can use outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Im an email admin for a medium sized public company in the US and I can tell you straight out that data management through ANY outsourced company is a huge deal. Even out customer Db interaction @ rackspace make management queasy.

Also, US public companies ARE allowed to delete email as part of a reasonable email management system. (unlike Germany for instance where financial emails have to stay around for 10 years). This end of course when litigation is involved, you can not delete any emails (or other documents) which may be lrelated to possible or ongoing litigation.

But until that occurs you can delete email any time you like.

Re:You can use outlook

[Bigjeff5]

Vs running on running your confidential company communication on MS?

Which the company controls on its own servers, decides exactly who can do what with it, and where the information goes. MS is very, very good at that with their business products.

The only way a real business will change is to read its mail in a newspaper or have it dumped on the net.

Hmmm... MS is so vulnerable, I wonder why you aren't hearing about major companies losing data every day? All you hear about are the retards who do something completely insecure, like leaving a laptop in the back seat of their car, which would result in stolen data no matter WHAT your favorite OS is. Don't kid yourself into thinking that anything is uncrackable if a bad guy has physical position of your computer. If it is uncrackable, it's also unusable. There is no way around that.

Until this generation gets Enigma 'ed or Crypto AG'ed they will blindly trust MS and Google.
Who would trust Google with its US gov seed money and NSA backrooms on every US (and friends) ISP pipe Google is connected via?
Who would trust MS with decades of closed source bugs?

People trust MS because they have 25+ years of stellar service in the corporate arena. MS doesn't do funny business on their corporate products, they make too much money on them to risk it. All of the MS server products since NT (I honestly have no NT server experience) have been rock solid from day one, and are constantly updated and any bugs delt with in a timely manner. Their desktop products may be questionable, they may BS about bugs and exploits, and the defaults until Vista have been piss poor for security, but their server line is a whole separate ball game. They are bar none the best out there. It seems expensive to pay $15,000 for an OS and the rights to use it, but it becomes cheaper when you consider that it takes a very well built Linux system (which can run you $150,000+ a year for one guy to set up and maintain) to match a standard MS server setup that any numbnuts IT guy can configure well (which may only cost you $60,000 a year to set up and maintain). That's why MS dominates the server market too.

By default *anyone* interested can get in as you turn on a MS product.

By default *anyone* can get into just about anything, that's why we change the defaults. Duh.

MS dominates the server market because they make the best server OS. They dominate the desktop market because that's what people use at work, and it's easier to stick with what you know. Plus it's cheap and easy, as opposed to Macs which are expensive and easy, or Linux which is cheap and hard.

Re:You can use outlook

[DUdsen]

The problem with google is the terms of service, google does not offer you full ownership of your data, they wont negotiate out out clauses they dont make guranties and whont offer fixed compensation when guranties are breached, it's the same deal with apple and a big reason apple is non existiant in the business to business market.

Take a standard linux netbook use non google webtools and you can get those deals but google acts the same way apple does and ignores the business market, this is wry this debate is pointless google isnt even trying to enter this market, they are plotting to take the low end consumer market not the enterprise market.

The reason this is being debated is that the fortune 5000 companies are trying to ditch their PC's and go back to the mainframes as fast as they can and google is the most visible of the new timeshare systems, because they are consumer oriented and not enterprise oriented.

Theres other players like zimbra, zoho or thinkfree that specificly targets enterprise and some of the old forgotten giants still lingers around in the shadows.

Re:You can use outlook

[cmdr_tofu]

What about Zimbra?

Re:You can use outlook

[MikeFM]

I think you are over estimating how confidential most company communication is. Also, email is an unsafe medium - you should never communicate secure information by email without encrypting it. Those two facts make it so it really doesn't matter to most companies. Most businesses just want something that is easy, affordable, fast, and that will stop spam. Google offers exactly that.

We've had half our email running on Google for about six months and it's been a great improvement. We'll probably switch the rest over sometime in the next six months. Absolutely nothing we communicate matters if it's stored on Google's servers. We don't scan our offices for hidden bugs either. Weird.

Re:You can use outlook

[gullevek]

And still a lot of companies think exactly about doing this.

Re:You can use outlook

[ajs]

Pretty much every large company is de-facto required to rigorously delete materials that aren't required by law to be kept.

Which, in any public company or company that has a fiduciary role is either every piece of email for at least 5 years or a very specific cross-section of email which must be painstakingly identified (and most companies do not do this). This is the joyous ambiguity of S-Ox. Nowhere in the law does it say this explicitly, but the interpretation (which is very broadly applied by public corporations in order to cover their asses, since being "buried in discovery," as you put it is far better than literally going to jail) is that any email might contain data which is related to auditing requirements, and therefore must be retained.

See http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1039054510969 for more detail. Then see http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/07/google_apps_gra.html;jsessionid=IASOOQCSKFDVGQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN for some info on the retention policy features in Google Apps, though I'm sure you could find more on Google's site at google.com/a

Re:You can use outlook

[AHuxley]

Amazing what an expensive lunch and some funny numbers on the back of a napkin can result in.
Do you get points for posts like the above and get to redeem them for MS software ?

Re:You can use outlook

[Rich0]

I'm hardly an expert in SOX, but in every big company I'm aware of emails tend to be deleted pretty quickly (less than six months). Emails aren't considered official records. When you're producing official documentation you're suppoed to do it in a more official form (reports/documents/etc). Even drafts of these documents are supposed to be destroyed. The idea is that you want to have final records of anything of importance, and anything that doesn't reflect the official position of the company shouldn't exist.

Again, I'm not an expert. But this has been policy in at least a few big companies, and they certianly pay lawyers big money to write these policies. The company would rather spend $10M to create some official accounting-documentation-creation program than have email considered the official record. Those emails are WAY too expensive (just ask any of those companies with damanging emails posted all over the internet that came up in discovery).

Re:You can use outlook

[gullevek]

Google Doc works great for small things. But nothing really serious. I use it mainly for small documentation stuff, etc where it is great that I can view and edit it anywhere, but I do not need to have all the features and stuff from the big office suits.

But I personally love the fact that two or more people around the world can work on the same document without the need of some big big major server backend at your office.

And still I agree, google docs is far far to weak to even compete with any other stand alone office product.

Re:You can use outlook

[gullevek]

Thought i do not agree on the numbers, windows servers are actually pretty solid.

Re:You can use outlook

[BlueCollarCamel]

What I don't get is why don't they make a Google Apps Appliance, similar to what they did with their search.

Re:You can use outlook

[Sadsfae]

It seems expensive to pay $15,000 for an OS and the rights to use it, but it becomes cheaper when you consider that it takes a very well built Linux system (which can run you $150,000+ a year for one guy to set up and maintain) to match a standard MS server setup

I would love to know where this $150k/year Linux sysadmin position administrating one server can be found. I would be interested in such an opportunity.

Re:You can use outlook

[ajs]

Just curious, did you follow the link? I admit that my experience with such things is mostly through financial institutions which take SOX much more seriously than your run-of-the-mill public corp. Still, it's very hard to correctly isolate out audit-worthy emails from not. For example, if a customer submits a bug report and your engineers bounce it back and forth on an internal mailing list between them and someone from the CFO's office who is trying to track down how much time is being spent on that project, how much of that conversation needs to be retained? Just the part that finance saw? Some auditors would say yes, some no.

Re:You can use outlook

[Runaway1956]

Ahem. Business lesson appreciated - but you ultimately make my point for me. The money passes THROUGH the bank. Maybe some businesses make a lot of use of CD's for medium storage of money - but that isn't what most businesses are in business for. I did mention that every business keeps assets in a readily liquidateble form, and your CD's are exactly that.

As for Google being more secure than Fort Knox - I'll believe it in a couple hundred years, when Google has never lost any data from any account.

I may not be able to hack the key for any particular scrap of data in the next million years, with the technology that is available. But, I CAN find the individual(s) who have the keys, and extract the keys from him using a 5 dollar nutcracker.

However, I didn't mention anything about hacking Google in my first post. I did mention availability and control. If the itartubes start rusting out, or if terrorists cut all the optic fibers, or the electric grid goes down - then suddenly, business is unable to access the data on Google. Just because we haven't experience the combination of fire/flood/earthquake/meteor strike that could disrupt Google's communitcations, doesn't mean it isn't going to happen next year.

Re:You can use outlook

[JackieBrown]

I work at a medical equipment company and s-ox very much effects our retention of data (as well as who has access to what.)

Re:You can use outlook

[Andy Dodd]

"First off, I just want to say that the paranoia issue is moot. Google provides the same sort of assurances that any other outsourced IT organization provides. It's a matter of seeing successful businesses doing this for years that will convince everyone that Google isn't just that ad company they're so familiar with."

So what? I have yet to work at a company that outsourced their mail system offsite. The people managing the servers might have been outsourced, but the servers themselves were property of the company and resided at a physical location belonging to said company.

(That said, I have yet to figure out how Blackberry got an "in" with companies to allow mail to be mirrored offsite, my guess is that BB's servers hold the mail in encrypted format to which BB doesn't even have the key. In addition, with the Blackberry setup, the primary mail system still resides within the company.)

Re:You can use outlook

[vertinox]

Uh, I don't follow you. For a large company good control of deletions is mandatory, but how that makes this a non-issue escapes me. Does gmail provide for guaranteed deletion?

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure litigation has the upper hand here.

Using a well regulated email deletion system to avoid getting a subpoena can be contempt of court if that was your intention. Of course they have to prove that was your intention.

Of course they have to prove you are malicious rather than just a cheapskate who didn't want to make backups.

Re:You can use outlook

[virtualXTC]

I actually tried Funambol (albeit half a year ago), and it sucked. Duplicate appointments, missing data in contacts, Appointments that were deleted in Outlook never got deleted in Google Calendar...

As for the elegance... meh :P

odd... I had a strikingly similar experience using Google apps.

Re:You can use outlook

[bemymonkey]

Guess I'd better not try the calendar sync then ;)

Re:You can use outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you suggest going about finding someone who would be able to implement a system such as the environment you describe at your workplace, but for a small company (25-50 office workers)?

We've had a tough time finding someone who can put this together, and I have a feeling we've been going about the search wrong. I don't think we're looking for anything extraordinary. Alternatively, can you recommend some good books?

Here's what I see transfering over from your extremely large company to our small one:

Standard disk images for desktops and laptops
Antivirus
Backup
Ability to install non-standard apps on some computers, either by user or by admin creating custom disk image
Email
Shared file storage
Security policies to reasonably protect company's data (virus, loss of laptops, disgruntled former employee)

Thanks!

Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[LibertineR]

I know, I know, the prevailing opinion is that SharePoint sucks, but in my experience, companies that grab hold of SharePoint integration with Exchange and MS Office, would rather give up their children than that combo.

Where is the competition for that ENTIRE feature set, for a comparative amount of money?

Its full Lock-In, and I have no idea how Google competes with that.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Google Apps let you host the data yourselves? The only time we want our confidential information off-site is in the form of encrypted backups.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Threni]

I use Outlook at work and it's shit. Searching email is really slow, and you can sense all the bloat as you do anything - the options I want are always hidden somewhere. I used google desktop for a while and amused myself with how fast it was finding emails and files, but in the end I gave up because of limits on how many files it indexes (why is there a limit?), and because it (twice) caused my PC to slow down unusably. Also, I had to fiddle with the registry to make it index more file types. Then again, you have to do that sort of thing with Windows to get it to index files. Why is it apparently so hard to know what's on your own, local hard drive? I don't get it. I have the CPU and disk space for indexes.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[smartin]

I would give up my children to be free of that combo. Not one of those tools works well either by itself or together. Sharepoint in particular has no value what so ever and Outlook and Office are steaming piles of shit.

Can't wait for Google Wave to be available hopefully it will crush Outhouse/Exchange.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[westlake]

Where is the competition for that ENTIRE feature set, for a comparative amount of money?

This is where the geek gets it wrong.

He sees the MS Office suite or perhaps Exchange.

What he doesn't see is that Microsoft - and Microsoft's partners - can deliver a turn key solution for a business of any size.

Microsoft has had close on to 35 years experience and - quite literally - tens of billions of dollars to spend on the study of office work.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[todrules]

And also the integration with Communicator and Live Meeting. I have teammates all over the country, and these tools make it a lot easier to collaborate and communicate.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[DoofusOfDeath]

companies that grab hold of SharePoint integration with Exchange and MS Office, would rather give up their children than that combo.

So the stereotypes are true??? Damn...

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[LibertineR]

So,....what combo is better?

This is where detractors always fail. What is the alternative? There is NO alternative. Not in feature-by-feature comparison, or by price. To suggest that SharePoint has no value whatsoever is to make your argument unserious. Also, 80% of SharePoint functionality is FREE as part of Server 2003/2008.

Where is the competition on this?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya that's part of the rub with using Google things for a business. They hold all your data. What's more, Google is the ultimate data mining company. They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want. As such, they could, if they wished, very easily dig in to our data for company secrets. Now, they say they won't, but all you have is their word on that. While that's fine for a home user, I don't see that as fine if I run a business, especially a public company. It'd be a great way to get yourself in trouble with your shareholders.

So while I use Gmail myself, I wouldn't want to use Gmail for business, especially a tech business. Hopefully, Google would leave all my mail alone and respect my privacy. Probably they would. However, what if they don't? What if they find plans we have for bringing an amazing new product to market, and they then beat us to the punch?

So I think there's more than just inertia at play here. With business information, you have to start to take things like secrecy seriously. That generally means hosting your own stuff or, if you must use a 3rd party, make sure they are a disinterested 3rd party. By that I mean if you take a big data centre, who's only business is holding servers, they aren't that interested in what is on there, nor do they really have the capability to look. Their market is, well, holding servers. However Google, their market is tech toys of all kinds, and they keep expanding in to new areas. Thus they might well be interested in what you are doing.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Zimbra - Whatever-email - Alfresco - BABY.

Zimbra - Free
Whatever-email - Free
Alfresco - Free

BABY.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Primarily, shared contacts (without Exchange Server) is the holy grail of small businesses. This is the truth. The first company to market an alternative to this functionality (FOSS would be sooo cool) will make a fortune.

In my consulting experience, small businesses (15 staff) would kill for that, but can barely afford an extra server, let alone all the costs that come with Exchange.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[leamanc]

I admin Zimbra at my org. To get anywhere near the features you need for a business, you have to BUY the network edition. The free version just isn't going to cut it. You can't even use Zimbra's backup system with the free version.

And we've looked at Alfresco. What started out as a simple shared folder web app has blossomed into a monstrous CMS web serving solution. It's not even in the same sphere as SharePoint anymore.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[BitZtream]

I hate to say this in defense of MS but...

Having a superior product isn't 'Lock-In'.

Lock-in is when you have a bunch of data and prevent people from taking it to some thing different.

You can't call it lock-in when you basically say 'I like product A better than product B because product A has (insert feature list) and product B doesn't, or product B is a loosely connected amalgamation of simple tools trying to pretend to be A.

The only thing GMail has over Outlook/Exchange is reliability. So far, GMail appears more reliable than an Exchange server generally is, however thats probably because GMail just has far more servers to throw at it. Long term, GMail isn't even really cheaper than Outlook/Exchange unless you're doing the freebe apps for your domain or standard gmail, in which case you've just basically given up every single feature of Outlook/Exchange in order to go back to email the way it was in 1996, with a pretty web interface.

If Google wants to compete, they have to produce a superior product. GMail and Apps for your Domain in their current forms aren't superior products.

There is no lock-in because there is no competing product with a comparable feature set, and its pretty easy to export your data from all the products you mentioned so that it can be moved.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[JAlexoi]

Microsoft has at most 20 years of experience in that field. Before the 90-ies they were basically a second grade DOS and developer tool vendor.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Robert Larson]

Google isn't evil so this doesn't matter. They said so themsleves.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[westlake]

Sharepoint in particular has no value what so ever and Outlook and Office are steaming piles of shit.

Sharepoint generated a billion in sales for Microsoft before the geek even knew it existed.

Calling Office and Outlook "steaming piles of shit" is usually worth three of four mod points on Slashdot - with a bonus point, maybe, for the "Outhouse" slur.

Worthy of Twitter, that one.

Doesn't make any of it true.

Even when it arrives tagged with a 942 ID.

The geek's natural habitat is the server room. He is not likely to be an office manager or - by choice - a clerical worker.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[ciggieposeur]

that SharePoint sucks,

My company runs Sharepoint. As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking. But I've also been told that we really don't use Sharepoint correctly, that it's got a lot of nice features and such.

Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unequivocally proving that having a low Slashdot ID does NOT make one immune to spreading FUD.

Sharepoint in particular has no value what so ever and Outlook and Office are steaming piles of shit.

Really? Ever actually used the products in a REAL environment? (i.e. by people who _know_ the product, not people who are _trying out_ the product?)

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[darkmeridian]

The cost savings of Google Apps would be in not having to host servers. If you have confidential information that cannot be put onto outside servers, then you're not the target audience for Google Apps.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[westlake]

Microsoft has at most 20 years of experience in that field. Before the 90-ies they were basically a second grade DOS and developer tool vendor.

Microsoft was selling BASIC to corporate clients as early as 1976. Microsoft was a first-tier vendor of development tools for the micro from Day 1:

April 4, 1979 Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry. Microsoft History The Multiplan [1983] spreadsheet did quite well abroad. MS Word 1.0 for DOS also launches in '83.

1985 marks the launch of Excel for the Mac.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[lseltzer]

The fact that these products are massive sellers proves that you don't get it. Unless you think that the corporate IT world is full of idiots and that only you see the truth

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Russianspi]

Yeah, you have to buy it. And it is expensive!! But, when my org looked at TCO (on of Microsoft's favorite topics), Zimbra came out MUCH cheaper for the same feature set (Including MAPI based Outlook support). They support blackberries, and have full-on Mac sync, too. Plus, their web-client is quite nice/usable (as opposed to OWA), and support is responsive. So, there is the answer to the original question: where is the full-feature-set competetion: it is at Zimbra. (Note - I am not affiliated in Zimbra in any way, except for being a happy customer!)

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Bert64]

If you sign up for and pay for a service, then Google are obliged to continue providing that service for the term of the contract providing you keep up your end of the bargain (ie paying for it)...
They are also obliged to abide by any other terms in the contract, so as a business you would be foolish to not demand clauses that forbid Google from mining your data or doing anything else with it not directly related to providing the service.. You should also demand the ability to download all of your data at any time you wish in a standard format so that you can keep your own backup and/or have the data available to you for migrating to another service.

Companies trust their critical data and resources to other companies all the time... There are companies who specialize in storing or destroying massive quantities of hard copy documents for instance, not to mention courier or security companies.

This is actually a better situation than using MS apps, which come with no warranty and often provide no method or guarantee to get the data out in a standard format.

Obviously the best plan is to have the data on your own hardware, in formats which you have full documentation for, and using software which you have an unlimited irrevocable right to use for any purpose, but neither MS nor Google offer this right now.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[blincoln]

As far as I can tell, it is a document store with version control, a business user's version of source code control minus defect/feature tracking.
[snip]
Could someone explain briefly what Sharepoint really does?

It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.

It's a very, very complicated system and at least today it has a lot of limitations and bugs, but there's also a lot of interesting potential there. I'm not a huge fan of using it myself, but every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[brusk]

No, they say they will do no evil, that's different. Actually, that slogan makes me think they are evil and they're just trying to restrain their natural tendencies. Who other than an alcoholic has to publicly say, "I will not drink"?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you for large businesses where the cost per unit is practically nothing I can't see how MSFT can keep hold on the small businesses ( 20 employees) with little or no in-house IT.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[tronbradia]

They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want. As such, they could, if they wished, very easily dig in to our data for company secrets. Now, they say they won't, but all you have is their word on that.

You have their 'word' but it would also ruin their reputation if they were caught, and unless you're emailing around the Minuteman launch codes, I'm pretty confident that Google's reputation is worth more than your data. If you get a security system for your house, the security company would have a very easy time robbing you, but their reputation is worth a lot more to them than whatever is in your house. If you think about it that way, Google has more incentive to keep your data safe than your own IT people do.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[zullnero]

Why do you think people who don't do software for a living would give up something that works?

They don't have any real emotional ties to philosophy around software. And honestly, they couldn't care less how much the company pays for it, as long as it works and they don't have to tinker with it or worry about a lot of outages. To them, Microsoft isn't "evil", it's just this company that makes this thing they use and don't think twice about. These are people who are more concerned about getting the right customers, keeping those customers, their families, their bosses, getting a report out by tomorrow...they frequently don't want to risk change if change doesn't appear to be needed.

The bottom line is this: The only way you're ever going to make inroads into that is to add features and sell those features as something people will absolutely require. They're used to how they save and deal with files...they couldn't care less if it's stored on the "cloud", and a whole lot of them aren't sure about the security of that because they don't understand network security. They feel more secure about things being on a thumb drive in their pocket, unconnected to anything (until they spyware it up when they hook it to their kid's computer). You have to make real features that save people lots of time. And it's hard. Microsoft had a 20 year head start on Google Apps. The best people are able to do is to imitate and offer something for free. Free is easy to see for an admin, but selling free to people who livelihood isn't saving money on infrastructure, but is actually getting things done without outages, takes something that is worth the risk.

I haven't seen a whole lot of risk taking lately by a lot of the "non-Microsoft" community, and it really hurts me to say that. We think a risk is a sneaky backdoor way to do something really slickly behind the scenes, but when it comes to making things more configurable and more responsive to an individual's needs, more able to help them finish their work faster, aside from a few exceptions...most of us completely miss the boat. You aren't going to budge that rock unless you can make a bigger rock.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[mpe]

Ya that's part of the rub with using Google things for a business. They hold all your data. What's more, Google is the ultimate data mining company. They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want. As such, they could, if they wished, very easily dig in to our data for company secrets. Now, they say they won't, but all you have is their word on that.

Since it isn't Google's data "they" don't have much incentive to keep it secure nor are they likely to make sure that "they" don't employ someone with links to your competitors.
Google storing data related to many businesses automatically makes them a target for spys, by they government, commercial or criminal...

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[mpe]

The cost savings of Google Apps would be in not having to host servers.

Against this would be the cost of bandwidth and redundancy in your connection to Google.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like really useful software for marketers.
Shame about the economy and consumer spending...

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[pamar]

Note: I work for a large System Integrator company in my country and I have recently left a project which delivered a corporate intranet built on Sharepoint. The intranet has 3000 users, just so that you get a picture of what kind of systems I work on.

It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.

Yet it is not a "proper" CMS. It fails spectacularly to provide a out-of-the-box solution for documents made of small sets of disparate files (ex.: a financial statement as .doc plus a pdf version and accompanying excel; in order to treat this set as a single identity you have to roll up your own custom implementation).

- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.

An interesting and flexible approach unless you want to build relationship among existing lists. Yes, you have "lookup" but it's fragile (good luck deploying a solution with lookup fields to different sites, for a start) and Sharepoint confines everything into non-communicating sites so if you need a list to centralize, say, a list of departments so that you can reuse it from other subsites... you have to write code for that.

- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.

Didn't play much with it so I can't comment. If it does what it says on the box, it's nice.

- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.

Forget about corporate homogeneous look&feel, or decent collaboration tools like forums, faq lists, or blogs, though. The stuff offered without resorting to third party solutions is pathetical.

- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.

We used forums, mostly. They are horrible and very feature-limited.

- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.

And forget setting up any meaningful relationship among the data unless you wrote code yourself.

Also, Sharepoint/Exchange integration has so

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given what most users of Sharepoint and Outlook I've encountered use it for, that should be office "work". Making Excel work as a database isn't real work, it's DOING IT WRONG.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[derrida]

What's next then? Banks holding all your money?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[orngjce223]

Isn't that what FOSS is for?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Sleepy]

>What's more, Google is the ultimate data mining company. They have tools like no one else for looking through vast amounts of data to find what they want.

Please clarify. Do you KNOW that Google mines "your" hosted email? I don't think they do in the way most would take your statement as saying.

Google can show you ads based on foundkeywords, but that's Javascript code running in your browser, and it's done in a black box sort of way.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[kamakiri]

Incidentally in the above post, IE stands for Internet Explorer, not id est. SharePoint doesn't play well with Firefox, Opera or Chrome - another lock-in.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[FlyingBishop]

No, their slogan is in fact "don't be evil." It doesn't actually say anything about taking evil actions.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Shamenaught]

Ah, I had forgotten google were offering wave for people to run on their own servers. If someone can modify Wave to act as an in-place replacement for an exchange server (converting emails into waves and so on) then I think a lot of people might be sold on it. Whether storing data on Google's servers is a real threat or not, it certainly strikes me that people on here perceive it as a threat. As perceived threats are the real barrier to adoption, removing it might tip the balance for some companies.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[westlake]

Making Excel work as a database isn't real work, it's DOING IT WRONG.

It's a hack. "Good enough for government work." Using a familiar and easily accessible tool to solve a relatively simple problem.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[TheNarrator]

Three Cheers for Zimbra! It kept us out of the Exchange/Outlook/Windows lock-in tar pit and everybody at my company is happy with it. Yes we did pay for it. Yes it was worth paying for.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[bpprice]

Interesting. I have never, ever seen a SharePoint setup that worked for users very well, and seen a high abandonment rate. I would like to see what it is "supposed" to look like. My current company's SharePoint site is a disorganized disaster that frankly serves very little purpose, really. The higher-ups try to use it, but it is rarely up-to-date or relevant. And the search is a mess. Count me as "don't get it" about any positive value to SharePoint.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the lockin generated by the Exchange/Outlook combo is very deep. But then the limitations become aparent when you want to do something without a Windows device. But is is difficult to find anything that integrates mail, contact and calendaring as easily and simply as Outlook and Exchange. What it really needs are some standards based hooks for apps to use rather than proprietary MAPI, and these are starting to appear, but are still feature crippled or not trivial to setup and secure.
Interestingly, Apple has one of the easiest mail/calendar/contact systems to setup to compete with a single server Exchange environment, but a huge chunk of the target market wont be able to break the rest of the Office/Windows lock in from their users and businesses easily.
Groupwise is getting pretty good too, and does have the advantage of running on Windows, Linux or Netware, but again the eDirectory model will be very foreign to many businesses, so inertia will keep Exchange dominant for a long time.

Also Exchanges enterprise and redundancy features are now finally getting really good, if only hey would open up the client side, but of course, MS will never do that willingly. All of the other mail systems are forced to be standards compliant as they don't own the clients the way MS does.

For myself though, breaking the MS Office dependency was the hardest part, now free of it, I can use any system I want. Currently running a SLES10 server with cyrus imap for mail, but lacking integrated calendaring and contacts, so I just put OS X server on a Mac Mini. This is fantasticly easy to setup, and integrated well with my existing LDAP directory.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Mista2]

Sharepoint does nothing that other web based collaboration systems haven't done for the last 10 years, but unlike most of those others it has good basic functionality out of the box and doesn't require much tweaking, however, you better have MS Office installed for most of the collaboration to work seamlessly. 8) There is the tie in again keeping the Windows OS on desks

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Attila Dimedici]

I see two posts that talk about "serious deficiencies" in Sharepoint. Yet neither of them suggests a superior alternative. Please recommend what software package you would use in place of Sharepoint.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[pamar]

I see two posts that talk about "serious deficiencies" in Sharepoint. Yet neither of them suggests a superior alternative. Please recommend what software package you would use in place of Sharepoint.

I am currently working on yet another Intranet Portal. This time it will be Liferay+Alfresco. Not sure if it will prove "a superior alternative" or just have a different set of limitations/problems. If you are interested drop me a line in a couple of months, maybe.

Can't vouch for the other poster, but in my case I wasn't saying that there are "superior alternatives" out there. It was just to point out that Sharepoint, on paper, looks like a great solution to a lot of problems. In reality, it isn't without lots of custom code, and the deployment phase looks overdesigned and buggy. It also shows a severe case of XMLitis without any practical advantage to show for it.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[fluffernutter]

Companies trust their critical data and resources to other companies all the time... There are companies who specialize in storing or destroying massive quantities of hard copy documents for instance, not to mention courier or security companies.

You just disproved your whole case, the key word is TRUST which apparently doesn't have a place in the business world.

My company has strict policies to ensure NO hard drive leaves the site with data. Trusting someone else with business communications is foolhardy.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah so basically what your saying is that its a shitty implementation of a WIKI, and is not nearly as good as Twiki, Dokuwiki etc..

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[codekavi]

You have a point. Does Google consider any non-google data storage company trustworthy enough to store their search algorithm code?

If Google doesn't find a single company they can trust enough for that, why should they expect others to do the same?

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[SpooForBrains]

I know this is nitpicky, but "Google isn't evil" and "They said so" in the same line? Surely therefore Google *aren't evil.

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's not their slogan. The phrase appears in a couple of places on their corporate description page, not very prominently. I don't know who first spotted it there and gave birth to the belief that it's Google Inc's credo and holy mission. Maybe a couple geeks felt sentimental that day and wanted to have a megacorp champion? (See the far beyond reasonable IBM loving at Groklaw's forum during the SCO case.)

Re:Exchange-Outlook-SharePoint, baby!

[Bert64]

Internal communication perhaps, but how much important business communication goes over the internet with no encryption whatsoever?

I would place far more trust in a company that i have a legally binding contract with, than with some middle man providers of network transit or dns who have the ability to intercept email traffic.

Market it to Notes users

[chiph]

They'll change in a heartbeat -- anything .. Anything! to get away from Notes.

Chip H.

Re:Market it to Notes users

[LibertineR]

Nope. Notes users are like abused women. They really believe that this time, everything will be okay, if they can only FORGIVE....

Re:Market it to Notes users

[gander666]

Wow, you nailed it...

Re:Market it to Notes users

[hibiki_r]

Notes is heaven compared to the 'powers' of Groupwise.

Re:Market it to Notes users

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on now. Notes isn't all that bad. Sure it has it's issues. It's slow. It's bloated. It doesn't display things correctly. It's complex. It's slow. The scheduling interface leaves a lot to be desired. The address book is pretty clunky. It's slow. The client is a piece of crap. But really, it's not that bad...

Re:Market it to Notes users

[PenguinGuy]

Windows users are like abused women. They really believe that this time, everything will be okay, if they can only FORGIVE....

There fixed that for ya

Re:Market it to Notes users

[TheLongshot]

Heh, we cheered at a previous company when we finally changed from Notes to Exchange for our company E-Mail. It kept going for years because the man in charge liked the encryption functionality of Notes, apparently. No matter that it was a PITA for the rest of us to use.

Re:Market it to Notes users

[JAlexoi]

I've seen "enterprise solution" Exchange+Outlook suck mire than Notes. And the fact that Note, now, is an all in one collaboration solution has it's positive effects.
I do use Notes 8 and see very little issues with it.

Re:Market it to Notes users

[tcr]

Hmm... well, I'm not sure that people really use the Notes client that much anymore.
For klunky email, sure.... but for groupware, Domino web apps have been more popular for over a decade.
Around 1995, Apache was integrated into Notes to become Lotus Domino.
Compared to LAMP development : The DHTML/CSS/Javascript stuff is the same. LotusScript agents are used instead of PHP/Python/Perl modules. The backend is a BTree derived non-relational DB.
 
In my experience, the biggest problem for that stuff was companies trying to use it for purposes where a relational DB would have been a really, really good idea.
 
Looking at the tech that's emerging, I would consider Google Wave to be the real Notes killer (which is probably why the Groovy Mr. Ozzie seemed to have a bug up his ass about it). Wave Robots extend the concept of Notes agents.
 
[Disclaimer : have been a consultant for IBM/Lotus]

Re:Market it to Notes users

[Hymer]

Have you forotten that we now can choose a RDB as backend ? We do have DB2 integrated in Domino.

Re:Market it to Notes users

[crunzh]

No thats the notes administrators.. The users would jump in a heartbeat if given the chance...

Re:Market it to Notes users

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll change in a heartbeat -- anything .. Anything! to get away from Notes.

We did. And as much as it sucks, it's still an improvement.

In other news

[Joce640k]

Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.

Re:In other news

[Norsefire]

I wouldn't say that it's Windows inertia it's more that- ... wait ... what's an "operating system"? You mean there's computers that say something other than "Windows" when they're booted?

Re:In other news

[hedwards]

You mean Internet Explorer?

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.

Once I can boot into a new Linux install and have my four monitors come up without having to manually edit files and search forums for answers....then you can call Linux a proper operating system.

Re:In other news

[jbuk]

Booting? Is that like when you press the big blue button on front of the Hard Drive?

Re:In other news

[Hurricane78]

You say that as if Windows were an operating system. That is like saying that a Bobby Car is fit and eligible for the 24 hours of Le Mans race. ^^

Re:In other news

[Me! Me! 42]

Is Windows Inertia (TM) the name the name Microsoft plans to release Windows 7 under?

Re:In other news

[darkmeridian]

This is an unrealistic argument. If anything, it's Windows inertia amongst hardware manufacturers that keep Linux away from the desktop. They don't provide drivers for Linux, and Linux doesn't want binary blobs, so hardware support for Linux lags behinds Windows. Moreover, Linux just isn't a good operation system for the average user. Computers are ubiquitous nowadays. It's no longer the case that only fanboys should be able to use computers. Windows works. Once in a while, it breaks, but generally, it works, and the average guy can figure it out. Linux requires a bunch of file editing and command lines just to do mundane tasks. You want to apt-get a package? Well, you have to edit the .conf to put in the proper servers before you apt-get it. The user interface is inconsistent. And that's how things are supposed to work in Linux. Imagine when stuff breaks.

I use Linux on my netbook, FreeBSD-based FreeNAS on my NAS, and a Linux Apache server. I also have Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7 RC1 x64. For a desktop, in my experience, Windows 7 x64 probably offers the best experience as far as things being intuitive, and just working. (I haven't used MacOS, though.)

Re:In other news

[westlake]

Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.

Microsoft and Apple both began with the stand-alone PC - and both moved as quickly as possible - and as far as possible - beyond the hobbyist - market.

Apple sells an upscale urban lifestyle. Microsoft solid middle class values. It's no coincidence that Microsoft has a solid anchorage in business and the Mac in the arts.

The "proper OS" is defined by the needs and values of its user.

The Windows desktop is multicore and increasingly 64 bit. The OS Vista today and Win 7 tomorrow.

Combined market share about 25% of the consumer desktop.

The geek will rant and rave but the core tech is solid. The OEM systems full-featured and very affordable.

Linux is the generic netbook with 512 MB of RAM that sells for $250-$300 and chokes when you leave two tabs open in Firefox.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, it's Windows inertia amongst hardware manufacturers that keep Linux away from the desktop. They don't provide drivers for Linux, and Linux doesn't want binary blobs, so hardware support for Linux lags behinds Windows.

Drivers aren't the issue...any of the big hardware manufacturers hold enough sway over their suppliers to demand drivers for Linux. Binary drivers aren't a problem either since OEMs don't need to have the drivers built into the distribution they use, they can just pre-install them.

But what doesn't exist for Linux is all the crap that comes pre-installed on new computers. That's a major source of revenue for hardware manufacturers that they don't want to give up.

Re:In other news

[quetwo]

I would disagree with this... Many hardware manufactures will not develop drivers for the Linux/Unix based platforms because they don't want to spend the R&D for a driver that could potentially be very complicated, for just a niche market. This is the same reason why they don't make OS/2 or BeOS -- they are niche products. A company will often make a decision -- do they delay a product for an additional 4 weeks in market time and make the Linux drivers, or do they ignore the potential 2% of the market? In the server world, the market share is much, much higher, which is why server-class products always have Linux drivers available for them.

The BLOB discussion is one that is pretty interesting too. Many Linux enthusiast don't realize that hardware manufactures have lots of patents that they've applied for, and often have to deal with purchasing rights to certain patents to create their products. When you have to deal in that world, you can't just give away the source code, especially if it deals with any of those technologies. They are still allowing interop with their products for these OSes, but they also protect their IP.

Re:In other news

[budgenator]

Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.

Once I can boot into a new Linux install and have my four monitors come up without having to manually edit files and search forums for answers....then you can call Linux a proper operating system.

Once I can boot into a new Windows install and have my four monitors come up without having to manually registry files and search internet for drivers....then you can call Windows a poser operating system.

Too much in too little time

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Google is trying to explode onto the scene with products and services that compete head to head with some very deeply ingrained technologies. Sometimes, like with the ChromeOS, it's like they are trying to compete against themselves.

What they will find is that earning a good reputation through customer satisfaction is the way to win over customers. Trying to bowl them over with competing products is almost never effective.

Google Search didn't kill Yahoo! search in one fell swoop.
Gmail didn't become dominant (and it still isn't) against Hotmail/Live Mail right away.
Google Maps was able to leverage the Google Search engine, but still has stiff competition from Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest.

But lately, they've been producing new products at an astonishing rate. Taking the shotgun approach of seeing which spaghetti sticks to the wall, Google doesn't seem to have a larger view of what they want to do with their technical talent. This is going to be their downfall in the long run as the advertisement-based profit stream slowly dries up.

Re:Too much in too little time

[Insanity Defense]

But lately, they've been producing new products at an astonishing rate. Taking the shotgun approach of seeing which spaghetti sticks to the wall,

Is it really just lately? It is also possible that a lot of these products have been in the pipeline for some time and we see them as they mature to the point of public testing. We may have seen things like GMail and Google maps sooner because they were early starts compared to what is coming out now. It takes time to start and mature a product to even a public beta testing level.

Re:Too much in too little time

[Lennie]

I think this is, because a lot of their services are offered free and they are looking for more profitable businessmodels. Advertisments is their only really profit machine at this point.

Re:Too much in too little time

[Anonymous Coward]

What they will find is that earning a good reputation through customer satisfaction is the way to win over customers. Trying to bowl them over with competing products is almost never effective.

Yeah like Google really gives noone a choice of search engines. And people are forced to use google because... D'UH.

Google Search didn't kill Yahoo! search in one fell swoop.
Gmail didn't become dominant (and it still isn't) against Hotmail/Live Mail right away.
Google Maps was able to leverage the Google Search engine, but still has stiff competition from Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest.

And since when did Google set out to 'kill' Yahoo?

Gmail > Hotmail/Live/whatever it is now.
Yahoo has maps? MapQuest.. never heard of...

Re:Too much in too little time

[Will.Woodhull]

Wow.

I cannot believe that you loaded that metaphorical shotgun with spaghetti and fired it at the wall.

Now clean up your metaphorical mess and don't do that again.

Re:Too much in too little time

[darkmeridian]

Google is attempting to position itself as the data kingpins of the next-generation. Right now, the average consumer is concerned about their privacy. They don't want to host their data on outside servers, etc. But kids nowadays have no such compunctions about posting their entire personal life onto Facebook or Myspace. You have teenagers who have spent their entire lives in the Internet age. They'll grow up with that attitude, then put all their business work onto third-party servers. Google wants to be that server. There is a network effect here so Google has to act fast to seize new ground. It doesn't make sense now, but it will in five years when everyone is running on Google's servers.

Google has taken Microsoft's MO of persistent beta testing. Google releases a product, it sucks, then Google fixes it, then adds more functionality. In a year or two, you have a good product. So Google is reaching all over to get its feet on the ground to start that process with as many products as possible. The end goal is to have a whole suite of interrelated data-related products that are good enough for 95% of the users out there so no one else can break into the Google data hegemony.

Google wants to provide an entire suite so all of your information goes through Google, so no one else can break in and take your data. You have Gmail, with its fast interface and great spam blocking. That naturally extends to Google Calendar. If you want directions, you have Google Maps that takes info from Gmail and Google Calendar and gives it to you. All that info is fed into Google so it can toss up targeted ads for you. Now with Google Voice being deployed, you can seamlessly call contacts who mailed you, or a business close to the destination. Google Street View lets you see where your destination looks like. You can get an ad from Gmail, then buy the product using Google Checkout. When you're on vacation, you can take photos and upload it onto Picasa Web via Picasa. You can tag your friends and location so Google knows where you like to go and who you hang out with. Your info is already on Google. The more products Google has, the less likely you are to take any bit of your data elsewhere. I mean, Flickr is great, but Picasa works so well with Picasa Web! You can easily retouch a photo using "I'm Feeling Lucky" then sync it onto Picasa Web. You can e-mail photos to your friends via Gmail through Picasa. And it's all free! It becomes increasingly hard for a competitor to get into the data business.

I am a small business owner. I have to say that Google has been a godsend. I cannot afford to deploy my own Exchange servers, much less administer one. But with Google Apps, I can push e-mail from my domain on my Blackberry. Third party apps (and now Google new plugin) allow me to sync my Google contacts and calendar onto Outlook and my Blackberry, which I can backup in case Google eats all my data. Google Voice lets me use only one phone number, so I can be selectively available everywhere I want to be available with clients being none the wiser. As the features become more complete, I can see Google penetrating deeper into mid-sized and large-sized businesses. Google has to maintain uptime and reliability, which is a very difficult task. Perhaps that's why they are building so many geographically-separate servers. But for a small business owner who would otherwise would have to do without Blackberry push mail on my domain, or without calendar and contacts syncing, I'm very happy with Google's software suite right now.

Re:Too much in too little time

[mjwx]

Google Maps was able to leverage the Google Search engine, but still has stiff competition from Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest.

Google Map's main competition when it was launched was ESRI's ArcIMS/WMS servers (Internet Mapping Service/Web Mapping Service) as well as other IMS/WMS based on non ESRI products but most were based on ESRI products. Yahoo and MapQuest as well as MS's Virtual Earth offerings were responding to Google.

Where google differed is that it offered pre-prepared imagery to the public either free or at a decent cost (Google have had an interest in satellite imagery long before Google Maps was released, their participation in the GeoEye project for example) and provided a pre-made gateway for that service (all other solutions required you to build your own host). They also had the first decent public mapping gateway combined with a very well integrated an easy to use free public client.

ESRI responded to Google by combining the separate IMS and WMS products into a single product (ArcGIS Server).

Taking the shotgun approach of seeing which spaghetti sticks to the wall,

What most people don't see unless they've worked in the GIS field is that Google has been involved in mapping and imagery for a while now. It's the same with their other offering. Android was not introduced overnight, same with Google Docs/apps. A great deal of behind the scenes work goes on with Google releases and normally a very long public beta to get rid of the bugs before the final product is released.

Re:Too much in too little time

[Anonymous Coward]

Google doesn't seem to have a larger view of what they want to do with their technical talent. This is going to be their downfall in the long run as the advertisement-based profit stream slowly dries up.

Yes, but those kids sure look like they are having fun!

Re:Too much in too little time

[Anonymous Coward]

If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

Same old story, same old song and dance...

[that IT girl]

I believe this is the argument that keeps so many people on Windows and IE, too. This article is informative in that it brings up another example I hadn't thought of before, but when it comes down to it, people just resist change.
I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

{snip}...you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

And that bit there pretty much explains the whole Windows hegemony... Within the last 24 hours, on another non-tech forum, there's a guy who's been getting griefed by a WinXP install. After others suggested Linux, he responded with the (all-too common) "...But I can't run my business-related Win apps on it". Of course, and only after I pointed out to him that he could easily do so via virtualization, he comes clean with the real reason - that it is by his choice he continues to use Windows, which in his own words he refers to as 'the devil he knows'. He has been having these issues for over 2 months now, attempting to get this box running - and this from a guy who coded DB apps for Win98. People are very resistant to change. Most of 'em, it seems, they'd rather suffer. :/

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Kjella]

I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

Not to mention:
2. First contact with reality, your customers will think other missing features are important.
3. Get a revenue stream going, don't squeeze for profit just realize money = developers.

It's like many other not-so-great standards, just by getting enough money and momentum behind it you can fix it later. Just run with it and eventually you'll get to where everyone links to youtube because everyone links to youtube. The same really goes for software, you want what's popular because that's what is easy to find people for, easy to find solutions for, basicly finding out how to do things differently every time is hard. I'm sure many here have thought "Sigh, that's the Windows solution. Where's the Mac/Linux solution???".

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista did the dirty work, and Win7 will get the merit. It sounds familiar?

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

Yeah, just like all those MP3 players that came out before the iPod...

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[that IT girl]

Ssssshhh. Steve Jobs sold his soul to Satan for that one.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[BitZtream]

Some of us realize that when you really start using things for more than email and web browsing, that you're going to have 'these problems' with every OS.

If you (or anyone else) thinks that Linux doesn't have these same issues then you don't actually use it for anything serious. Nor is it just Linux, its *BSD, Solaris, AIX, Windows, Linux, EVERY OS HAS ISSUES. Stop pretending Linux is special because you don't see thousands and thousands of blog posts, mailing list posts ects about Linux issues. For every pissed off Windows user posting to a forum there are several happy ones. There are more Windows posts because there are more users.

This idea that Linux is 'better and less prone to problems' is silly. Computers (here it comes) are like cars. Everyone make and model is different in some way, but in general they ALL have the same issues, pretending that your teams OS doesn't is just silly and ignorant. Its a sign you don't have a grasp on reality or your teams place in the world.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

Sorry, BitZ - Been using computers since '83. I personally have been "MS Free" for almost 10 years, I run my own IT business, and as such work on Windows machines almost daily, and Macs about proportionately to market share. I know what the respective consumer OS'es are capable of, and where they lack. Nowhere in my post above, nor in the thread at the other forum (that you have not read), did I tell the guy (or you) that Linux is all pink ponies and chocolate candy canes.

That said, I will say this - in my experience, which is quite a lot though not as much as some of the greybeards who post here, it is much easier to run and maintain a Linux/*nix system than it is a Windows system, on a day to day basis, especially when you are using it for things far beyond email and browsing. In that, I feel you are quite mistaken. But, of course, YMMV, and that doesn't bother me a bit. There's room for all "teams", as you put it. In fact, I kind of like the other teams - they pay my bills. :)

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Zak3056]

"...But I can't run my business-related Win apps on it". Of course, and only after I pointed out to him that he could easily do so via virtualization

So the solution to problems with Windows is to virtualize Windows? Exactly how does that solve anything? You're still left with whatever bug is biting you, but now you have performance overhead from the virtualization layer, have to maintain whatever you're using as the host OS, and you still get to pay the Microsoft tax.

I'm really not seeing it.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[fluffernutter]

Well, I'm basically a linux guy but I have to play devil's advocate here. Say this guy is named Harry.

Scenario 1: Harry tries to install Windows based business server with apps for months and cannot do it.
What his co-workers say: Poor Harry, that machine will just not cooperate with him. Stupid windows.

Scenario 2: Harry tries to install linux server with adapted linux app and it takes him weeks.
What his co-workers say: Harry thinks he's a tech bigshot and used linux and now he's having trouble. What an idiot.

Everyone who works in an average workplace knows this is true. I'd rather take scenario 1 myself.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

His problem is stemming from the over-complicated and over-long re-installation of the OS, Service Packs, accompanying WGA woes, etc... Thus, my idea for a solution: If he'll run a virtual installation of XP on Linux, once set up it can be cloned. Then, when the next time to reinstall comes (and it always does - that is common advice for a slow/buggy WinXP installation - right? Whether or not it is needed, that is what most people will hear when asking for help...), it will take minutes, instead of hours or days. And he won't be totally without the use of his computer in the meanwhile.

He could also use Ghost or some other cloning app, of course. After he gets the OS set up - but that is what is giving him a hard time. Yet, he's only 20-30 minutes away from having a functional, working K/Ubuntu/Mint system, if he would try some 'change', and not just blindly object while repeating the "Win is the business standard" mantra.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[westlake]

I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

Being first to take the high dive is a risk.

Your product and your market are not well defined. Competitors learn from your mistakes.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. Microsoft is rarely the first to do anything. Spreading quickly is important, though, and one of the quickest ways to spread is to bundle your product with something else.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

I generally don't recommend Linux to people that I cannot directly help with their transition/adaptation. In this case, however, others recommended it first. I gave him the virtualization idea, along with some tips on where to find help like his local LUG, online forums, etc..., only after he declaimed that Linux could not do what he needed. I showed him there was a way. I doubt he'll take it.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again sure I can virtualize my xp, vista or windows 7 on a linux but then what else is there to linux?
Sure I can have linux run virtual instances of windows and close it afterwards. I could run games, office, emails, etc but at the end of the day large part of the population isnt going to be programming something. Linux pretty much has been for programmer.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Zak3056]

hus, my idea for a solution: If he'll run a virtual installation of XP on Linux, once set up it can be cloned. ...
He could also use Ghost or some other cloning app, of course. After he gets the OS set up - but that is what is giving him a hard time.

As you note, something like Ghost, Acronis, hell, the low end imaging tools built into Microsoft's server products (RIS or WDS) already solve the problem--so why complicate things by running Windows as a guest OS? You note that he can't image the machine until he actually gets it built out, but assuming he moves to a VM, he still has to build out the image. You keep talking about people being resistant to change, thus not moving away from Microsoft, but your proposed solution is still Microsoft centric--sure, you've abstracted it a layer, but it's still there, and it's still the host for the applications that the user is actually going to use. You've added cost, complexity, and a performance penalty, but actually accomplished nothing of value.

Now, if you were going to suggest WINE as a solution (and his apps would work under it) then yes, you're introducing what might be a positive change. But all you're really suggesting right now is change for change's sake... and frankly, that's a fail.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

I understand what you are saying, and agree to a certain extent. Yes, he will have to build out the install, regardless of how he does it.

Doing that as a .vdi does add in a layer, but that is not necessarily or only a Bad Thing. It is one that can be useful, too, especially if your vOS happens to be the most-targeted OS out there. ;) Regarding good performance and assuming a 'typical user', any fairly recent machine might need at most to add some RAM to achieve that; XP runs very smooth and quickly on machines with 1.5G of RAM for 'normal' computing purposes.

Yes, the solution is MS-centric, BUT... at the same time it is expanding the guys tech horizon a bit. :) IF Linux is indeed functionally superior, then he won't help but be able to notice that during use. Experiencing that, he might be inspired to learn more.

I did not introduce WINE into the equation when corresponding with him; that is a possibility and if it works well, could very well be the best possible solution.

At any rate, like I noted below, I made the point to him mostly because he was simply repeating the "I can't run X_Windows_application on Linux..." mantra, and my whole intention was only to point out to him that that was not in fact the case. His immediate response was to demonstrate that he was resistant to any change, preferring to stay with what he already knows, without even attempting to try what might work out to be a benefit to him. We never got to the point where I could do up a quote for him based on a proper consultation... ;)

Thanks for the discussion!

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[ignavus]

Still using VisiCalc and WordStar, are you?

PS They were very good in their time.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[Anonymous Coward]

So wait, installing XP, SP3, & letting it download a few patches is a 2 month problem? A user like that is going to have problems with any OS. Unless by WGA woes you mean it's seeing bootleg MS software & not letting stuff run.

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[sjames]

That's the real issue. I have consulted for small businesses. When (inevitably), Outlook burped and misplaced 100% of their email AGAIN (it happens to them every month or two), I suggested they try Thunderbird. Note that they didn't have Exchange server and never used any feature of Outlook except reading and sending email. They DO use their inboxes as a history and todo list and typically keep important contact info in emails in their inbox (or occasiobnally another folder).

Their conclusion: Thunderbird is 'too hard' to use 'because the buttons look different'. So, in order to not have to get used to different icons, they'd rather lose all of their contact information customer history, todo lists, etc and start over every few months!

So I had them sign that they were staying with Outlook against advice and fully expected to lose all of their emails as a result. Next time they lost their email and wanted to complain, I sent a copy of the document to them. They stopped yelling then. I recovered much of the email but lost the metadata like read or replied to (by importing the mail into thunderbird and pushing it to an IMAP server). They still wanted to stay with Outlook.

I'm convinced that the best move Apple could make to expand the popularity of the iPhone even more is have it randomly deliver painful shocks and scramble the contacts list. People seem to like it!

Not willing to give up functionality??

[magisterx]

it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides

Isn't that the same as saying that companies like the functionality and are willing to pay for it?

I could certainly understand the point if it had said that they are not willing to lose the current interface or not willing to lose the training time already put in, but saying they are not willing to lose the functionality is the same as saying it is good software, they are willing to pay for it, and they are not willing to switch until someone can come up with something actually better.

Re:Not willing to give up functionality??

[Phroggy]

Yeah, saying that nothing but Exchange has the features we want is not the same as saying we can't be bothered to learn how to use something else.

Somebody else mentioned that sharing a folder (with subfolders) is a pain in the ass with GMail. That's a great example. I've done it with Outlook/Exchange; at an ISP I used to work for, the abuse@ mail came to a shared inbox that several people had access to, and we could do things like mark messages as read/unread, create temporary folders to sort certain messages into, etc. and everyone on my team could see what everyone else was doing. This is really simple functionality; how easy is it to set that up with your mail server?

Microsoft shell game

[chrylis]

The most exasperating irony of this situation (and its siblings of getting people to switch off of MS Office and Windows) is that each new version of Windows (and, recently Office) is a drastically new product anyway. Businesses say they don't want to retrain employees (and schools say that they have to train for MS products)--and then when XP or Vista or Win7 rolls around, they retrain anyway but still claim that familiarity with the interface is the reason they won't consider alternatives.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[jimicus]

All this droning on about training but I've never seen a company offer any training on anything other than custom applications that are specific to the organisation. Windows and Office training may have happened years ago when computers were new but today...

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference here is the level of training required. For example, our company does a 1 hour required training for folks moving from XP to Vista. This is basically to show them the (easily mastered) differences in UI and to introduce them to the new features that folks don't always pick up and run with on their own (like the integrated search, especially for the start menu and the different - but better - way to connect to VPN).

Switching them to a whole new OS like OSX or Red Hat or something would be a drastically different training program and would NOT be some little 1 hour overview course. The reality is that the training would be a much bigger burden - but we can't even look at doing that because the number and complexity of Line Of Business applications would cost so much to rewrite (or in many cases attempt to cajole our vendors into rewriting).

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be using a definition of "drastically" with which I am unfamiliar. I'll give you Office 2007; the Ribbon is a fairly substantial departure from the traditional menus of previous versions. But the changes from XP to Vista/7 are mostly inconsequential. Aside from UAC (which is more of a development issue than an end user issue), the only noticeable changes were in the main UI elements (Start Menu, Task Bar, Control Panel). All the same functionality is still there; it's just been shuffled around a bit. I don't think any reasonable person would call that "drastic".

Re:Microsoft shell game

[CAIMLAS]

I have a friend who is making some decent money right now doing presentation and one-on-one MS Office 2007 training. Yes, 2 years after it was released.

People still need to re-train, especially when there is a massive paradigm shift in the interface (pre-Office2007 to O2k7 is about as much change as UNIX was from VMS) and when they're not technologically savvy. Something like O2k7 takes even a professional Windows IT person (someone who lives and breathes software GUI and MS products) several months to get "comfortable".

Re:Microsoft shell game

[jimicus]

I apologise. Clearly I was wrong - some companies are clearly training their staff.

I still don't think it's very many though.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Blakey Rat]

Office has significantly changed once in its entire history. Once. Windows, on the other hand, has actually changed ZERO times, unless you count trivial cosmetic changes, in which its changed twice in its entire history. Twice.

In short, you're full of shit.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[darkmeridian]

I think it's the backend that keeps everyone stuck onto Microsoft. Office 2007 was completely different from Office 2003. However, it was also much more stable, and faster. But I have a feeling that the backend infrastructure (Exchange servers, etc.) was the same. Windows Vista and 7 come with deployment and administration tools that IT groups are familiar with. So even though the end user is given a completely different change, the underlying backend technologies stay similar enough to keep people on Microsoft.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[brusk]

For some values of {changed|significantly|Office|Windows|shit}. Have you tried using pre-Windows versions of Word? Windows 1.0/3.1/95? There were significant changes (for example, Unicode support is a significant development as is, oh, I dunno, multitasking.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Blakey Rat]

For some values of {changed|significantly|Office|Windows|shit}. Have you tried using pre-Windows versions of Word? Windows 1.0/3.1/95? There were significant changes

You're going back lifetimes. And being an pedantic asshole.

for example, Unicode support is a significant development as is, oh, I dunno, multitasking.

And yet neither of those changes require re-training.

Just admit you were full of shit so we can move on.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[lwsimon]

Really? I remember the introduction of "My Documents" and "Program Files" in Win95, then "My Documents/My (Photos|Videos|Porn)" in XP, and now a more Unix-like "/Users//(Documents|Photos|Videos|Porn)" in Vista. I'm still getting programs add all kinda of dumb folders under my home directory in Vista - Firefox downloads default to ~/Documents/Downloads, while IE defaults to ~/Downloads, etc.

Windows UI may not have significantly changed in its layout, but there have been significant changes in file structure over the years. For people who barely know how to find their files in the first place, this is a big issue.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Blakey Rat]

Those changes aren't "significant" those changes are "trivial." You guys are really, really stretching to prove the grandparent's retarded point.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[brusk]

If that's going back lifetimes you're 15 years old. That's not a lifetime for some of us. If you'd said Windows/Office hadn't changed dramatically in the past decade, I'd agree. If you're going to make a point about history, you should be clear about the range you're talking about.

In fact, both those developments did require significant retraining. Unicode changed how multilanguage support and input systems (especially for non-European languages) worked, and multitasking was a completely new paradigm for people who hadn't experienced it before, and took getting used to (one simple example is the clipboard, the idea that you could copy data from one app to another).

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait...hold the phone. From what i've read Vista went no where, in business. I'm sitting here in a large multi national company typing on a Windows 2000 machine (with promises of xp soon!) with office 2003...

What are you talking about with the companies jumping ship to vista and new(er) MS products?

Hell, I'm suprised their McAfee's is up to date... we got hit with conficker so many not...?... lol

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Anonymous Coward]

That's for damn sure... The small company I work for, as a support tech, had been on Office2003, the IT manager decided since we bought Office2007 licenses and were using the older version under those licenses, he wanted us to upgrade to 2007. Hearing this, I asked if the IT dept could upgrade immediately so we could be somewhat up to speed on it before the rollout.. Answer was initially "no", finally about 2 weeks before the rollout was to begin, we got the goahead to install it on our own machines.. I feel like an idiot when a user asks about a new feature, and I have to tell them I'm learning it along with them. Plus the only training is a link on the homepage to the MS flash-based "training" stuff... I keep telling myself.. "At least I have a job....."

Re:Microsoft shell game

[hitmark]

That may well be thanks to the massive home training people get by running the same software on their home pc as their office workstation...

Re:Microsoft shell game

[BitZtream]

I'm not sure I've seen anyone who needed 'training' for an Office upgrade. Office upgrades are basically skinning changes, and have been since Office 95. Office 2k7 was a rather drastic change, but its still basically a skin change.

Vista was a bad one. I, a rather technical person could not get used to it and won't use it. I however love Win7 compared to Vista. It is an acceptable upgrade. Of course, I prefer XP over Win2k so I'm part of that group of people who like 'pretty and cute' in their OS, not 'ugly and as efficient as possible'. Either one is acceptable, not knocking the people who like the Win2k style interface, it just doesn't do it for me anymore, looks old and out dated.

I don't see anyone needing training for Win7 upgrades except for IT personal who have to deal with bugs, and maybe a few minutes explaining the task bar differences, but there really won't be much training there either.

Why do you think it will require a bunch of retraining? Do you need retraining every time you change your KDE or GTK skin? I can understand if you do, some of them are outright horrible.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[BitZtream]

Yes, and I know people who by eXtenze and Bottled Water. There are always going to be idiots in the world, you have to throw them out of the equation unless you are in the business of taking advantage of those idiots.

IT people have a harder time 'getting comfortable' because they generally know the products better than the average user. IT people generally have to know everything about the product because each one of their users will actually use different parts. IT people also generally take pride in knowing how to do stuff, so they are much more into how the software works.

Joe the Secretary just needs to know how to use his company press release templates in Word. Gina the marketing drone needs to know how to do mail merge. The accounting group needs to know how to get the new version of excel to pull in some data from the old version of access until it gets converted, Dave the IT guy has to know it all so he can explain it to Joe, Gina and the accounting group when asked. Sadly, a two day training course doesn't teach you everything, it just hits the high points in a hurry.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Nefarious Wheel]

There was a very old comment made by Bill Gates when Microsoft was on the rise. "If we don't obsolete our own products, someone else will." Say what you will, that's a winning marketing philosophy today. It may not be to everyone's benefit (and in fact often mightily sucks, if you want a stable environment) but it's a good one for the shareholders if they can get away with it. Embedded systems? No. Consumer electronics? Shouldn't have to ask.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[rrohbeck]

That's why many corporations are still on Office 2003 and see no reason to change.
A supplier recently dared sending a spreadsheet in .xlsx format. I think he learned his lesson from the barrage of replies asking "WTF?" :)

Re:Microsoft shell game

[ignavus]

Of course the lack of training shows.

We had some staff talk about "temporarily deleting documents". After our heads stopped spinning, we asked them what they meant. They said they were deliberately deleting files that they wanted to keep, and then later on undeleting them from the "trash can"... as a way of hiding the files for a while.

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Microsoft shell game

[lwsimon]

Trivial to us geeks, sure - but the Office 2K7's ribbon is trivial to us geeks too.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Blakey Rat]

You're seriously saying that completely redesigning the Office UI is on the exactly same level as changing the folder from "My Documents" to just "Documents?" You're so far away from "logic" and "reason" right now, I don't even know how to steer you back onto the right path.

Look, Windows hasn't. fucking. changed. in ages. Look, I've used Macs, I've used Linux, I've used Windows. OS X and Linux change more in 2 releases than Windows has in its entire history. It's a ridiculous argument.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[lwsimon]

That's because you're thinking like a "geek" - changing where all of the user's files are is a big change. BIG. We're talking about people who call IE "my internet" - as in, "My internet isn't working!".

I typically use ArchLinux myself. Awesome for a while, but I've found myself using KDE4 more and more. Now that I have the hardware to run it, I don't see why I should use a TWM unless I'm coding.

Re:Microsoft shell game

[Blakey Rat]

Believe me, I'm not thinking like a geek-- or if I am, please slam my head in a locker or something. If you read my posts, you know I'm probably one of the biggest advocates for the end-user who posts to this site. I honestly and truly believe that those changes a trivial-- real neophytes don't bother doing anything but typing in a file name, they don't move files into different folders. Whether the default save position is named "My Documents" or "Documents" doesn't matter to them; it's trivial.

I typically use ArchLinux myself. Awesome for a while, but I've found myself using KDE4 more and more. Now that I have the hardware to run it, I don't see why I should use a TWM unless I'm coding.

And I'm not enough of a geek to know anything about ArchLinux, or what a "TWM" is. (Two Womenly Men? The Worst Mayonnaise? No clue. Bing says it's a company that makes electronic fuel injection parts.)

Appliances are the way to go!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for Google to buy Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/ Bundle it with some hw to make appliance like google search appliance. Then provide some local data storage for cache and expand backup/archive/recover over the net by their datacenters. Streamline deployment, management, scaleability and encrypt data stored in backend for security.

Wouldn't be too bad, really.

Re:Appliances are the way to go!

[Lennie]

Only if Yahoo would sell it, because Yahoo bought it some time ago. And buying Yahoo wasn't something Google was allowed to do.

Re:Appliances are the way to go!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo already bought Zimbra, a couple years ago.

People WILL change...

[LibertineR]

.... but only upon being faced with a demonstrable improvement. Case in point: I have yet to encounter anyone resisting a move away from Vista after sitting through a Windows 7 demo. I expect Vista marketshare to be around 1 percent by the end of 2010.

Re:People WILL change...

[that IT girl]

I'm inclined to say Vista is an exception, since it was precluded by something better and hasn't been around long enough for people to get set in their ways with it. However, I do get your point. I'm looking forward to Win7 myself. I skipped the whole Vista debacle, though.

Re:People WILL change...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that XP is not superior to Vista after using both for a while. I had been using Vista for a year and gotten used to its different ways of doing things. Now, due to some limitations of certain software I need to run, I am back to XP. Vista is the better OS for most users, I feel.

Vista has a better user action learning system. I need to make use of the multilingual features of Windows, so the IME is one of my most frequently used tools. In XP I find myself fighting the IME all the time. It either wants to put me in the wrong default language or it suggests incorrect characters during input. Vista learned quickly what my usage patterns were and molded the IME functionality to fit me within a week of use.

Other things like builtin desktop search are very nice compared to the clumsy add-on required for XP.

Sure, performance for things like Control Panel and Add/Remove programs is terrible in Vista. And its penchant for not searching for a wifi network until pushed is irksome. But in all, it is a very usable OS with definite advantages over XP.

I can't wait to see Win7 if all the claims about it are true.

Re:People WILL change...

[Henry V .009]

I've had Windows 7 on my desktop for a while (currently RTC). I really don't notice too many differences between it and Vista except for some superficial UI changes. On the other hand, Vista was more or less a fine operating system. It's not Vista that was shit, it was the IT media that was shit (but everyone already knew that).

Re:People WILL change...

[Tenebrousedge]

No, Vista was shit when it came out. There were several serious bugs, one involving file copying, performance issues, incredible amounts of driver issues (graphics drivers especially), and the whole 'vista ready' mess.

I'll grant that the situation is much improved now.

Whether or not IT media is shit, the initial reports on Vista were extremely positive, from the betas to shortly after the release. I presume Microsoft paid for a good many of those, but the point is more that the bad press started after Vista had been released and in use for a while.

Re:People WILL change...

[Bert64]

That's the point tho...
XP replaced 98/ME (from the consumer's perspective), and offered a significant improvement over it, prompting them to change...
Vista replaced XP, but did not offer a significant improvement and in many cases was actually worse...
People resisted changing to vista, but by the time 7 comes out they will often have little choice.

Replacing Outlook and Office are the key apps

[prometheon123]

About 7 years ago, I did a Linux desktop pilot with a large ad firm in Chicago. It would have reduced their costs, improved reliability, etc. However, the IT Director at the time did everything she could to work against me. She wouldn't enable IMAP on the server, which made switching off of Notes impossible. Further more, OpenOffice was 1.0 and the compatibility with Office docs was terrible, and it's not a whole helluva lot better today. Almost every other app had a viable open source replacement, but the Office suite was the Achilles heel. If the open source community could get a full replacement for the Office suite, especially Outlook, it wouldn't be as hard to switch to Linux on the desktop. Maybe now that Oracle owns OpenOffice, we'll get better compatibility with Office files. However, compatibility isn't enough as "me too" products don't do very well in the market place. We need something that has enough "killer features" compelling enough to switch off of Office and Windows.

Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[localroger]

If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.

Re:Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[Registered Coward v2]

If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.

I think it's a little different with Outlook - the tasks are much simpler (read and respond to email, manage a calender) for most users - many of who probably on use one or two task bar items (New, Reply, print) or tabs (Day, week, Month) so the switch wont entail learning a lot of new menus. So even if you change the overall interface as long as the on-screen view is relatively familiar people won't care.

Word, otoh, is much more of a user intensive experience; requiring the use of more commands, even if some are used infrequently. As a result, interface changes have a much greater impact.

Re:Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument get's overused and is not actually that big a deal. The ribbon menustyle does not change the logical interface, just the (menu) structure where you find them. All the user actions remain the same, they are just located elsewhere. And since Office menus are so cluttered with all the features, ribbon is actually much easier especially if you're not a poweruser.

Re:Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[Nimey]

Not at all true. Plenty of installations of Office 97 and 2000 are still out there.

Re:Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[ignavus]

Yet it will have that familiar Windows logo on it.

Re:Microsoft may just fix this themselves

[DougWebb]

Outlook 2007 was the first place I saw the new Ribbon interface, and though it looked odd at first, I got used to it quickly. I think for Outlook it works really well. I'm still having trouble getting used to the Ribbon in Word and Excel though; while a few things are easier, I still find myself hunting for commands. I think those applications simply have complex command sets, and the Ribbon can't put everything in an easy-yo-find place any more than menus can. Effectively, all they've done is re-arrange the menus.

Works in reverse

[hcs_$reboot]

the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar

Reversely, it happens to be one of the reasons people do not want to give up the Google search engine in favor of Bing: "a tool that is so familiar".

Re:Works in reverse

[db32]

And here I thought it had to do with the fact that most users don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser. I have literally had to send screenshots to users circling the address bar to show them where to type the address I gave them because they were typing it into the search bar, or worse, directly into google. You make bing the default, make google hard to pick, and you have reality...where there is a sudden surge of bing users and MS is claiming success. Semi computer literate users continue to just use google because they know the difference. I have only ever met a few people that sang the praise of any other search engine and most of them were MS fanboys anyways.

Secrecy

[Necroman]

I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email. There is so much critical information about a company in their email, why would they trust it to any external company, even if it is Google. Also, I'm unfamiliar with how Google handles data retention of email. Outlook allows some backup of emails at the IT level of all company emails (included deleted ones).

I know I wouldn't want to have my company give up control of it's email to Google (5000 person company).

Re:Secrecy

[Jahava]

I agree. While cloud-based applications and communications provide some extremely desirable features, a company's internal communications are its lifeblood. While good arguments can be made to trust this to Google's hosting services, good arguments can be made against it as well.

What Google really should do is provide an appliance - a suite of servers pre-loaded with Google Apps, GMail, etc. - that companies can buy or lease from them and integrate internally. They already do this for many technologies including Google Search and Google Earth.

Re:Secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a mid-sized American university. We recently transitioned some 30000 email accounts to Google. Many other universities have done/are doing the same. Personally, I trust Google more than I trust the average IT department.

Re:Secrecy

[Will.Woodhull]

I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email.

Yeah! That would be like letting another company handle your company's finances. Down with banks and their hideously invasive checking accounts and credit cards!

Re:Secrecy

[Vellmont]

I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email. There is so much critical information about a company in their email, why would they trust it to any external company, even if it is Google.

How about the internet connection that feeds your email, are companies willing to trust an external company for that? If you're paranoid, there's a ton of people you could be worried about if you lack trust.

The truth is the world is built on trust. I really think most companies couldn't care less about trusting email to an external company. Anyone on Exchange is ALREADY trusting Microsoft with their email infra-structure. Is it really that different trusting Google?

No, I really do think this is about people losing Outlook. I seriously don't understand it, since Outlook is about the worst program I've ever had to avoid using. There's a certain segment of the population that are just dinosaurs and refuse any kind of change once it's put upon them. If those people have any power within a company, they can easily kill any move to replace Outlook with something else.

Re:Secrecy

[dissy]

I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email. There is so much critical information about a company in their email, why would they trust it to any external company, even if it is Google. Also, I'm unfamiliar with how Google handles data retention of email. Outlook allows some backup of emails at the IT level of all company emails (included deleted ones).

The article is clearly talking about comparing things to Exchange server.
If you won't trust your email with another company, they won't be running Exchange since Microsoft (read: another company) makes that software.

There is no more trust from Google than currently with Microsoft for using a Google App Appliance.

You are saying businesses won't trust putting their email on a Google app server in the companies server farm, because that is somehow different from putting their email on an exchange server in the companies server farm?

Somehow using software from Google on your own hardware is trusting Google, yet using software from Microsoft on your own hardware is not trusting Microsoft?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/

If a company won't trust software from Google, unless they are just lying and being hypocrites, are already avoiding Exchange for the exact same reason.
If they ARE on Exchange server, they are already running Exchange in-house, so there is no difference in running Google Apps in-house as well. Exactly nothing internal leaves the company in either case.

We're not talking about Google's free personal Gmail service only available online here ;}

Re:Secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the internet connection that feeds your email, are companies willing to trust an external company for that? If you're paranoid, there's a ton of people you could be worried about if you lack trust.

In any company, there is a lot of internal email, between employees, that usually contains confidential data.

Re:Secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I'm unfamiliar with how Google handles data retention of email.

Then read the Google mail data retention policy. It's pretty brief.

It's not very specific for the public version of GMail, but if you're interested in corporate GMail they can give you more specifics.

I know I wouldn't want to have my company give up control of it's email to Google (5000 person company).

Google has 20,222 full-time employees worldwide. source

Re:Secrecy

[ecki]

My workplace (over 100k users) just migrated to Microsoft hosted email. And we're in some areas direct competitors of Microsoft.

Absolutely true

[Rambo Tribble]

Time and time again I've found the only sticking point for the end user is Outlook. They often readily accept Firefox, OpenOffice, and a host of other application substitutions, but get hung up on Outlook. The bizarre thing is that Outlook really isn't very good.

Re:Absolutely true

[Swampash]

The bizarre thing is that Outlook really isn't very good

It used to be, once upon a time. I remember being blown away by Outlook 98. It just annihilated every other mail client on functions, interface, and usability. I swore by Outlook for years and years.

However, when I was asked by my present employer to select and deploy a new email system, I chose Google Apps, and now I do everything in gmail via a browser. Because it's better.

Re:Absolutely true

[Anonymous Coward]

you can't just write "outlook is not very good" as a fact. give us reasons! In my organization it's a very useful tool that cut's down secretarial work to a minimum. No other tool I know is that well integrated with other office tools.

Re:Absolutely true

[SirLurksAlot]

The bizarre thing is that Outlook really isn't very good.

I'd like to know what you're basing this comparison on. Do you use Outlook in your daily routine? My work life is absolutely run by Calendar and Tasks and I'm sure this is the case for the vast majority of users. I'll also say that compared to Outlook 2003 the 2007 version is head-and-shoulders better. Tasks are much easier to work with, and the ability to categorize messages makes inbox management much easier (though I'd really rather see categories replaced with tags). My only complaint is that Outlook likes to freeze up on me, but that is entirely due to the fact that our Exchange server is overworked.

Re:Absolutely true

[TheRaven64]

You're handwaving even more than the grandparent. How has it cut down secretarial work? What are the features that Outlook has that other products don't which make it good? How is the user interface superior.

Re:Absolutely true

[VJ42]

The bizarre thing is that Outlook really isn't very good.

Really? What other app will allow me to drag and drop an email into my task list, and set a deadline to follow it up, and not only that but then allow me to drag my newly created task onto my calendar so i can block some time out to act on it. And all the while I can let the whole office knows that I'm unavailable during that time because they can see my calendar. Outlook isn't just a mail app it's quite good at being an all round (albeit basic) time management tool.

Re:Absolutely true

[ciggieposeur]

You might want to check out Chandler.

Re:Absolutely true

[brusk]

The bizarre thing is that Outlook really isn't very good.

I tried--really, seriously tried--to use Thunderbird+Lightning. I gave it a chance, accepted its limitations, used it as my sole email/calendar solution for 2 years. But I've gone back to Outlook because its integration is so much better, and it doesn't make you choose between running a crashprone beta for a decent feature set and having some pretty severe shortcomings. There are a few things Thunderbird did better: its LDAP client is superior, for example. But overall it was just too buggy and the calendar/task system just wasn't reliable, especially in terms of email integration. And many aspects of the Lightning UI are braindead from a design pov.

Re:Absolutely true

[Bert64]

We have a mix of macs and linux boxes as well as windows workstations... We need to be able to access groupware from any of those, which makes exchange unfit for purpose... Mac support is poor (entourage hooks over the web interface which is really kludgy) and linux support is non existent. So we'll have to use something else.

We also want to have custom applications, which are deployed on unix servers which can talk to the server and insert calendar entries, we have various job tracking systems that could benefit from adding calendar entries which were synced to mobile devices, but there is no standard way for these apps to talk to exchange over the network.

Incidentally i have found outlook to be a terrible email client, it doesn't set the in-reply-to header properly (i believe it has its own method, intentionally incompatible as another form of lockin), it always tries to post replies at the top (making for very unreadable mailing list archives), it generates extremely bloated html emails, and as you pointed out it runs extremely slowly if the server is slow (my imap clients just download mail in the background from a slow server, actual ui responsiveness and startup time is not affected by slow server performance).

Re:Absolutely true

[SirLurksAlot]

Well you certainly seem to have several very good business reasons for not wanting to use Outlook+Exchange to management your communications and scheduling, but I wonder how many other companies have the same issues? I'm not disagreeing with you you understand, but your business case sounds somewhat unique. From my own experiences most of the places I've been to have a fairly uniform mix of OSs, platforms, etc. There may be several 'nix boxes on the server-side, but by and large I believe most businesses are running some form of Windows on their workstations.

We also want to have custom applications, which are deployed on unix servers which can talk to the server and insert calendar entries, we have various job tracking systems that could benefit from adding calendar entries which were synced to mobile devices, but there is no standard way for these apps to talk to exchange over the network.

Obviously you'll come up with your own solution to this, but we had a similar system (minus the mobile device requirement) at one of my previous positions. It was written in C# and ran on Windows Server 2003, but you could probably achieve the same thing with Mono if you absolutely had to use Exchange and integrate the calendar with your job tracking system.

Your issues with Outlook are unsurprising, I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing. Especially regarding the bloated HTML messages. We actually just had a discussion regarding that very same issue. Basically we have an approval/sign-off process for all projects, tickets, etc and we're required to save email approvals in the .msg format. Several of us (myself included) protested this decision and gave our reasons for wanting a different format (.msg is proprietary, exporting to HTML generates ugly code, it is easily falsified), but in the end we were overridden by management, who doesn't believe in using anything but proven technologies. In their defense I can completely understand their viewpoint, but it does illustrate the inflexibility of many management types. So now the joke going around is this: "Welcome to the IS department, now with 100% more MSG!"

Re:Absolutely true

[vonFinkelstien]

I agree. I absolutely HATE Outlook. It's the most unintuitive program I've ever used. Unfortunately last year I substituted at a school that ran virtualized Windows from Sun Rays. I wasn't allowed to install Thunderbird. I tried the portable version, but it was blocked by the Nazi-like proxy. Ugh, which did I hate more--teaching junior high kids there or using Outlook? Tough call.

Client-server works well for many applications

[sphealey]

>> it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to
>> lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides

> Isn't that the same as saying that companies like the functionality
> and are willing to pay for it?

I think it is a more general unwillingness to accept that the client-server model works pretty darn well for many business-intensive apps, and that fat clients often are better suited to business use than browser-based apps. If pure mobility is the goal than the browser-based systems are a necessity, but I have seen too many unfortunate office workers clicking away at browser windows for tasks that could have been handled in seconds by a directly-connected interface.

sPh

SEE? Just like a woman!

[LibertineR]

Oh come on now. He isn't all that bad. Sure, he has his issues. He is slow. He is bloated. He doesn't treat me correctly. He's complex. He's slow. The way he treats me leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, I would rather he talked to me instead of punch me in the face. He is slow. He has a hard time staying employed. But really, he's not THAT bad...

Google looking ahead to Wave of future

[RyanHam]

Google appear to be actually focusing on emails replacement and to me it looks very promising: Wave combines email, instant messaging and collaboration. You can run it on googles servers or on your own. Its very promising. Google Wave http://wave.google.com/ Common irritations with email, - replying to one person, reply to the group, making sure everyones included - trying to coordinate on one document via email and contant back forth emails

Re:Google looking ahead to Wave of future

[BitZtream]

So they are catching up to what MS offered almost 7 years ago ... Maybe it'll catch on with Google, they're good at seeing the future. To me however, wave is nothing but a bunch of Hot air and an indication that Google is starting to get too arrogant and MS like for my tastes.

Re:Google looking ahead to Wave of future

[blahplusplus]

Email was designed before the advent of interactive discussion boards, there always needs to be a way to refer to a persons post by their location and absolute character location within lines of text/video/slides/etc.

We're getting there I was certainly glad when youtube added the ability to link to video the exact part of a video segment you wanted to show someone instead of them having to load it all at once and then scroll to the time.

The truth is User interfaces are still in the stone age, I've been looking at things like combining things like mind mapping programs + discussion forums + video/presentation software, if anyone gets it right it's going to sell like hotcakes.

I love applications like the brain and cooliris, because I can see the amazing potential there for the future user interfaces.

http://www.thebrain.com/

http://www.cooliris.com/

Re:Google looking ahead to Wave of future

[teknopurge]

MOD PARENT UP.

What about hosted Exchange?

[LibertineR]

Thousands of companies leave their mail on other companies servers when they use Hosted Exchange. The issues usually boils down to whether or not a company wants to admin their own Exchange servers in-house.

Personally, I dont get this, because while Exchange used to be a nightmare, it is far from that now. In fact, its pretty simple if things are done right from the beginning, and servers are properly maintained.

Re:What about hosted Exchange?

[jimicus]

Personally, I dont get this, because while Exchange used to be a nightmare, it is far from that now. In fact, its pretty simple if things are done right from the beginning, and servers are properly maintained.

You would be amazed how many alleged sysadmins couldn't admin their way out of a paper bag. You would be sad at the number of businesses that take the approach "it's not our staff that's the problem, Exchange is such a horror to manage that you need someone who can dedicate their entire life to it".

Perhaps it's because admitting it's your staff that are the problem means admitting that you made a bad hiring decision.

Re:What about hosted Exchange?

[gonz]

I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email. There is so much critical information about a company in their email, why would they trust it to any external company, even if it is Google.

Thousands of companies leave their mail on other companies servers when they use Hosted Exchange. The issues usually boils down to whether or not a company wants to admin their own Exchange servers in-house.

You're comparing apples and oranges here. With hosted Exchange, you're entrusting your data to a medium-sized company that specializes in hosting Exchange. They charge a fee because that's really their business plan. With Google Apps, you're entrusting your data to a massive leviathan that aims to eventually be a competitor for every business in every industry, and who specializes in mining the hell out of everyone else's data. Google doesn't charge a fee because your data is way more valuable to them than the actual cost of hosting it.

Sure, Google has a privacy policy. But what good is a promise to only use your data to "improve our services" and "develop new services", when those "services" are completely unbounded? Google is constantly trying to invent new services, and inevitably its services will turn into a conflict of interest.

Google might be appropriate for individuals who don't see any value in data privacy. But it's not appropriate for a business.

-Gonz

Re:What about hosted Exchange?

[Bert64]

If you use exchange, you are also trusting your data to a massive leviathan that aims to eventually be a competitor for every business in every industry... Your data may not be on their servers, but it is stored on their proprietary filesystem in their proprietary format which requires their proprietary os and applications to read... And while google guarantee your continued access to the data so long as you keep making your subscription payments, much like any other subscription service, MS make no such guarantees...

Obviously the ideal situation is to keep your data on your own machines, and in formats you can control...

I agree that it's stupid to keep your data on someone else's servers, but it's just as stupid to keep it in someone else's formats and yet millions of businesses are willing to take that risk already.

True, and it won't be an easy fix

[sootman]

There are lots of problems with exchange/outlook but the fact is, the feature set is pretty complete. Microsoft did a lot of boring work to make lots of things happen, like the ability to invite people to meetings, collect responses, send updates when they get changed, deal with timezones, etc etc etc. People who rely on it (and there are literally millions) would really have their work impacted by not having all those features.

Re:Can you help me?

[hedwards]

Yes, and for $10 I'll tell you.

Give me an alternative...

[simp]

I've got 10 years of emails in .pst files. I use that as my personal knowledge base. Copernic desktop search is used for indexing those emails, it kicks all the other search tools in the balls. X1, MS desktop search, Google desktop, they are all not quite there yet.
The Outlook calendar function is also vital but can be migrated to something else much more easily. Not so the emails. Until I have something with which I can migrate my emails into a more sensible format than pst files and have a kick-ass search tool Outlook is not going anywhere.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[maxume]

If you are talking about the combination of Copernic and Outlook, never mind this post. If you are looking for a way to get the messages out of the pst files, you can import them into Outlook Express (apparently from Outlook, not directly from the pst) and then use something like Thunderbird to convert them over to mbox format (Thunderbird uses the Outlook Express binaries to read the files, making it more reliable than tools that try to parse the OE files themselves).

Re:Give me an alternative...

[MosesJones]

You get 25GB of storage with the corporate GMail account... I'm at the rather high level of email by volume (PPTs, Visio, random people sending me pointless Mega-Zips) but 2.5GB a year doesn't sound too high.

The reason you have, and I had, all of those PST files is that one PST file can't be over 2GB and the search engines seem to prefer multiple small files anyway. Switching it all into a 25GB GMail account stops that problem and stops the "oh look time to create a new PST file".

For those of us who actually search back through time in emails its a mega boon, especially as you don't get the occasional "Oh sorry, we've just realised that your PST file is trashed for no apparent reason.... and we trashed it about 2 years ago but this is the first time you've accessed it since then so all the backups are also trash."

25GB of Email storage, its a wonderful thing.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[fangorious]

Configure an IMAP account in Outlook, then you can drag all those pst archived emails to the IMAP account. Then you can use whatever other IMAP client you like to store in a different archival format.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[brusk]

Look into Mailstore.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, my current PST is over 5 GB. They introduced that feature in 2003 or 2007.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[Bert64]

So sorry...
I have 10+ years of emails in maildir format (ie 1 small raw textfile for each mail), separated into dirs by year or months depending on the volume of mail for a given time period. Over the time i've collected it, i've migrated it between at least 6 different physical servers running a variety of different mail server software and accessed it using a variety of different imap clients... You've screwed yourself by getting your important data locked in a proprietary format, so you've lost the freedom i have to choose what i access my mail from.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the newer Outlook PST format (>=2003), you can have your PSTs as large as you like.

Re:Give me an alternative...

[Anonymous Coward]

PST files? Since when does Outlook + Exchange use a PST file?

Re:Give me an alternative...

[Martin Foster]

A lot of corporate Exchange accounts have limits on their size. So you have a PST to bypass that limitation, since an overflow prevents you from getting mail in at least our case!

Not the *users* who are inertial

[MaggieL]

The article is smoking crack on one point: It's not the *users* who are inertial. It's the Minesweeper Champion Solitaire Experts (MCSE) who run their IT operations, who are deeply invested in all the crap they had to learn to keep Domain Controllers and Exchange Servers running.

Re:Not the *users* who are inertial

[that IT girl]

Hmm.. I see your point, but having worked in IT, I can testify that there have been many times when we wanted to implement something that would be very much an improvement, and all we got were complaints that it didn't work the way the old system did. One guy even said he was annoyed that we expected him to learn something new (scary, as he works with a particularly transient set of customers). You can definitely have problems with either side, but sometimes the crap you have to put up with from the users when you try to improve something ('WHY WON'T YOU LET ME HELP YOU??") isn't even worth the benefits of switching.

Re:Not the *users* who are inertial

[BitZtream]

No, its the users.

Only idiots want to run Exchange, and they want to run exchange when the company is tiny, when running Exchange is easy and relatively hassle free.

Exchange is actually not so bad in a tiny company, it sucks ass when you are a large company.

However, users want integrated calendars, scheduling/free/busy notification, global contacts, personal contacts, shared contacts, global shared folders, user controllable shared folders, they want it on all their PCs and they want it available from the web when they've got a dead battery and only a Internet Cafe to check in from. They want it to keep their blackberry in sync and they want it to coordinate the 150 other things that Outlook/Exchange do well on a small scale that allow Outlook users to, I know this is hard to believe, be productive.

Users love Outlook/Exchange. The admins hate it with a passion, but thanks for showing us how little grasp you have on the IT world.

Re:Not the *users* who are inertial

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep pretending the users are being forced to use Outlook and don't like it - BUT, if you're going to do that, please don't join any F/OSS projects because you will do nothing to advance the state of the art.

Re:Not the *users* who are inertial

[rantingkitten]

I expect it's probably both. The users are stubborn and usually totally ignorant when it comes to computers, and god forbid you ask them to learn anything new. The storm of whining when that happens is truly astonishing.

But if the notion of switching to any other platform even comes up in management's discussions with IT, you can also count on at least a few Windows-only twits who will try to talk them out of it. They might do this because they enjoy looking like heroes for bringing the Exchange servers back up, or they might do this because they don't know any other platform and either can't or don't care to learn.

Saw this first hand

[TrippTDF]

Last year I helped a 20 person company transition from Exchange to Google Apps. Technically everything went fine, but once the transition was done, everyone refused to use the Google's web interface even though some of them used gmail for personal use! We wound up using IMAP through Outlook to bring everyone back to where they had been before.

I was sitting down with one woman who just flat out refused to do anything different. I was in the middle of setting up Outlook for her, and we had the following conversation:

Her: Outlook is so slow- the messages take forever to load!
Me: Well, you don't get that with a web-based system, because it is much more efficient at getting to your messages faster than your single hard drive
Her: Oh. Now, is there a way I can put the same message in multiple folders without making a duplcate?
Me: Actually, with Gmail you can use labels to assign one message to multiple labels, making organization much easier
Her: Oh.

It went on like this for awhile, and at the end of the day, gmail clearly did everything she wanted outlook to do, but she still refused to use anything different.

Google's biggest challenge is not a technical one- it's a marketing one. Google has to convince everyone that they have a product that really is better. It's not impossible, but it will take longer than it should :)

Re:Saw this first hand

[oiron]

When we switched to Google Apps (from a horrendously configured sendmail), most people were stuck wanting to use outlook express. Let me say that again a bit louder in case it's unbelievable; OUTLOOK EXPRESS!

Now, most people have switched to the browser interface and/or Thunderbird. Those who haven't are either the newbies or... the PHBs...

Re:Saw this first hand

[gonz]

Her: Outlook is so slow- the messages take forever to load!

Outlook was probably slow because you were loading against Google's IMAP server on the internet, rather than from an Exchange server in the same office. :-P

Me: Well, you don't get that with a web-based system, because it is much more efficient at getting to your messages faster than your single hard drive

A web-based system is LESS efficient because nothing is cached locally. I use Gmail for some accounts, and every time I jump to a new message ("conversation"), I have to wait several seconds while the page loads. I periodically have cases where I get a blank white page because the internet connection timed out. If the network goes offline for some reason, my e-mail is totally inaccessible. Outlook (or in my case Thunderbird) has NONE of these problems because all the messages are right their on your laptop's hard disk. You can read them and search them with no internet at all.

Her: Oh. Now, is there a way I can put the same message in multiple folders without making a duplcate?
Me: Actually, with Gmail you can use labels to assign one message to multiple labels, making organization much easier

In other words, NO, Gmail does not have simple folders. It has a different system called labels. If you want to use Gmail, you need to learn how to use labels, and accept the claim that labels are better than folders.

This claim might be true, but it's interesting that to this day, simple folders are still the model used by file systems. When filing, you want things to have a single location in a nice hierarchical tree. Searching is useful, but it's not the same as filing.

Google's biggest challenge is not a technical one- it's a marketing one. Google has to convince everyone that they have a product that really is better.

No, Google's challenge is to actually be better. It's great for personal e-mail, but regular people rarely need to "manage" their personal e-mail, since it's mostly chatter that expires after 1 week. By contrast, business e-mails are documents that need to be searched and sorted, with deadline pressure from the boss.

You've shown that this woman was unable to refute your spirited technical arguments. But does that really mean she's clueless and incapable of deciding which product meets her needs?

-Gonz

Re:Saw this first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

true. they should have an outlook "skin" for google apps.

Re:Saw this first hand

[teknopurge]

The problem is their product is not better. All I hear from the google camp is how they like the simple gmail interface, labels, threading, etc. I have yet to hear of any new features in GMail that haven't existed in another kit for many years.


Just as background: we run everything. Exchange, Zimbra, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX (I know!), etc... The fact is you pick the right tool for the right job. So many people try and tell me how great their iPhones are because they can now copy/paste things. I hear the same about GMail when users got IMAP[revolutionary] access.


Do you want to know why users have trouble switching to another platform? Because they have better things to do. More than likely their job is not related to fiddling with new Kernels or tweaking PHP. Why should they spend more time relearning something(sending email for example) when the new system doesn't do anything more efficiently?

Is English your first language?

[Anonymous Coward]

I made some corrections to your post. There were so many simple mistakes that I felt you could probably benefit from some help. I encourage you to keep studying English!

Google appears to be actually focusing on email's replacement, and to me it looks very promising. Wave combines email, instant messaging, and collaboration. You can run it on Google's servers or on your own. It's very promising.
http://wave.google.com/ (If you used HTML tags, you could cut down on extraneous text.)

Wave addresses some common irritations with email: replying to one person, replying to the group, making sure everyone's included, and trying to coordinate on one document via email and constant back and forth emails

Now, the last sentence doesn't really make any sense. I don't think it is an English problem, but a communication problem. You haven't explained how any of those things are irritations with email. Additionally, the "coordinate on one document" concept isn't clear at all.

I suggest you take this to your ESL professor for some better help and suggestions. He (or she) could give you more information about the proper use of punctuation and verb tenses. Your professor would probably also have time to help you formulate your last sentence into something comprehensible.

Good luck! I know learning a new language is tough, but you seem like you're well on your way.

Re:Is English your first language?

[RyanHam]

lol thanks, my problem actually was, that I was copy-pasting to rearrange the paragraphing and I accidentally hit submit. Then I couldn't edit.

Clearly these lusers are clueless

[heffrey]

I mean, they couldn't possibly choose Outlook over Google Apps because they might prefer it or because Outlook may be more effective for their needs. Instead of blaming the users for your failure perhaps Google would be better off looking inwards.

They may be hooked on it but ... still idiots

[cellocgw]

I'm sure my company is no different from many others: despite having had Exchange/Outlook server running for close to 10 years, most people are &^%$* clueless as to its use. We even mandated that all conference rooms be reserved thru Outlook Calendar, but (especially upper management) people just plain don't do so. And I've tried to suggest that people learn to put their personal schedule (vacation, trips, etc) and their personal calendar, AND that managers learn to *look* at their staffs' calendars ,but not a chance.
So we plod along with a tool that nobody is willing to learn how to use.

Outlook has ton of features

[Paul Carver]

I've never used Google Apps, but I've used Gmail and it doesn't hold a candle to Outlook in terms of features. The ability to search all mail quickly is a great feature, but that's just one feature compared to dozens if not hundreds of features that Outlook has that Gmail lacks.

There is no free mail client that comes anywhere close to the configurability of Outlook. I use Outlook at work and Thunderbird at home and I'm constantly frustrated by the unconfigurable straitjacket of Thunderbird. I suppose the classic open source answer is that if Thunderbird doesn't do what I want I should shut up and code the features myself or write a mail client from scratch. The non-zealot answer is just to use Outlook because it works well and is extremely configurable.

Re:Outlook has ton of features

[Bert64]

Could you give some example of the features outlook has which other applications lack? I've always found outlook to be an extremely poor mail client, especially if mail is all you use it for.

Convert them!

[Anonymous Coward]

One at a time.

We have 800 users where I work and I use Evolution with our exchange server, not only is it faster than outlook but it is more intuitive and does not have that stupid ribbon bar. So far I have converted about 25 users and the tide is turning. Outlook is still installed on their systems but it almost never gets used by the users whom I have converted.

 

I am having similar success with OpenOffice. I am putting OpenOffice on our standard image and explain it as a disaster recovery tool. There have been many times when word will not open a corrupt document but OpenOffice will with a little formatting problems usually due to the corruption. In fact most users continue to use OpenOffice after their document is recovered because they seem to trust it better than Word which screws up their documents.

.
.
.

One PC/User at a time and the tide will turn....

You can do the same with Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

You can just outsource Exchange and pay for the IT service.

Intertia and...

[wampus]

Do Google apps plug into our existing AD infrastructure? Can I book a conference room and phone bridge with it? What about voting?

Re:Intertia and...

[Macfox]

Yes, the premier edition does have this ability to leverage an external directory. Many of the edu users make good use of this feature. Resource calendars are also supported in the premier edition.

Re:Intertia and...

[BitZtream]

Do Google apps plug into our existing AD infrastructure?

Yes. Learn more about Google Apps integration with AD and other SSO systems, but it most certainly does.

Can I book a conference room and phone bridge with it? What about voting?

No.

Proper operating systems...

[tjstork]

Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.

Linux's file dialogs are too obsolete to call it a modern operating system. Once Windows 7 goes mainstream, people will be addicted to the libraries feature in the Windows 7 dialogs like they are crack. Then, not only will Linux have to come up with better file dialogs, which, they have a lot of work to do, they might also have to consider how they will migrate people's library settings from Windows to Linux.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[drinkypoo]

Linux's file dialogs are too obsolete to call it a modern operating system.

They don't seem notably different from, say, Vista's to me. Or for that matter, OSX's (except that I STILL find the multi-pane approach more confusing than just looking at a current folder... though the way Vista displays directory paths and lets me easily reselect any path element is beautiful.)

Can you please explain why a file dialog needs to do more than let me find a file with different folder views? Or what, specifically, is missing from the dialogs commonly used in KDE and GNOME applications?

Re:Proper operating systems...

[Anonymous Coward]

"File dialogs" are not part of a "proper operating system". In face, a GUI is not *part* of a "proper operating system" either.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[CAIMLAS]

What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?

KDE (the design's about 5+ years old at this point - since KDE 3):
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-01-14/files/katetest-kio_file.png

The 'file dialog' has been optionally "universalized" in KDE4 via dolphin: http://artipc10.vub.ac.be/serendipity/uploads/screenshots/kde4.1/kde4-desktop.jpg

Ok, so W7 finally gets similar functionality in a pre-release 7+ years after KDE had it.
http://blogs.msdn.com/yvesdolc/archive/2009/01/07/windows-7-libraries-and-the-common-file-dialog.aspx

Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.

(Now, GTK2/GNOME, on the other hand, is a bit of an ugly kludge akin to the newer OSX Finder interface, but that is largely an argument of preference, I think.)

You want to talk about a crappy interface, let's take a look at the paragraph-of-irritation style "file copy" dialog in W7:

http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/general-discussion/4566d1234384335-copy-replace-dialog-there-way-get-old-one-like-xp-screen2.png

Explain to me why I need 1"^2 icons, with sublimated text and the important bits shoved off into a corner or otherwise de-emphasized? It's almost as if they want you to just click "yes" and ignore what it says. How useless (and irritating). KDE4 isn't much better, but at least its evident where the better implementation came from (first):

http://imagebin.ca/img/8GQHAD.png

In closing, bitching about the file dialog (presumably in GNOME) as a reason why "linux" is not a modern operating system is comical, especially when the 'major look' as well as many of the nice-to-have features of W7 are (by the opinions of many MS and Linux fans alike) a near-copy of KDE 4 functionality/features/look/feel. And when you consider that it was only a couple years ago when MS got an actual security model on their desktop OS (which still doesn't really work properly). That seems like a pretty obvious requirement for a "modern operating system" to me.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[KevinColyer]

The Windows 7 icons make me scared: surely if you turn a folder on it's side like that all the bits will fall out? Is that what will happen to me with Windows? I don't want gravity pulling my bits out!

Re:Proper operating systems...

[skeeto]

Windows doesn't even come with a decent shell, so it's already decades behind unix-like systems on file management.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[ChatHuant]

Windows doesn't even come with a decent shell, so it's already decades behind unix-like systems on file management

Yes, it does. Look up Powershell. Very nice, powerful scripting language, beats most Unix shells in capabilities.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[oiron]

Try KDE4's file dialogs with Nepomuk enabled sometime, and see how a file dialog should really be done...

Re:Proper operating systems...

[dcam]

They don't seem notably different from, say, Vista's to me. Or for that matter, OSX's (except that I STILL find the multi-pane approach more confusing than just looking at a current folder... though the way Vista displays directory paths and lets me easily reselect any path element is beautiful.)

Vista's (or as I have seen it, Win 2K8's) directory paths is an abomination. 95% of the time when I am hitting the address bar I want to copy and paste part of it or paste into, not switch path.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[tjstork]

Try KDE4's file dialogs with Nepomuk enabled sometime, and see how a file dialog should really be done...

See, I'm not a big fan of social ratings. Ratings can work for things that a lot of people are interested in, but, if you've got 1 reviewer giving you a star per year, that's hardly useful.

I just wish sometimes people who were religiously into Linux could admit that the operating system is something that is honestly more geared towards IT professionals only.

Like, I'm surprised no one looked at Win7 my comments about dialogs and provided what I thought was the nobrain Linux answer. You could get some of what I talk about with symbolic links. You can make a directory off of your home and then stuff it with symlinks. That would get about 80% of what Win7's dialogs do. But of course, that launches you back into shell land... and that's the thing about Linux.

Re:Proper operating systems...

[GF678]

They don't seem notably different from, say, Vista's to me. Or for that matter, OSX's (except that I STILL find the multi-pane approach more confusing than just looking at a current folder... though the way Vista displays directory paths and lets me easily reselect any path element is beautiful.)

Can you please explain why a file dialog needs to do more than let me find a file with different folder views? Or what, specifically, is missing from the dialogs commonly used in KDE and GNOME applications?

I like the fact that in Windows' file dialogs, I can rename, copy, move and delete files right inside the selector. There are times I might want to perform some on-the-stop file management when I select a file to open in whatever application I'm using. The fact that I can perform this manipulation right there, instead of having to either stop and do it elsewhere, or remember to make the modification afterwards, is a time-saver. It's one of those things you miss once you've gotten use to having that capability there.

I don't like it when people say that file selectors should just be for selecting files. Why? They're not sacrosanct - the ability to perform file management in them is USEFUL! Isn't that a good thing?

Re:Proper operating systems...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the fact that in Windows' file dialogs, I can rename, copy, move and delete files right inside the selector.

What? You can't do this in Linux? The uber powerful everybody should switch right away it's 100 times better and more powerful for the elite powerful power user of power Linux that I'm always hearing about?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Re:Proper operating systems...

[InverseParadox]

What? You can't do this in Linux? The uber powerful everybody should switch right away it's 100 times better and more powerful for the elite powerful power user of power Linux that I'm always hearing about?

Depends on what file-selection widget the program is using.

The default GTK (and, therefore, Gnome) widget couldn't do that last I looked, no.

It's rarely been something I even notice, however, given that almost all file interaction is done on the command line; I can only think of twice I've even wanted to do this under Linux.

If you think it's that important, however, I doubt it would be that difficult to add... (Assuming you could grok GTK well enough, of course, which is far from a given.)

Re:Proper operating systems...

[InverseParadox]

But as far as I've ever seen, PowerShell doesn't come "set up and ready to go" on a new Windows install; you have to go out and get (and install) it yourself. (Thus, "Windows doesn't ... come with" it.)

Combined with the near total lack of publicity and marketing for PowerShell, that means the vast majority of normal users will never even realize it exists, much less make use of it. It also means that people writing scripts to run on Windows can't rely on its being available for any given machine, whereas they can be quite certain that a POSIX-compatible shell (and, very probably, bash itself) will be available on any *nix machine.

Combined, these two points mean PowerShell verges on being useless for most purposes. If it were near-universally installed, that would be different; however, since it isn't, it might as well not exist.

Zimbra instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook + Exchange isn't really about the email side. Heck, Postfix and Courier IMAP do that better than Exchange for free.

It is about the Enterprise Calendaring. That's the killer app part when combined with Outlook. Individual calendaring is trivial and done well enough all over the place. Enterprise calendaring is where you can see other peoples' free/busy status and confidently schedule meetings without asking 10 people their availability.

Zimbra Network Edition, NE, (paid) does enterprise calendaring and many other things, while integrating with Outlook. Further, you can place 2x and more users on the same server infra as Exchange. Zimbra Community Edition, CE, doesn't support Outlook interfaces for Calendaring at all, but everything else works fairly well with Outlook. My experience with Thunderbird and Zimbra calendaring is read-only, no write. The web interface rocks for everything, so many of your users won't need to use MS-Outlook to be productive. CE is free.

Lots of extras included with Zimbra - Jabber/IM, Shared calendars, shared contacts, and a few other things that aren't worth using for most companies like a document store and highly simplified wiki. The alternatives like Alfresco and MediaWiki are 1,000x better.

Either Zimbra edition fits into your existing LDAP infrastructure since it is OpenLDAP or you can let Zimbra be the primary LDAP with or without replication. Samba and POSIX accounts can be supported too. While it isn't SSO, it is single password, which is a good start for free.

For small companies, Zimbra can be run in a VM without any performance issues. We use Xen and 1.2GB or RAM. It can scale to 20,000+ users. Many Universities use Zimbra for staff and student email.

Re:Zimbra instead

[Macfox]

Google Apps excels in calendaring. Free busy that just works. Superior calendar sharing controls. Free SMS notifications. Activesync (OMA) out of the box.

Google Apps Premier edition also supports external directories like AD, NDS and LDAP.

The free edition is quite good, but most businesses will need the premier edition if they seek features found in some of the solutions you mentioned.

Re:Zimbra instead

[BitZtream]

Zimbra is a steaming pile of shit. Sorry, I hate exchange, I hate Outlook, but Zimbra doesn't even come close to comparing to the Outlook/Exchange combination.

Integrating with Outlook doesn't mean shit. GMail 'integrates' with Outlook. SEAMLESS integration is what users expect. Zimbra simply works differently, and differently enough that its freaking annoying.

While I realize MS produces bloated crap code, when you state 'You can put 2x the users on Zimbra' then you need to stop and think for a second why ... Why? Because its not providing the same feature list.

I too want an Outlook/Exchange replacement combo that doesn't suck ass, but Zimbra isn't it.

I'd say:

[Hurricane78]

Google Apps being featureless crap, even worse than Outlook, being pointless webapps instead of real apps, and not hosted on their own servers, is the main factor holding business from using them. ^^
There being no advantage over Outlook being the other one.

(And I hate Outlook just as much as IE, which I had to get webapps working on for five years. So I am really the furthest away from an Outlook fanboy. ^^)
(I also think Google deserves the success they have. But not the success that the shill who wrote TFA wishes them to have. :)

Re:I'd say:

[CatoNine]

I agree. Why would I want to sit behind my fine 3 Ghz PC to click on some slowly refreshing web pages? Google: Nice going, but you'll have to make some applications that run *locally* at full speed. (And are installed automatically, of course...) Cheers, Richard

Re:I'd say:

[teknopurge]

mod parent up.

A better tool

[jamesl]

... employees unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar.

Perhaps it's due to employees unwillingness to give up a tool that works so well. And which gets better with every new release.

Tried getting away, but eventually gave in

[brainee28]

I wanted to get away from Exchange. So I put in HP Openmail (Samsung Contact). That works for a few years until my users crashed my server (management refused to allow me to place limits on mailboxes, so this is what happens). After the crash, I put up a Postfix IMAP server and used Mozilla Thunderbird. What I found was that even though my users essentially use the email portions of Outlook and not the other collaborative features (some use the Contacts and Calendars, but not with any critical data), they still wanted Outlook. Daily I would hear complaints about how they hated using Mozilla, and eventually, we put Exchange 2007 and Outlook back in.

I think what happened is that many companies put in Exchange without understanding whether or not their company would really use all the collaborative features with Outlook. I'm willing to be many of them only really use the email portions, like mine does. Had my company started out with using just a simple POP3/IMAP server, then we might be using something like Google right now. But because we started out with the "defacto" standard, we setup the wrong expectation. This is what will be tough for Google; trying to get existing users to switch.

I agree that the Outlook plugin was probably not the best thing Google did, but it may be the only way Google can start transitioning people over to their services.

Happened here with a different solution

[Hamfist]

We migrated to in-house Zimbra from a simple sendmail server (500 accounts), which has worked exceptionally well. We had quite a bit of pushback from die-hard Outlook people. We adopted a policy that all new hires would get Zimbra and a business case would have to be presented to get Outlook for that user. We also dont support any of the sharing features via Outlook, and all new training material is for Zimbra and not Outlook. We also chose a few high profile individuals and helped them become more efficient with Zimbra to help spead the word. We still have about 50% of the user base on Outlook, POPing off of Zimbra. We expect this number to dwindle as our users decide to start leveraging sharing.

A mixed mode can be supported, and its probably the only way to move away from a deeply entrenched tech like Outlook. Baby steps are required.

Re:Happened here with a different solution

[Anonymous Coward]

We also dont support any of the sharing features via Outlook, and all new training material is for Zimbra and not Outlook. We also chose a few high profile individuals and helped them become more efficient with Zimbra to help spead the word. We still have about 50% of the user base on Outlook, POPing off of Zimbra.

Look at the full cost for Zimbra pricing. It's not that far from Exchange.

Any reason you're using pop instead of imap with outlook? You get more features with imap. There also is a zimbra connector plugin for outlook.

Zimbra is nice, until you try to do something Zimbra doesn't want you to. Try copying a message from one folder to another. You can't, because Zimbra thinks you shouldn't do that (adds clutter). Well, sometimes I want to do that.

There also is a Zimbra connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server. It tries to emulate a MAPI (Exchange) email server, but not very well.

There's an App for That

[alexburke]

Right here.

Quoting the Google:

Now businesses can run Microsoft Outlook on Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange, so they can achieve the cost savings, security and reliability of Google Apps while employees use the interface they prefer for email, contacts and calendar.

Oh, and it works with all editions of Google Apps, both free and paid, and it costs $0 extra.

You're welcome.

Re:There's an App for That

[jimicus]

I have yet to see an Outlook sync plugin that was worth a damn and I've looked at plugins for Zimbra, OpenExchange, Citadel and generic IMAP servers.

Most of the time, they don't integrate properly at all. "Shared" calendars aren't (or they sync on-demand rather than in realtime, which defeats the whole object of shared calendars because it introduces one race condition for every user on the system), email rules aren't synced (which means that things like out of office don't work), the concept of mailbox ACLs simply doesn't exist.

All of these remain problems with the sync plugin even when the system they're syncing with supports all of these things properly.

Google may (may) have done it right but frankly I doubt it.

Re:There's an App for That

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the page you linked? It shows that the Premier Edition is required. That's $50 per user per year for a desktop sync program; a far cry from an Exchange replacement.

Clippy?

[Seth Kriticos]

..employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar.

Re:SEE? Just like a woman!

[DoofusOfDeath]

Oh come on now. He isn't all that bad. Sure, he has his issues. He is slow. He is bloated. He doesn't treat me correctly. He's complex. He's slow. The way he treats me leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, I would rather he talked to me instead of punch me in the face. He is slow. He has a hard time staying employed. But really, he's not THAT bad...

But... the chairs. Oh God, the chairs...

GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[BitZtream]

I'm the lead developer for a product that is currently available only for Outlook (shameless plug/advertisement: http://www.lettermark.com/ )

The next major release which of the system, which now supports Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Apple Mail, and of course Outlook is in the early alpha stages and has been given to several of our larger clients. We've worked with these clients through their Outlook upgrades, complaints and joys.

I can tell you that none of them will ever switch to Gmail as it stands. Theres a good chance none of them will switch off Outlook any time soon, period.

Its not JUST about the company data sitting somewhere else, that really doesn't bother a lot of companies as shocking as it sounds.

The problem? Any of the customers we have, and pretty much ALL of the customers we have that are over 100 seats ALL have other products besides ours that integrate with Outlook to make their email part of a larger workflow. These people track sales, customer relations, trouble tickets, orders, you name it, ALL via Outlook and most of the time using Exchange so that the data can nicely be shared, calendars can be viewed, ect.

Some of this you can do with GMail, but its a pain in the ass. We also have use Google Apps for your Domain to test with. Its not even close, and can't be until they open it up. Yes, Outlook is far more open than GMail in its wettest dreams.

GMail doesn't let my random sales person app hit a button then thrown an entire wedding planning itinerary into an email to the customer, which is also stored in the sales system.

GMail doesn't let my random technical support person import the message into our issue tracking system.

GMail doesn't let me encrypt messages with personally identifiable information in it, which is required by law, regardless of whom it is sent to in a couple of states now.

In short, you may call it 'inertia' if by 'inertia' you mean a far more mature and feature rich product. Otherwise it is simply, and I cringe as I type this, that Outlook is a far more useful tool than GMail.

I HAVE to deal with Outlook and Exchange, I know far too much about it. I ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT STAND IT. The only reason we're supporting other email clients going forward is because I refuse to be forced to use Outlook for email, so I want a choice. Fortunately, there are still large organizations that use things like Groupwise and Lotus Notes which allowed me a very nice business case for supporting more than just Outlook when I took the project over.

But if you think for a second there is a replacement for the Outlook/Exchange combination for a integrated solution of your typical business persons email/contacts/calendar then you're are completely out of touch with reality. I REALLY REALLY wish there was, but there isn't. And GMail isn't anything more than OWA, with less features and a better UI. Its just missing far too many features and the ability for third party software to integrate with it for it to become a replacement for Outlook. Not to mention the legal issues as to why companies really shouldn't be using GMail when customer data is being emailed.

I wish that someone out there would realize this and actually make real Thunderbird extensions to make it on par with the Outlook, but it doesn't exist. I've used all the OSS alternatives, if you think they are equal, you haven't used one of the two things you are comparing. It wouldn't even freaking be hard, all you need is some damn plugins that use IMAP folders for storing things. Do it on something like Cyrus IMAP which has proper notify support and it really could be just as good if not better than exchange! I'd do it myself if I wasn't so overloaded aleady.

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[That's Unpossible!]

All of the things you're describing as locking these people into Outlook sound like things that could better be handled *outside* of Outlook.

E.g. why is a tech support system being built on top of Outlook? ::shudder::

The only thing stopping our company from moving to Gmail is lack of REAL BlackBerry/iPhone push support. What is taking Google so long to implement ActiveSync? They licensed it from Microsoft, implemented it for Calendar and Contacts. LET'S GO, GOOGLE!

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[jimicus]

All of the things you're describing as locking these people into Outlook sound like things that could better be handled *outside* of Outlook.

They're probably integrated with Outlook because the problem they solve is fundamentally 70% communication, 30% organising that communication in some fashion. Their plugin provides the 30% organising, Outlook provides the communication.

I could equally ask - why the Hell do so few PDAs and smartphones support IMAP NOTIFY? It gives you push email using a perfectly good standard that works quite happily with any half-decent IMAP server. Concept-wise, it's not drastically different to ActiveSync (client establishes a TCP/IP connection with the server, says "let me know when something new comes in" and keeps the connection open).

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[BitZtream]

As I've said in another post. 'Superior product' is not a synonym for 'lock-in'. GMail lacks features that Outlook has. That doesn't make you 'Locked In' to Outlook. All the data is easily exportable, you can move it very easy, there is no lockin.

There just simply isn't a product that has the features that Outlook does.

I'm sorry you don't like Outlook. I don't either, but there is no Lock In, there just isn't any competition, regardless of all the shitty little jokes that try to call themselves replacements such as Zimbra or OpenExchange or whatever that happens to be called this week.

Tech support isn't using Outlook for the support system, but the tech support people can get an email to them personally, instead of to the proper support address, click a button and it goes into the support system.

I'm sorry you don't understand how useful integration between products can be, but it is. Integration doesn't imply using that Outlook is being used for the support system, but it does make using the support system far easier. Our support system is actually Eventum, now part of the MySQL family, and we have a nice plugin that makes it so when a sales person or anyone in our company gets an email thats REALLY a support issue, with the click of a button and filling out a form it gets thrown into Eventum, all the appropriate contacts are added to the ticket, priorities set, ect ect ect.

Do that with GMail. The best you can get is moving it to another shared folder, such as the standard inbound support email folder.

You won't get iPhone push support from google without MobileMe accounts, thats the way iPhone push works. Use MobileMe and you already have iPhone push email.

Google uses ActiveSync to sync with Outlook, nothing else.

Again, 'Superior Product' is not another word for 'Lock In', regardless of how much we all hate the company with the superior product.

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[BitZtream]

I could equally ask - why the Hell do so few PDAs and smartphones support IMAP NOTIFY? It gives you push email using a perfectly good standard that works quite happily with any half-decent IMAP server. Concept-wise, it's not drastically different to ActiveSync (client establishes a TCP/IP connection with the server, says "let me know when something new comes in" and keeps the connection open).

I can tell you why. If phone properly supported NOTIFY then I wouldn't have to sign up for a MobileMe account to get notifications. RIM couldn't sell their rediculously priced systems to the various people who want push on their blackberry's.

The excuse used is that battery life suffers because the radio has to stay active to monitor the server for notify responses. Of course there are about a billion ways this could be resolved, but going back to the original reason, they make more money this way.

The fact that we aren't using IMAP for all email services at this point blows my mind. The shitty support for IMAP is all just to facilitate supporting vendor specific protocols such as Exchange.

Exchange IMAP support: sucks ass, might as well use outlook and the exchange protocol.
GMail IMAP support: lame and a mess, makes you really just want to use the web interface, yay more ads!
Outlook 2007 actually finally supports IMAP NOTIFY, no previous version did. Too bad they fucked it up with a shitty rendering engine for HTML.

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[dbIII]

E.g. why is a tech support system being built on top of Outlook? ::shudder::

I worked in a place where the only f*ing complete client contact list for the entire company was in a secretaries personal Outlook folder stored on the hard drive of their desktop machine with no backups anywhere. About a dozen times a day people would walk into her cube, get her to stop work and take over her computer to look up some details. Fortunately I migrated it to a saner place and saner platform (including a paper copy just in case) before the inevitable loss or corruption of that file.

People will do all kinds of incredibly stupid things with the software they have if they don't know they have alternatives. Even Outlook could have been used in a far better way in that situation.

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[ramsun]

The only thing stopping our company from moving to Gmail is lack of REAL BlackBerry/iPhone push support. What is taking Google so long to implement ActiveSync? They licensed it from Microsoft, implemented it for Calendar and Contacts. LET'S GO, GOOGLE!

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/mobile.html

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Experience the benefits of Google Apps with the BlackBerry experience you're already accustomed to. Integrate the Google Apps messaging suite with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), letting employees use built-in BlackBerry applications for access to their Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts.

Google Apps Connector for BES is currently in beta and will be publicly available in Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition in July of 2009. If you'd like to speak to an Apps sales rep, please submit your contact information.

        * Messages sent to your Gmail inbox are pushed to your BlackBerry within 60 seconds.
        * Emails read/deleted on your BlackBerry are marked as read/deleted in Gmail, and vice-versa.
        * Synchronize BlackBerry folders with labels in Gmail.
        * Search for email addresses and phone numbers of other users on your company domain.
        * View your Google Calendar schedule on your native BlackBerry application, with one-way synchronization from Google Calendar to your BlackBerry device.
        * Contacts in Gmail are automatically synchronized with your BlackBerry address book.

A proper OS just won't do

[Anonymous Coward]

when you've got a pooper OS

I thank you

Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Sycraft-fu]

So what is a "proper" OS? What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right? Provides a standard, enriched experience where more than just a kernel is standardized? Makes the OS easy to use without a command line? Has a working audio layer? Oh wait... those are all good things.

What is it that Windows doesn't do, that keeps it from being "proper"? I'd really like to know since it seems that, well, Windows does pretty much everything. You want to do office productivity stuff? Yep, Windows is good at that. Need a web server? Sure it'll do that. Wanna play games? That's fine too. Doing some media production? No problem.

I get a little tired of this attitude that Windows is such a bad OS and if only people would "see the light" things would be better. Oh really? Then why is it that I can do everything I want with Windows with very little difficulty, which is quite a varied set of things, but when I try to do it on Linux I discover some easy, some very hard, some impossible? From a user standpoint, Windows works well.

The argument of it not being a "proper" OS to me sounds like generally snobbery, the same sort you get from people who think that only their very limited taste in movies are "proper" movies or only their very limited taste in beer is "proper" beer. No, not really. If Linux works well for you that is wonderful, by all means use it, but don't try and push it as the One True Way(tm) unless you've got something more than condescension to back it up with.

To most people, a computer is a tool. They aren't in it for a philosophical or semantic debate, they want it to do whatever various functions they need, and do it with a minimum of fuss on their part.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[lwsimon]

Well, you're right...

There is nothing wrong with Windows as an OS from an end-user's perspective. Personally, I'm a bit of a Linux zealot because it offers me a degree of configurability and flexibility that Windows simply cannot match.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[skeeto]

Windows really is a poorly designed OS, and as such I view it as an expensive toy. To name some things from the perspective from a fairly fresh install:

It intentionally hides lots of information from the user for the sake of hand-holding. The execution permission on the filesystem is stored in the filename (ie ".exe"). The shell sucks. The filesystem has all kinds of stupid, arbitrary limitations (like no ?, <, >, ", *, :, | characters allowed). Case insensitive filenames. No package manager (at all!). Still use archaic "drives" for the filesystems. Spaces in system path names. Severe limitations on the size of environmental variables. A seriously piss poor excuse for a browser. Lots of GUI-only configuration. The registry. No SSH. No X. No basic commands (find, grep, ln, df, du, etc.; part of shell sucking really). Extremely shitty text editor. Regular BSODs (yes, even Vista; I have yet to personally see a linux kernel panic, or any other crash that required a reboot). No decent interpreters (even the barest unix installs always have an awk, and almost always have perl).

Luckily, some of this can be fixed by installing tools ported from unixland (cygwin can help for a bit until it quickly falls into a broken state). However, because of the lack of package manager this can be time consuming.

So not only is it expensive and proprietary, it's technically inferior in almost every way.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Phroggy]

I suspect a lot of people who complain that Windows isn't a real operating system haven't really used it that much in the past eight years or so, so they're simply unaware that it isn't the steaming pile of crap that Win98 used to be. After all, people defended Win98 back then, the same way they're defending XP now, so how would an outsider know that it's actually completely different?

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[FlyingBishop]

I switched my home desktop a little over two years ago.

However, Windows has been my constant companion at work, and at my parents house, and anywhere else.

And the thing is, it has nothing to do with usability. It's the simple fact of Window's convoluted and completely ineffectual security system that force a lot of applications to require admin priviledges. Granted, MS has taken some steps to alleviate it, but they're mostly smoke, with UAC being very easily subverted and rendered useless.

Furthermore, though I will generally install everything but the kitchen sink, Windows is only recently moving to a sufficiently modular architecture to allow removal of unimportant pieces, which causes a host of stability and space concerns.

I happen to hate Apple's interface decisions, but their OS itself is solid. The only reason Windows functions is well as it does is the billions of dollars being thrown at it by every company on the planet (even Apple.) The underlying system could be GNU Hurd and it would be just fine if it had that many people working on it.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[okmijnuhb]

How about no built-in handling for zip or iso files? And then when the OS asks if you would like it to search the net for handlers, it comes up empty!
I love when I open an attachment in outlook, and when i close the email, it asks if I would like to save the file's changes. Whether or not i say yes or no, it gives me the same ridiculous dialog without saving any changes.
I love being nagged by my OS every 5 minutes to reboot after an update. I love being pestered and annoyed by my "real" OS, while I am trying to get some work done, just because my OS thinks it's work is more important than mine.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[drsmithy]

The execution permission on the filesystem is stored in the filename (ie ".exe").

False.

The shell sucks.

How so ?

The filesystem has all kinds of stupid, arbitrary limitations (like no ?, , ", *, :, | characters allowed).

These are limitations within the shell, not the filesystem.

Case insensitive filenames.

This is most definitely a feature, not a problem.

No package manager (at all!).

That's because it doesn't have the dependency hell that requires such a thing in Linux.

Still use archaic "drives" for the filesystems.

Windows has supported (easily) mounting drives underneath directories for nearly a decade. People prefer drives because they are a more sensible organisation tool.

Spaces in system path names.

Irrelevant at best. Not to mention, why would you be referencing paths (that might not be consistent) across systems instead of using the environment variables or API calls ?

Severe limitations on the size of environmental variables.

For example ?

A seriously piss poor excuse for a browser.

That most people find more than adequate. Can't be that bad.

Lots of GUI-only configuration.

Irrelevant.

The registry.

What's the problem with a transactional database ?

No SSH.

Remote desktop instead.

No X.

Terminal services and remote desktop is superior in pretty much every way.

No basic commands (find, grep, ln, df, du, etc.; part of shell sucking really).

Irrelevant to most all users. Installable for those who desire it.

Extremely shitty text editor.

Irrelevant and unnecessary.

Regular BSODs (yes, even Vista; I have yet to personally see a linux kernel panic, or any other crash that required a reboot).

If your system is BSODing regularly, your hardware or drivers are broken. Not an OS issue.

No decent interpreters (even the barest unix installs always have an awk, and almost always have perl).

Also irrelevant and unnecessary to most all users. Installable if desired.

So not only is it expensive and proprietary, it's technically inferior in almost every way.

You've listed a whole bunch of stuff that's either flat-out erroneous or userspace personal preference. Nothing technical.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[skeeto]

I see some microsoft fanboy couldn't think of a response and modded me down instead.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Bert64]

Being "standardized" is both a good and a bad thing... One size does not fit all, and a monoculture is no good for anyone... The ability to select the best tool for the job rather than having to use a "standard" is a good thing. Data should be standardized, but how you interact with it should be a matter of choice... Roads are standard, tv signals are standard, but people drive all kinds of different vehicles and use different types of tv.
But to answer your question:

Windows makes a terrible server platform, you can't strip it down to the bare minimum, you can't install and manage it from a serial console... and don't mention the "cli only mode" in windows 2008, their idea of cli only is to load the entire gui layer and then put a cmd.exe window in the middle of it... what was the point in loading the gui layer with all it's overhead just to display a cli? a windowed cli will never work over a serial console either...

On a desktop system the interface is extremely clunky, and is very much geared towards doing things their way or nothing... Their way doesn't suit me, the default ways of most linux distros don't suit me either but linux is much easier to customize.

Linux is easy to use without a command line, modern distros will let you do everything most users will ever want without a command line... And yet, many seasoned users actively choose to use the command line on linux.. Why? because in many cases it's easier, much easier for an experienced user, and much easier to explain when trying to help an unskilled user. Windows users, even experienced ones rarely use the command line mostly because the windows cli is pretty bad, but one counter example is when someone doing phone support wants an ip address from a windows user they're supporting, they almost always have them open a command prompt and type "ipconfig"... Why? because that's easier than finding the IP through the gui (which i assume can be done somehow).
Because of this people get the impression linux is only usable from the cli, when in reality the cli is often the best but not the only way to do many things...

And when it comes to advanced things, a cli where you can cut+paste is much easier than regedit...

Another issue is package management, windows simply doesn't have one, on linux i can just open my package manager, search for what i want and hit install, and what i want is installed including any dependencies it has, or i can do it from the cli. Windows requires you to manually find what you want through google, trust that the download site you find is reputable (when was the last time a windows user downloaded a file from a random download site and then compared the checksums with a set published by an official site?), and then wait for the download to finish before you can manually execute and follow through with the installer. That is just a HUGE pain in the ass.

Multiple workspaces - i cant live without multiple workspaces, and all the windows implementations i've seen have sucked, mostly because no apps or even the basic window manager are designed with workspaces in mind. And yes, aside from workspaces i can't stand the way the windows window manager works, i find it clunky and inflexible.

Foreign filesystems - linux comes with support for all kinds of filesystems out of the box, windows just doesn't, and what third party filesystem drivers do exist are often poorly implemented, buggy or both... I have to read disks from macs, bsd and linux boxes all the time and occasionally misc other systems, windows just doesn't cut it, they arrogantly only support their own filesystems.

Source - I want the ability to modify the source code of the programs i use, to do things the authors never intended... I also want to be able to use new and exciting hardware, many years ago i used alpha, more recently i was using 64bit amd64 very early on and these days i would be looking at low power arm based systems, microsoft have always been playing catch up and the closed source nature of most windows apps make

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[skeeto]

In several of your responses you cite that "typical users" don't need it, which only reinforces my comment about Windows being a toy operating system. Typical users use their computers as a browser/e-mail appliance, and maybe some word processing or games. It's a toy. To be clear, I am not saying there is something wrong with that, and it doesn't make typical users "stupid" or anything.

But for serious computing, like research, simulation, large data processing, etc., a unix-like system is going to be incredibly more useful. I work in a laboratory and I see first-hand all the time how Windows continually gets in the way of productivity. Management and overhead prefers Windows because they like Office and Outlook and that whole thing, but the technical people, needing flexible computing systems, generally prefer some kind of unix-like system when they have a choice.

The execution permission on the filesystem is stored in the filename (ie ".exe").

False.

Upon further examination I now see this is entirely true, but that's how it effectively works. If someone emails me a file with a .exe suffix Windows will automatically execute it if I click on it wrong. In unix, I would need to manually set the execute permission. In Windows, the sender is effectively setting this. Combined with hiding file extensions by default probably makes this one of the biggest mistakes in computing history. The solution right now in the case of email is to block filenames with "bad" suffixes.

The shell sucks.

How so ?

The unix shells are some of the most powerful computer interfaces. The traditional Windows shell doesn't even come close. I read a bit about PowerShell when it came out, but I am still not convinced it even comes close either.

The filesystem has all kinds of stupid, arbitrary limitations (like no ?, , ", *, :, | characters allowed).

These are limitations within the shell, not the filesystem.

I am corrected again. A test with ntfs-3g allowed me to use these characters. From Windows though, the this is still effectively a limit on the filesystem. Is there an API that gives enough access to do it? I've never seen a program use it.

On several occasions I have had filenames with some of these characters in them, threw them in a tarball, brought them into the Windows world, and found mangled filenames upon extraction.

For example, I would make a static wget recursive mirror of a website, which includes the CGI arguments in the filenames, like "index.php?q=hello". On Windows, the static version becomes unnavigatable because of the mangled names. It's really frustrating.

Case insensitive filenames.

This is most definitely a feature, not a problem.

Case of newbie hand-holding. See top of post.

No package manager (at all!).

That's because it doesn't have the dependency hell that requires such a thing in Linux.

I guess you don't have much experience with a good package manager? Dependencies are an issue that these solve, but they are really fantastic for maintaing and entire system. With a single command I can update all the software on my system. With one command I can install a number of desired packages. On Windows, each package has to do this itself, each with its own interfaces and deamons, which is a stupid way to do it.

I can't imagine maintaining a system without it.

Still use archaic "drives" for the filesystems.

Windows has supported (easily) mounting drives underneath directories for nearly a decade. People prefer drives because they are a more sensible organisation tool.

People prefer them because it's what they are used to, and its what all that legacy software needs to see. I think the unix root-style (/) way is much more sensible. To each his own.

Spaces in system path n

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, well no _true_ Scotsman would use Windows.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[dbIII]

So what is a "proper" OS? What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right?

The OS is supposed to provide a layer between the metal and the applications so that the applications can do what they are supposed to do without bothering about doing things to hardware or doing things to system files. On a decent OS you only have to run Administrative tasks at an admin privelege level. Security would also be nice, as would a sane and consistant permissions model. Some would argue early NT was all of those things and MS Windows could certainly become all of those things and probably has to or it will vanish under a pile of malware.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[dbIII]

drivers are broken. Not an OS issue.

With respect, when most people stumble out of their field and argue about another they are unfamiliar with they usually at least have the decency to refer to a dictionary. If a hardware driver is not part of the OS then what the f* is?.
Your comment about X shows that you are really thinking of it in terms of a full desktop VNC instead of a way to run single applications from multiple hosts - and you can get X for MS Windows anyway although it only works in one direction (hopefully now that MS is attempting to move into clusters they will do something about that).
The mixup about DLL hell is amusing and puts all your other replies into context. I also suspect that your view of the registry also stems from little experience with that obfiscated hiding place for malware which was really only possible to backup when volume shadow copy came around - when the one file that NEEDS to be backed up can't be backed up within the operating system that is a bit of a sign that things are broken. The number of times people have come to me saying the backups have everything apart from the registry and the users email and could I please help recover the disk is somewhat ridiculous - until recently it was a hobby OS suitable for launching games that somehow got into the workplace.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[drsmithy]

In several of your responses you cite that "typical users" don't need it, which only reinforces my comment about Windows being a toy operating system.

No, it reinforces your non-sequitur argument that only people who use computers like you do are doing "real work".

By extension, you are arguing that only a fractional percentage of people using computers are doing "real work" on them. I think you might find some disagreement from the other 99%+ of computer users that they're not doing "real work".

Upon further examination I now see this is entirely true, but that's how it effectively works. If someone emails me a file with a .exe suffix Windows will automatically execute it if I click on it wrong. In unix, I would need to manually set the execute permission. In Windows, the sender is effectively setting this. Combined with hiding file extensions by default probably makes this one of the biggest mistakes in computing history. The solution right now in the case of email is to block filenames with "bad" suffixes.

End users are happy to open password protected zip files to get at the malware goodness inside when they're being promised free stuff. Do you seriously think need to set +x would make a meaningful difference ?

The unix shells are some of the most powerful computer interfaces.

At certain tasks. For, say, designing a 100-storey skyscraper or adding digital effects to a film, they're useless.

The traditional Windows shell doesn't even come close. I read a bit about PowerShell when it came out, but I am still not convinced it even comes close either.

You should probably read up on something before you criticise it.

I am corrected again. A test with ntfs-3g allowed me to use these characters. From Windows though, the this is still effectively a limit on the filesystem. Is there an API that gives enough access to do it? I've never seen a program use it.

That's because creating filenames that can't be manipulated by the majority of existing software would be extrememely dumb.

Case of newbie hand-holding. See top of post.

No, it's a feature. Case sensitivity just increases interface complexity.

I guess you don't have much experience with a good package manager?

I do.

Dependencies are an issue that these solve, but they are really fantastic for maintaing and entire system. With a single command I can update all the software on my system. With one command I can install a number of desired packages. On Windows, each package has to do this itself, each with its own interfaces and deamons, which is a stupid way to do it.

Package managers are good right up until the point where you need software that falls outside their scope. Then they tend to cause more problems than they solve.

This has been an issue with me mostly with Cygwin. The build configure scripts that comes with source tarballs expect to be built in paths without filenames, because it would require convoluted escaping otherwise. It was annoying being on a system where I could only write under "Documents and Settings" and trying to build a package.

So the real problem is actually a poorly designed third party software package.

For example, the PATH variable was limited to a pathetic 1023 characters. Combine that with ridiculously long system path names and you have lots of problems. It was eventually doubled to a still-pathetic 2047. This has been a really serious issue for lots of people I know, with many different convoluted work arounds?

The root problem here is you're trying to use cmd for something it's not really designed for. Try out Powershell or alternative methods.

Why the hell would such a limit even exist? It just screams of incompetance.

So what does the existence of something like xargs scream ?

As I said, computers are often browser appliances, so a good browser can go a long w

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[drsmithy]

If a hardware driver is not part of the OS then what the f* is?.

A hardware driver Microsoft does not provide, is not their responsibility. Windows can - and does for millions - run fine without BSODs or other forms of instability. That means stability problems are not inherent to the OS.

Your comment about X shows that you are really thinking of it in terms of a full desktop VNC instead of a way to run single applications from multiple hosts - and you can get X for MS Windows anyway although it only works in one direction (hopefully now that MS is attempting to move into clusters they will do something about that).

Doubtful, and terminal services already supports individual application sessions anyway. The main problem with the X model is the inability to disconnect from sessions and leave applications running (without additional hackery).

The mixup about DLL hell is amusing and puts all your other replies into context.

What mixup ? Windows left DLL hell behind years ago. Dependency hell is very much a part of contemporary Linux, especially if you need something that your package manager can't provide.

I also suspect that your view of the registry also stems from little experience with that obfiscated hiding place for malware which was really only possible to backup when volume shadow copy came around - when the one file that NEEDS to be backed up can't be backed up within the operating system that is a bit of a sign that things are broken.

Pretty sure you could backup the Registyr prior to Windows 2003.

The number of times people have come to me saying the backups have everything apart from the registry and the users email and could I please help recover the disk is somewhat ridiculous [...]

So they weren't competent enough to backup user emails, and your first instinct is to blame the OS ?

[...] until recently it was a hobby OS suitable for launching games that somehow got into the workplace.

Right. And by "recently" you mean back when it started dominating the business world in the '90s.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[skeeto]

No, it reinforces your non-sequitur argument that only people who use computers like you do are doing "real work".

I would bet that most interactive computer use is done solely for entertainment, which isn't real work, and the operating system doesn't matter much. I never said people using computers differently than me weren't doing real work. You are putting words in my mouth.

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's disorganised.

In my experience, most of the time configuration files in the /etc directory for a particular program are named /etc/name (now bring phased out) or /etc/name.conf or if it is more complicated /etc/name/ with /etc/name/name.conf probably being the "main" one. If not this, then very close to it (".cfg", ".ini"). The man page will also list the configuration file, and the configuration file has its own man page. These are all text files that I can manipulate with a powerful text editor, or other powerful text manipulation tools.

Here are some typical Windows registry paths,

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-4230677753-242917041-4215019230-1000\Identities\{64B7BE73-9160-4010-AA24-347327EB9AD3}
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{64A8BE73-9160-4010-AF24-347327EB9AD3}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{00020524-0000-0000-C000-000000000056}

Which must be manipulated using a program with an extremely poor interface. I think it's impossible to pretend that this is organized. Ridiculous to pretend.

I'm also very sure that versioning it will be nowhere as nice as it is versioning /etc.

If you've never seen bad drivers take down a Linux machine, you can't have been using it for very long.

I've had problems with drivers, yes, but none that needed me to reboot the machine. This probably has to do with not using proprietary drivers, generally the most buggy ones, with Linux.

End users are happy to open password protected zip files to get at the malware goodness inside when they're being promised free stuff. Do you seriously think need to set +x would make a meaningful difference ?

That extra step would probably cut down that attack vector by at least 90%, and couldn't be done completely by accident.

At certain tasks. For, say, designing a 100-storey skyscraper or adding digital effects to a film, they're useless.

I'm pretty sure that data is saved to files, and files are generally most quickly managed with a shell.

That's because creating filenames that can't be manipulated by the majority of existing software would be extrememely dumb.

Which is due to stupid design decisions by Microsoft. Thanks for reinforcing my point.

So the real problem is actually a poorly designed third party software package.

I have almost never had a need for anything outside the repositories. When I did, I would install it in my home directory, where the package manager and it won't fight.

Not according to any benchmarks I've ever seen.

First search results for benchmarks: http://www.tmsnetwork.org/blog/comparison-web-browsers-javascript-benchmark-scores

Shows IE about 10 times slower than FF3.5, Safari, and Chrome. I got my 100x factor from running this: http://nullprogram.com/download/mersenne/ When I ran it with IE7 it took about 100x longer than the above browsers. IE8 can't run it, so I don't know how it does.

Rubbish. It's got all the major features most people give a damn about.

Cal

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[dbIII]

It appears you didn't even know about the open file locking problem as well. As I said, a hobby OS. Things have improved since and show all indications of continuing to do so.

Re:Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Toreo asesino]

I'm sorry, but I don't buy this technically inferior rubbish either. Linux works differently; has a different design philosophy, and frankly isn't comparable to Windows if you ask me.

Linux is great for some things; Windows for others. I don't actually see much cross-over to be honest, and to say "omg $OS is so much better that $ALT_OS" is frankly little more than flamebait.

The case-sensitive names for example. That was a deliberate decision I think 99% of users are glad they did in Windows, save the hardened unix guys perhaps. I mean; how often would you want to keep "FILE" and "file" file-names in the same directory anyway?

I for one am glad there isn't just one way of doing everything.

Missing the point...

[FlyingGuy]

With the typical rantings of the vast majority of /.'rs this is NOT about an e-mail system.

What this IS about is integration. Love it or hate it, Exchange / Outlook are tightly integrated into the entire office product line. The API's ( for better or worse ) are there to make an entire ecosystem of applications work together. Your data is in Access? It is extraordinary simple to create a notification system for events that are built into your database, it is all just there, it just works.

Yes this is why it is insanely easy to exploit it, but it is what makes a business process run. Sorry you don't get that with Oo or any of the rest of them.

Exchange servers are notoriously flaky, GroupWise from Novell is rock fucking solid but their API's in their present form just suck and I have been a devote' of the Big Red Box or what seems like a lifetime.

Until something with this kind of functionality comes along to the open source world, then it will continue to be a curiosity and no amount of proclaiming that "I can do the same thing with 14 bash scripts a couple of Perl scripts and some python connected to a Ruby app" will sway anyone.

I am not saying it is good, I am simply saying it is reality.

Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift

[vinn]

Yup, you'd pretty much have to pry Outlook out of my cold dead fingers before switching to Google's apps. See, it's not the software, it's the way I work. Outlook just so happens to fit the style of how I like to work, organize my my stuff, organize appointments, and has some nice integration points with tools I need, like CRM.

(Note: I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I've been using Linux since 1995 and my first mail client was mh.)

Google wants me to rethink how I work in order to use their tools. I don't have cute little folders, I have to deal with "labels". I want filters to put mail into folders, not labels, because I don't want to deal with seeing the new mail in my Inbox that I know is irrelevant; I want the Facebook mail in a Facebook folder I can ignore all week long. Searching isn't necessarily as nice as sorting because sometimes my brain might remember someone's initials, but not their full last name. When I want to see all the "K's", I want to see all the K's. All in all, I find it too foreign of a way to work to be truly comfortable. However, I do use it for my personal mail.

By the way, the argument about using them for hosted services isn't a showstopper for our business. We have 2 Exchange servers and I fully intend on moving them to some kind of hosted solution around the time Exchange 2010 comes out. We have 200 mail accounts or so and I don't really have a problem trading off the amount of administration for someone else taking care of the data.

PS. The killer app for me for the year is Google Voice. It's going to change how I work and I love it.

Re:Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift

[gullevek]

I know how you think and feel, because that is like I started. But I want my folders and sort the mail and so on. And you can do this. I have the mail I do not care go directly to a label (aka folder) and the stuff I want gets a label and stays in the inbox.

It needs relearning, and if people are not willing to do that (and I say harsh most of the office drones sure don't) it will not work.

Re:Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift

[johnwroach]

Create a filter, apply a label, check "Skip inbox". Voila! Folders.

Re:Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift

[imtheguru]

Google wants me to rethink how I work in order to use their tools. I don't have cute little folders, I have to deal with "labels". I want filters to put mail into folders, not labels, because I don't want to deal with seeing the new mail in my Inbox that I know is irrelevant; I want the Facebook mail in a Facebook folder I can ignore all week long. Searching isn't necessarily as nice as sorting because sometimes my brain might remember someone's initials, but not their full last name. When I want to see all the "K's", I want to see all the K's. All in all, I find it too foreign of a way to work to be truly comfortable.

Labels can work exactly like folders, and it is trivial to set this up in Gmail. Sorting requires pre-determined rules. Searching uses throw-away rules. Combine the two and you have a very powerful usage paradigm. As Gmail can do both, i see very little merit in this section of your post.

My previous two employers used GoogleApps. There was some resistance from the masses, but when they were enlightened to the learning curve from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and Outlook versions, they came around very quickly.

Re:Agreed - Too Much of a Paradigm Shift

[Lord_Byron]

Check 'Skip Inbox' when you create or edit that Facebook filter. Labels look like folders to me, both in terms of having a thing I click to bring up stuff in that folder (or with that label) and looking like a folder to my IMAP client.

I am really surprised I haven't noticed the lack of sorting before & that does seem like a stunning oversight. I know I use it in Thunderbird & Outlook all the time, the former with GMail-hosted email.

That is one additional thing you might find interesting: there is no reason you can't use Outlook with GMail. Then you have the option to do both.

Re:You can use outlook...NOT.

[WheelDweller]

Now *there* is a telling attitude.

This is an OS with a huge liability problem. THOUSANDS of people have lost thousands of dollars and years of their lives trying to get it back. There is a stable of some TWO MILLION viruses for it, and 100,000 more each month.

Perhaps the first question is, why would you use Microsoft at all?

But beyond the obvious; Outlook is a sleepy test pilot; it crashes all the time. In fact, two men in Indy have the single job of restoring the crashed mail server *EACH*WEEK* when it goes down.

Like the rest of their arsenal of flashy, good-looking tools of doom, this is another component that just doesn't deliver.

Please: Stop and think. When was the last time you bought a product, then immediately bought someone ELSE'S product to go keep it on the road? Did you buy _that_ product again?

Dead Wrong

[pleasegetreal]

The article is smoking crack on one point: It's not the *users* who are inertial. It's the Minesweeper Champion Solitaire Experts (MCSE) who run their IT operations, who are deeply invested in all the crap they had to learn to keep Domain Controllers and Exchange Servers running.

The ignorance displayed in statements like this is astounding to me, but I guess any high school kid with a keyboard can comment here.

Our IS department really wanted to go to Gmail and away from Outlook, but the USERS were the ones who would not switch. Gmail has no nested folders for example, which was a deal killer by itself. The integration of email, contacts, tasks and calendar in Outlook is light years ahead of the Google set of tools. My mistake was underestimating the sophistication of the users. Gmail is actually attractive to me as a CIO from a support and expense perspective, but it is a non-starter for heavy email users in a business of any size. As far a reliability, our Exchange box has gone done zero times in the past two years, but Gmail has been down several times in the same period. For those businesses that live and die by email, that fact is significant.

Re:Dead Wrong

[whoever57]

Gmail has no nested folders for example, which was a deal killer by itself.

Indeed. Google doesn't have folders at all. It has labels, which are far more useful.

Most users will organize mail into folder and subfolders. Let's say that we have a set of customer folders and under each customer folder, I might have a subfolder for incoming POs. In Gmail, I replicate this by applying two labels: one label for the customer name and another label for "incoming POs". I can now search for the set of emails that has a the label for a particular customer name AND the "incoming POs" label.

The problem with hierarchical folders is that it is limiting. Labels are not. Any number of labels can be applied to an email, making searching easier.

Amazingly short memories

[93 Escort Wagon]

What's amazing to me is the loyalty to Microsoft being displayed in the vast majority of posts so far. It seems that people somehow don't remember all the headaches the Outlook+Exchange combo have caused users and admins over the past eight or nine years. Heck, wasn't it just last year that the silly "sorry, we don't know how to program correctly for daylight savings - so all your appointments for the next few weeks will be off by an hour" bug bit so many people?

But maybe, in this uncertain economy, all people can think about is job security? Well that's one thing; MS has been good job security for Windows admins...

I do know that our users have been extremely happy with our shift away from Outlook/Exchange calendaring this past year - we get a lot of "atta boys" regarding Google calendar. Our Exchange server has been turned off, and no one seems to miss it.

Re:Amazingly short memories

[jimicus]

What's amazing to me is the loyalty to Microsoft being displayed in the vast majority of posts so far. It seems that people somehow don't remember all the headaches the Outlook+Exchange combo have caused users and admins over the past eight or nine years. Heck, wasn't it just last year that the silly "sorry, we don't know how to program correctly for daylight savings - so all your appointments for the next few weeks will be off by an hour" bug bit so many people?

They still don't know how to deal with daylight savings. Appointments in Outlook/Exchange are sent under the hood in UTC and at the point it's put on the end-users calendar, the appropriate offset is added to account for the timezone they're in. Once it's on their calendar, it doesn't move.

What if the end-user is in a different timezone this week and has changed the timezone on their PC accordingly? What happens to calendar appointments they receive?

What happens if you are sending a recurring appointment and one of the people involved is based in a timezone which doesn't move to DST at the same time as the others? That doesn't work either.

This isn't news.

[sproketboy]

If Google didn't realize that then I think I should sell the stocks I have in them. This is exactly the same situation we had in the 90's and nothing's changed.

I have to use Outlook at work and the spell checker is so crap. I find it easier to just google the misspelled word and Google gives me the correct spelling

What The Fuck?

[Colin Smith]

Linux's file dialogs

Really? That's it? That's all you can come up with?

All the current OS concepts of file management "suck donkey balls" as they say. You know what I want? A tag based filesystem. WTF should I have to manage directories?

 

Re:What The Fuck?

[brusk]

You know what I want? A tag based filesystem.

You're it. No touchbacks.

Re:What The Fuck?

[dzfoo]

Take a look at Mac OS X. The Finder allows you to add comments to file properties. These are then indexed by the underlying search engine (Spotlight). You can use these to add "tags" or "keywords" or whatever you want, and then search for them with those. You can even save your searches as "virtual folders" (they call it a "saved search" or something like that).

These folders are completely dynamic and updated in real-time, so adding or changing tags will cause the folders to update immediately.

But if you trully hate all manners of folders, then just don't save your searches; just search for everything whenever you want by using the handy-dandy Spotlight interface.

I personally like folders; I like things in order, and for it to be predictable and static. Perhaps I'm getting old, but that's me. However, I still find the "saved searches" convenient for many things.

        -dZ.

Re:What The Fuck?

[InverseParadox]

You know what I want? A tag based filesystem. WTF should I have to manage directories?

Interesting you should mention that on this particular story.

I no longer use Gmail's Web interface, but last I heard, they had pretty much ignored the concept of folders/directories per se, choosing instead to present "views" (not their term, IIRC) based on user-defined searches. (This leads to annoyances such as their refusal to store more than one copy of a message, as determined by Message-ID, but that's another topic.) I remember having also been able to tag messages explicitly as one thing or another, and do so in an automatic fashion based on pattern-matching rules; having done so, you can then define a "view" for all messages with that tag.

I don't like Gmail's interface, for various reasons, but this underlying idea is interesting; it looks like much the same type of thing you're asking for, and I think it's the first "live" implementation of something like that I've ever come across.

I don't know if they've implemented this same kind of taggability and "view"ability for Google Apps documents (I don't use that service at all), but it wouldn't surprise me if it were possible.

Furthermore, given the recently-reported upcoming "Chrome OS", it's not impossible that you'll see something resembling a filesystem with this capability before terribly long...

Behavioral Momentum, Formal and Informal

[DynaSoar]

Behavioral momentum*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_momentum is formally a term describing the quantification of resistance to change in opposition with the pressure to change. The latter is phrased in terms of reinforcement because it was comes from the efforts to quantify the component phenomena in learning theory as laid out by Skinner. It implies any and all sources of resistance be considered as a single force.

Informally, the 'resistance(s) to change' suffices when applying it to a situation such as in TFA. The PC World article correctly though accidentally calls it an 'anxiety'. It could be described in terms of cognitive dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance but we're in the informal section now, so you can read the first line and see that it's an 'uncomfortable feeling' regarding (among other possibilities) 'awareness of one's behavior'.

There are few instances when one is more aware of one's behavior than when one is asked to perform a task in a way different from an accustomed manner. Being so aware of it is part and parcel with the awareness required to perform in an unfamiliar way and with the (performance, not separation, as per TFA) anxiety caused by the enforced change. That's an object summary of cognitive dissonance in action.

The greybeards out there may recall when they first encountered a mouse/GUI interface. Many noted that CLI worked just fine if not better. (You youngsters can ask them -- you know how they love to talk about the old days.) Making the switch was not that difficult because the new way was very easy to understand and so required little thought. But more importantly it was easier because it was very different and so didn't require unthinking an old way and new-thinking a new way without encountering as much anxiety provoking instances of potential or actual mistake making.

With the above we can then approach the nature of the problem in TFA and so the solution.

The average IT consumer knows little about what they're causing to happen other than pushing certain buttons causes certain things to happen that they need to happen in order to do their job. Making this easy for them to do is fine for getting them working quickly. But getting them working efficiently quickly does not teach them what they are doing. F'rinstance, if they want to move a section of words from one place to another, they don't even have to know what the names given to control-X and control-V are, they just know it does the job (and these days it's unlikely even you out there ever used scissors or razor blades and mucilage to cut and paste anything).

Along with the familiarity with the procedure, particularly without a grasp of the underlying mechanisms, and prior to any attempt to alter the procedure, comes behavioral momentum. People get used to doing something a certain way and *with a certain level of confidence*. Now, ask them to do exactly the same thing a different way. You've knocked them back down the front of the learning curve without the ladder of basic understanding.

Had they been taught how to do the same thing more than one way, and told what it is they're causing to happen, they could find that ladder. Trapped as they are though, they're aware of difficulty and incapability and little else. Anyone who's tried to teach someone a different method knows about that 'and little else'. It often seems they can't hear your instruction and can't get their head talking to their hands. They're frequently worse than complete neophytes because they'll freeze up when trying to do the most basic things that they know well in terms of 'how' with a different set of actions.

Those of us who've learned more than one OS or used learned several differently designed programs for doing the same things have an advantage not often appreciated by program designers and especially by those such as the Google group trying

Re:SEE? Just like a woman!

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment deserves the WOOOOSH!!! of the Year award.

Mod parent up

[Shandalar]

People like to bitch on Slashdot that "Office is a steaming pile of crap" but these people are ridiculous. How many have tried to use both Office and Google Apps for real work? Google Apps sucks. It'll get better, but at the moment it is far behind Office.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

[JoshRoss]

"Now businesses can run Microsoft Outlook on Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange, so they can achieve the cost savings, security and reliability of Google Apps while employees use the interface they prefer for email, contacts and calendar." http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.html You just have to cough-up some cash for the Premier Edition.

Email Organization and workflow

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the issue is that people have worked out a system for organizing emails within 50+ active projects and manage a todo list by drag and drop emails into the task list. They are used to having most things on their laptop, so they don't need to be internet connected to read/reply to emails.

Then there's the contact lists that everyone lovingly creates over years with almost every field complete. IME, export and import never completely works. Fields are always lost.

Journal?

The webmail solutions simply don't work **exactly** the same and fit into the work flow people have created over years.

At my new company, I forced a different solution on everyone. We are 9 months into using it and things have settled. I still hear minor complaints, but everyone is resolved that the costs for Exchange and supporting MS stuff isn't worth it.

I failed to kill off MS-Office. We continually hit slight formatting issues even within the same version of MS-Word. OpenOffice formatting differences screw with pagination.

Disaster Recovery Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

"Disaster recovery" That's sinister. I love it. I think that's a brilliant approach.

Re:SEE? Just like a woman!

[gbarules2999]

He's going for multiple-thread metaphors and similies. It's a very complex joke. We wouldn't expect your Anonymous kind to understand.

SERIOUS flaws:

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon to not undo mods...

Some background: I was working in a bilingual company as a technical translator, dealing with Japanese and English. We had the whole SharePoint-Exchange-Outlook triumvirate installed. We had large volumes of documentation in both English and Japanese. I finally left there completely in early 2007.

• A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations

  Except, the search engine can't handle Japanese. I suspect it can't really handle much in the CJKV line (cf recent /. thread here). Suffice it to say, this limitation on search greatly hampered its utility.

• From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.

  It took them until *2007* to implement wiki functionality. WTF? Wikis can be *enormously* useful, not least for establishing and keeping track of policies and best practices, precisely the kinds of documents that evolve over time. We desperately wanted to set up several different wikis, but SharePoint couldn't handle wiki-type text, requiring folks to post doc files -- much less easy to edit collaboratively, much less accessible, and with bigger memory and time requirements. Just stupid.

• The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.

  It was difficult enough to create and post a simple HTML page listing and linking to other documents that our users wound up creating lists of links in *Excel* files, fer crying out loud, and posting those instead.

Usability? Feh. The system was designed around the limited constraints of MS Office document types, and the blinkered capabilities of Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser). Anything beyond that narrow paradigm was difficult at best, assuming it was even possible. I will certainly grant that SharePoint may have been improved since last I used it, but good lord, it was fugly.

...every actual business user I've worked with has loved it to the point that if we replaced all of our fileservers with SharePoint servers, I think they'd be overjoyed.

I'm increasingly convinced that many people in the business world don't know which end is up. I'm reminded of a quote about journalism:

A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.

Some sectors are better than others -- when I was working in finance (lots of competition), companies tended to be leaner and saner. When I was working in high tech (*very* limited competition in that specific subsector), companies tended to be painfully full of deadwood, where management had zero idea about how various important aspects of their business (such as document translation) should work. And I'm not talking about avoidance of new measures that would cost money -- I'm talking about avoidance of change, i.e. anything resembling work, even things that were demonstrably cheaper and more efficient. "Well, we've always done it this way."

My favorite was when they'd talk about how they *had* implemented some minor change, and how things were "so much better now". It really sounded to my ears a bit like, New, Improved TURD! Now 15% Less Smelly! But, it was still a turd...

Ah, well. Part of why I left. :) At least Dilbert makes more sense now.

Cheers,

Worse than Windows dominance

[RomulusNR]

is Outlook/Exchange dominance. Businesses use Exchange like it's the only mail/appointment system that exists and simply no third-party apps really provide all that Outlook does (evolution-exchange-server is barely passable). As a result, Outlook/Exchange dependency is a big barrier to Linux workplace desktop penetration, too.

Re:Worse than Windows dominance

[cdrguru]

OK, so where is the Blackberry integration that allows wireless sync of contacts, calendar and email?

This is part of my job, and no, we won't be switch

[taustin]

And it's got nothing to do with behavioral inertia. Cloud computing adds an additional point of failure. Right now, with Office, if our T-1 goes down, OK, we can't check our email, but we can keep doing other things, like work on spreadsheets to send out by email when the T-1 is back up. With cloud computing, when the T-1 is down, everything is down.

Yeah, I know, Google Apps has options for working offline, but then, what's the point? How is it different, at that point, from Office?

No thanks. I know how reliable T-1s are. Yeah, pretty reliable, but without offline capabilities, we're out of business.

(Plus, I think whoever wrote this has little idea how many business use apps that Google will never have any interest in duplicating, like our cash register functions, and frankly, it would be illegal for us to let them handle some of that information anyway.)

From a Google App User Viewpoint...

[SuperCharlie]

I have a very small business. I set up Google Apps and use the entire collection of services.

First off, I have found that it does not provide the same stability as Gmail. It looks the same, but is is definitely not the same. We have uptime issues, cross-cookie issues with igoogle and gmail and it is generally not as stable as any other email solution I have used including Exchange.

It is worth about what you pay for it.. we are under 50 accounts, so it is free. If it cost, I would pay $30 a month to a web provider for all you can eat email and be done with it.

Blame it on the rain! Conversion tools suck.

[michaelcole]

I just migrated from Gmail to Google Apps, and it sucked. There are no decent migration tools out there. You think that Google could migrate between it's own two platforms. I couldn't move my email rules (filters) automatically and have about 80. Anyways, Outlook-Exchange-Sharepoint is just a better product. I use Google cause it's free. Deal with it. Mike

Biased sample

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook inertia may apply to users already use gmail, but only a minority of business users use gmail. Generally speaking, businesses would be strongly advised against maintaining confidential corporate data (most business e-mail) on a google server.

Combos

[lnxpilot]

As much as I despise Microsoft (I use Linux and Mac exclusively and I won't touch anything Microsoft with a 10 foot pole),
I can relate to the workers.
For example, I really tried liking Firefox and used it for over a year, but eventually went back to Mozilla because I can't live without the *built-in* email client.
The Firefox-Thunderbird combo is just not the same.

Re:SEE? Just like a woman!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm autonomous, you insensitive racist!

Let me be the first one to ask

[KZigurs]

Lotus Notes??? Really???

Re:Let me be the first one to ask

[BitZtream]

We see it a lot in government organizations. The federal EPA for instance uses Domino/Notes.

Sad, but true.

Re:The real problem is

[miknix]

Google doesn't have Clippy!!!! Who wants a integrated solution without clippy?

Patriot Act is the Dealbreaker...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Google may store our data on servers residing in the US, and since those US servers are subject to the Patriot Act, my company will never seriously consider the switch. The Patriot Act permits the US gov't to peruse/copy/pilfer our proprietary data, and our customers' private info, at will, without notice, and with punishment for anyone who told us this had occurred.

We'd love to switch to Google Apps, for a whole host of reasons, but it would be extraordinarily irresponsible to our customer who entrust us with their personal and private info and to our shareholders, who expect better.

Re:This is part of my job, and no, we won't be swi

[westlake]

I think whoever wrote this has little idea how many business use apps that Google will never have any interest in duplicating, like our cash register functions

It's this ability to tie everything together into a single unified working environment that makes the Microsoft solution - and those of its corporate partners - so appealing.

There is always a template or plug-in or a third party app that fits in somewhere, that solves some nagging little problem, no matter how obscure.

What Windows does wrong

[symbolset]

What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right?

A proper OS adheres to decades of best practice on security without regard to whether discarding the basic principles of security enables "popular" features.

Interoperability with past and future versions of the same operating environment and other operating environments - both with applications and data - is a core property of the thing called an "operating system". Without this property it's not an operating system, it's an operating environment. The difference is in whether it's suitable a suitable tool for solving a transient problem, or a platform upon which considerable business intelligence can be invested, and whether or not it's a foundation for progress. An operating system doesn't require an army of lawyers and deliberate engineering to prevent compatibility to defend its market share because it's not a tool for the vendor, it's a tool for the user.

A proper operating system comes with a toolchain to migrate it to another hardware platform, because hardware changes and a core principle of operating systems is not to trap its user into using an ephemeral hardware system.

There are more core principles of operating systems, but these three should be enough to illustrate that Windows never has been and never will be a "proper" operating system.

ZARAFA

[natxo asenjo]

I have no experience with zimbra, but zarafa really is an exchange substitute. The webaccess is amazing (working perfectly in firefox or other browsers), you can open several mailboxes in the web ui, it has push email that works with all active-sync devices and it really works as outlook users expect. It is opensource (AGPL) and they offer rpm, debs and sources.

They have great documentation, great support and as a whole, great product.

For hosters it is a killer too, you can set it up for multiple companies, each one with their own global address book.

You can store attachements in the file system instead of in the database (mysql). In their 'community' edition you even get 3 simultanous outlook users if you want that. But why would you want outlook if you don't have roadwarriors? If you do, then yes, you may need it.

Oh yes, before I forget, another great feature is the 'restore' button. Users can 'undelete' their deleted items (even from the trashbin!) up to 30 days after deleting them (all is configurable, period can be shorte or longer). Admins even have access to the deleted mailboxes of people whose accounts have been terminated for a similar period of time, so no need to dig up tapes anymore.

As a whole, great (opensource) software.

Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's little stuff!

[King_TJ]

One of my friends just tried deploying Google Apps to their entire company, switching everyone off of Outlook for email. 95% of the people were perfectly ok with it (at least after a bit of "coaching" so they didn't fear the changes). The problem was with the remaining 5%, who tended to be corporate "big wigs" and top producing sales staff. They took issue with things most of us would consider so minor, it was ridiculous -- yet were difficult to impossible to change.

EG. One guy had a hard time with the idea that auto-quoting of email replies didn't retain the exact same format Outlook used. Google uses the old-fashioned (familiar to all of us in the BBS days) method of quoting with ">" signs in front of each line. The user just couldn't cope with that change, insisting it looked totally "unprofessional".

$$$Office$$$

[wasabii]

I'm just going to throw this out there. I'm evaluating upgrading out existing Office install from 2003 to 2007. The cost for this is around $400 per desktop, $650 if we do software assurance. That's $650 per machine in the office. Some of these machines we bought from dell for $400. That means Office costs more than the entire computer and Windows itself. But I suspect we're still going to do it. Why? Because We're talking $650 for basically 3 years of productivity software per individual. That's about a week of salary for an employee. In total it makes back WAY more than a week of an employee's time over 3 years. So it may feel like a huge amount of money up front. And it is. But it *is* worth it.

Re:$$$Office$$$

[freedom_india]

Don't. Please don't upgrade to Office 2007.
Its UI is radically different from all versions till 2003 and your staff will spend many days learning it instead of being productive.
Plus you will spend more to get back the same menus.
There is functionally nothing new that 2007 has that 2003 didn't.
I have gone through your way and that's why am warning you of the pain ahead.

Legal required secrecy; Google fails

[Anonymous Coward]

All the documents I prepare for work are legally required to be keep confidential.
Google doesn't let me do this.
MSFT does.
I don't care if I can't access the document in 5-10 years. I only care if I can get sued because someone else can access the documents.

While I can fight a court order for the documents, I have no guarantee that Google would fight such a court order.

Google supports Outlook

[jipn4]

Google Apps emulates an Exchange server. That's also how the iPhone and Nokia phones synchronize.

So, you don't have to give up Outlook in order to use Google.

My Reasons why I would never recoomend Google Apps

[kzieli]

I'd never recommend use of google apps for a whole different set of reasons:

1. Your putting all your data on some one else's server without a contract.
2. Hence their is no uptime garantee
3. too many additional points of failure (now if ither google or your internet connection is down you can do nothing)
4. (from here) all your data ends up hosted in another country. Meaning the host is not bound by the same privacy laws as you are, which could cause you to be technically non compliant.

And why I personally don't use google apps:

1. Most of the time my laptop is not connected to the internet when I'm using
2. I run 64 bit Linux, for which there is no Google Gears.

All this recent talk of Google wanting to unseat Windows and yet so many of thier products currently require you to be using Windows in order to get full functionality.

Symptom sounds right, cause not quite so close

[MoeDrippins]

Ugh, Outlook how I hate and love thee.

Intertia may be strong, but at least with mail, sticking Outlook is not necessarily some emotional anti-response to change. Though it is a bloaty, slow, crash-prone steaming pile, no other mail system really comes close to it (that I've been able to find). Mail systems have various features that are better, yes, but none of them has it all particularly the integration of calendaring, contacts, filtering (with SpamBayes), GUI ease of use; and the degree of seamlessness between them.

I run Ubuntu but my company runs Exchange 2007, so I can't hook into all that; the most I can get is IMAP, which is a poor second choice. I'm really debating whether to keep a VirtualBox going JUST for Outlook.

Re:Symptom sounds right, cause not quite so close

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not run Evolution on your Ubuntu box? It works with my company's Exchange server, and has all of the meeting, tasks, and calendar capabilities of Outlook. It even mimicks Outlooks' interface. The only gripe I have with Evolution is that I had to install Thunderbird under Windows to convert my PST files to something that Evolution could read.

You can do it does not justify doing it

[kentsin]

Look at iphone:

the good old simple protocol approach for mail against fancy browser base mail client.

Why we need a complicate platform bound javascript or flash applications?

If browser-based-os means we edit the data on the browser in place without needing a platform bound fragile editor loading from server, that is a good step forward. The browser should be a read/write device. Multiple protocol, multiple format, portable, easy to develop for. Not a in-compatible fancy jungle.

Re:Can you help me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yarrr, I think ye be wanting one with this kernel http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3633221.

Re: Problems with Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern forms of Windows are fairly good OSes. However, since you asked, there are a few things that drive me up the wall about Windows. (For what it's worth, I spend a fairly equal amount of time on Windows and Linux.)

1. Drivers. Windows doesn't come with nearly enough drivers. Also, XP at least, tends to "forget" drivers which are installed, requiring them to be installed again and again.

2. Package management. As far as I know, Windows will only let you install or un-install most apps one at a time. This is terribly slow and primitive.

3. The UI won't get out of the way and leave me alone. I know there are updates, I know you found a problem, I know there are unused icons on my desktop. I know you want a cookie, leave me alone and let me get back to work.

As you pointed out, there are some terrible problems with Linux too, like sound and heavy reliance on the command line. Though, now that I think of it, there are some admin tasks which have to be performed on the Windows command line too. Ever tried to change your TCP window settings in Vista without using a command line?

I totally agree!

[drew73]

I totally agree! My company would be lost withouth Outlook and Office for that matter... Google can try to take over ther world, but they are going to have to offer something more than cloud computing... It's just the next business model to syphen money out of your pocket. Companies don't even want to sell you software anymore, they want to rent it to you! This world is going to hell in a handbasket!

Are you really that much of a zealot?

[tjstork]

What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?

1) Libraries.
2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog.
3) Workmanship.

Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.

No, you are missing something.

1) Libraries.
2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog.
3) Workmanship.

How can you claim that libraries in Win7 are something that Linux has is beyond me. I have the latest Ubuntu, and win7, and my ubuntu is running KDE, and honestly, KDE's dialogs suck.

Seriously, look at the left of the dialog in Win7...

http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=8

See that little thing that says "libraries"
See the crumb thingy at the top
And, if you actually used it, you might notice that if you hit the right mouse button, you get all the shell extensions.. and you can rename, copy, delete, etc... and even launch another app inside your file dialog...

And you tell me THIS is better?

http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=15

or THIS is better?

http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=16

than this?

http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=17

I thought Open Source was about honest communications. And, instead, I get a sea of rationalization that Linux's AMC Pacer dialogs are even in the same ballpark as Win7's Caddy's. They just aren't.

Maybe if FOSS people got paid for their product, they won't have to make it into a religious crusade and could deal with it objectively.

Google can learn from Excel vs Lotus

[jawahar]

Excel versus Lotus

Job Security

[deanston]

1). People debate the merits of different email systems as if none of their mail traffic ever goes outside of their firewall. The idea of internal message never leaking out is an illusion. 2). Company email maintenance is a big part of IT support. No manager will volunteer to give up that budget and personnel and lost of IT jobs. It's not user inertia. It is in-house IT inertia. 3) I haven't used MS Office for 3 years. Nobody in my office knows the difference in documents I create. 4) I've found Gmail faster and more responsive and have better uptime than my company's own corporate mail. 4) Since maintaining email and email data has become so expensive, my organization has severely limited the server storage capacity of each user - much less than Gmail. To ensure you do not lose your important messages and data our IT recommend you BACK UP THE MESSAGES ON YOUR OWN IN YOUR PC to save server room. Are you kidding me? Is this 2009 or 1999? Forget data security and backup issue on my desktop for a minute. It is not worth my time and I think it is a ridiculous use of my time at my hourly rate when there are other project priorities and deadlines. 5) Using email as part of your project workflow is just plain wrong. Any important notes and work orders should be in a real project management system. 6) Outlook is the principle carrier of viruses. 7) If your organization cannot keep an Internet line up 99.99% of the time in this day and age, you've got bigger underlying fundamental problems than just email and local apps.

This is slashdot

[jopsen]

So what is a "proper" OS? What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right?

For starters it's a proprietary OS, that's enough for me... I'm sure we all know the rest of the arguments... Besides Microsoft is inherently evil :)

Provides a standard

<insert condescending comment, possibly referring to IE>

Re:Blame it on the rain! Conversion tools suck.

[yivi]

In "Labs" you can enable an option to import/export filters. I don't know if labels are re-created when you import the filters, or if you have to create the labels manually beforehand.

All that being said, migrating from GMail to Google Apps it's a little bit sucky, yes (I've done it myself), but probably less sucky than most migration scenarios. It is rather bothersome that they let you import mail from many free web services, but not from a GMail account...

Regards,

I.-

Searchability

[Nerdposeur]

A few days ago at work I was looking for an Outlook email conversation from maybe 6 months prior. Spent several minutes and couldn't find it, meaning I have to repeat some work, which costs the company.

If I open my personal Gmail, I can find a 4-year-old congratulatory email from my brother in about 5 seconds with a simple search.

My company would be better served by the searchability Gmail offers. Whatever other obstacles there are, that's a great benefit.

Corporal-Captain. It's a new test rank.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major
> factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication
> interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness
> to give up a tool that's so familiar.

I thought the major factor was, "Google Apps, wut?"

Note to Google, Inc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Google, I have not adopted your "equivalent" software packages to replace Outlook and Office. Why?

1. Word processing and e-mail, let's be honest, are not inherently work. They are meta-work at best. You only use these programs to support other work. The point is the end, not the means. Did I successfully understand the e-mail or document content? If yes, no further femto-slices of brain power should be dedicated to the matter. These utility apps are not shiny toys, they are not fun to use, they are and should be boring and invisible. Outlook and Office are invisible to me and are not non-functioning, therefore I have absolutely NO motivation to replace, and in fact I have an interest in not expending resources to make unnecessary changes.
2. You haven't sold people on the concept that your Google apps are better, obviously. Why? Are they better or are they just the same boring app that works a little differently?

Maybe the main factor holding back Google Apps adoption is that Google Apps aren't needed, therefore there's no demand.

Google, beware: you WILL get pushback when trying to suggest something that doesn't make sense.