The benefit of ActiveSync is that it allows you to pull from Exchange & Outlook. This means the device can talk to whatever Microsoft's offering of the day is without any middleware. In essence ActiveSync is an embedded native Exchange Client.
If Apple wanted to develop their own, this would entail developing their own means to interface with Exchange and Microsoft Office. It's no doubt far easier to just pay the licensing to Microsoft than develop an inferior cludge over POP3/IMAP.
Apple's biggest cock-up is restricting carrier choice. I own an iPod touch and the platform is excellent, I'd love to have an iPhone but the UK Operator 02 has notoriously bad reception in my area. For business use we have established contracts and call rates as well as supporting infrastructure to reduce the cost of our calls from office to mobile. We are not going to change all that simply to get a new phone. We pay around £300 for our SmartPhones, hardware cost is not really the issue.
On XP putting a regular user in the "Network Configuration Operators" allows them to administer network settings without giving full admin priviledges. The power users group is all but an adminstrator anyhow.
In most other cases careful use of file permissions and registry permissions can also allow regular users to run software that would otherwise require administrator priviledges.
The programs that break down are not following guidelines that have been well established by Microsoft for many years, pretty much all Microsoft software works gracefully as a non-admin and the causes can be firmly placed with the 3rd party developers.
I'm currently in the painful process of removing all local admin / power user across a large user base with plenty of historical software. The only area where I am having significant difficulties are those users who are developing software (ie. Visual Studio and the like), it's not impossible, but certainly not easy for the average user or administrator.
Actually this is one of the missing pieces in the Google Apps puzzle. They've gained push e-mail and synching on anything that supports ActiveSync which includes Windows Mobile devices & iPhone/iPod Touch.
Once they finish off Google gears for offline gmail, then they have pretty much fixed the problem off offline / mobile access to GMail which makes Google Apps alot more appealing.
Most of the complaints against the use of web services is that you lose out when on the road or internet connection is down.
It's almost the Exchange Alternative everyone has been looking for.
I think it's ridiculous that MS is making customers pay for this as an upgrade when it's really a very pretty service pack.
People don't upgrade their PCs any more, they buy new ones. There is no *need* to purchase a Vista to Windows 7 upgrade as Vista will be supported by Microsoft for the 5 years or so, which is the useful life of your PC.
The days of people replacing components in PCs are over which in turn means there is little point updating your operating system, get your update when you replace your PC.
This is why Vista is simultaneously a huge flop and a massive success. No-one is in place upgrading, but those who buy new PCs have Vista installed.
"Without exception, every instance of this was slow or buggy or didn't actually do everything that the local app it replaced did, or just plain-out didn't work very well."
I quite agree - even taking this a step further some of the unixy terminal programs were often the best. Lot's of short-cut keys and no mouse to distract, yes these things can be a bit cumbersome to learn but given a few weeks or months of use the speed the people can use these things is astonishing compared to a Windows GUI app or a web app.
Web apps have there place and in my opinion is where lots of people use an application infrequently. If everyone in your company may need to access an application, but not extensively then a web-app is ideal. If it's what someone sits and works with all day, then a web-client is going to be a poor solution.
I agree - thin-clients are not often the best solution. If you need to put a centralised bandwidth hungry application out to a remote site or you have hundreds of users with limited identical needs, then they can potentially outweigh the other options through bandwidth savings. Another case is where there is application to install is so fiddly and error-prone whilst requiring weekly updates, that the cost of supporting this on a PC would be prohibitive. A school environment wouldn't fit any of these use cases, I'm betting that the same software is in use all year and that 6 weeks in the summer is plenty of time to get the development done.
Thin-clients are not a cost saver and should never be considered for that reason alone. The development of the centralised infrastructure requires great care and attention to get right, an admin who thinks that this is somehow easier in a thin-client environment will get a nasty surprise. A glitch on a regular PC might take a single machine out of service or provide some very limited performance disruption. In an thin-client environment this same issue could impact each and every one of your users.
I'm guessing that the school in question won't be able to afford a couple of admins who are competently able to administer a thin-client environment and once you start chucking Citrix licenses and the other middleware required to make the environment work smoothly you've pretty much wiped out and exceeded your savings.
I have helped a school implement a thin-client solution - this took a lot of outside help for them and they still need a lab with regular PCs for running photoshop and the like. Spending a bit of time learning how to configure PCs properly in conjunction with something like Microsofts SteadyState will be a superiour longer term option and will probably cost a lot less.
University IT departments tend to like degrees, particularly those issued by their own department. The jobs in turn also tend to go those who've done extensive "free" work placements.
This is not typical IT environment and the same the world over.
The whole point of a hashing algorithm like MD5 is that even a single bit change should change lots of random bits in the resulting hash. If it was predictable it wouldn't be suitable for it's purpose.
The reason these are blocked is due to viruses using them as a simple way to bypass virus scanners. Virus scanners cannot easily scan password protected.ZIP files.
I wouldn't consider a password protected.zip files an encryption mechanism.
Agreed, it has been my personal experience that tier-1 help desk people are usually of the college intern type. While they may be knowledgeable overall it takes too much time to get things done. Why put in a support ticket, or proposal for a new software package when I can do my own fixes, write my own apps, or use a FOSS to get things done quicker and more efficiently.
From the other side, the problem with people just like you is that when you leave, your replacement will not be hired for his ability to write apps or use FOSS. So the IT department will no doubt get a call from your now irrate manager or replacement demanding that IT support your systems.
I've seen this so many times within my own organisation, departments or teams have their IT guy who have historically done all the IT for them, doing a fine job of it. Then they leave, then the IT department have to pick up where this person left off, inevitably requiring a time consuming migration back to the corporate standard systems. If this arrangement is fully supported by appropriate management such that the replacements job requirement is such that they should have appropriate IT knowledge, the problem with this is that you were probably a 1 in 1000 candidate, finding a qualified competent solicitor (or whatever) who knows drupal inside and out is pretty rare.
Maybe because nobody wants to complain about a missing GUI when the product is free. But anyway I've found 4 GUIs for Postgresql in a quick search, not counting Navicat. I've never used it but it looks very nice. I've used PG Admin, which is great for simple work. Most of these are better than Access, which is just a toy, but not as good as Microsoft's query analyzer (now called "server management studio" I believe).
You've missed the point with Access. Access is a very simple to use application development environment. Someone with minimal database and programming experience can cobble together straightforward applications. Discounting Microsoft Access as a toy really shows ignorance of the power of the platform, the database engine may have been limited particularly with scaling and multiuser performance, but it's SQL feature set was far superior to MySQL for many years supporting features such as subselects, constraints and foreign keys.
I'm not an Access fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it has a niche that is not filled by pretty much any other commercial or open-source database in that a "power user" can put together an application.
Dell's PDAs were as good as any other Windows CE / PocketPC PDA. The whole market was full of similar devices with almost identical features, the reason that dell pulled out of this market was competition from Windows Smartphone, Dell couldn't really compete with subsidised handsets from the cell-phone operators.
Dell are on their 3rd generation of blade and second generation of chassis. The fourth generation blade and third generation chassis are not too far away. The Dell chassis has fully redundant power and networking capabilities, I'm not sure what else you'd expect.
Dell would not sell an iSCSI SAN built-in or bundled with their blade systems, that makes no sense at all, the product would be equally useful to a HP customer or a Dell Rack or Standalone server user.
As long as their is a SINGLE windows only app that is essential to a person's computer use then Linux will struggle to make it on the desktop. If you must have app xyz to conduct your work which is a Windows only app then you must have Windows. Sure a hobbyiest or enthusiast might run a virtual machine or second windows machine in order to accomodate the application, however for the typical home or corporate user this is going to be an unnessassary time expense. Certainly for the corporates the often touted cost saving advantage has just evaporated, perhaps even costing more with two seperate platforms to support.
I support perhaps 50 applications in some manner (various varieties of accounting, compliance, workflow, CRM, forms), pretty much each one of these applications are Windows only and each one would be a show stopper. This is perhaps why the government opensource / Linux projects rarely work, with so many specialised applications and services that cannot be met using Opensource software - weights and measures, health and safety, trading standards, cms, document management/archiving, building maintenance, roads maintenance, livestock tracking, town and country planning, building control, social care / social services, finance/accounting/procurement, legal casework, educational records, GIS / Mapping, the list is almost endless. Sure some of these apps might work under Linux, but not all and again their may be opensource solutions or customisations available, but the maintenance work and integration work trying to keep all this working smoothly is more than what can be reasonably managed by a typical IT department. This software is also the backbone of someone's working life, it needs to be the best possible software available to keep them productive. Their managers view of getting the best available system might not gell with the techies dream of Linux on a corporate desktop.
If just one game, one piece of hardware, one accounting package, one piece of compliance software is available for Windows only, then the battle for Linux will be lost with that user. In a corporate environment a single app could derail an entire Linux project. Why give yourself the overhead of supporting Linux AND Windows when you could just support Windows. Also Microsoft are getting very crafty with enterprise agreements / software assurance and are beginning to make certain applications only available to SA / EA customers (Bitlocker Disk Encryption / Softricity / Office Enterprise) a trend which I'm sure will continue until we are all hooked. Once an organisation has committed to these agreements there is no cost benefit from Linux on a selection of desktops.
There are similar problems with what is seen as a simple Microsoft Word -> OpenOffice Writer conversion. Whilst it's well known that nobody uses all the funcionality available within Microsoft Word, everyone uses a different feature set and in order for OpenOffice Writer to compete and gain anywhere near the marketshare of Microsoft Word it would have to duplicate virtually all of the functionality. Even for straightforward home / schools users, the killer feature might be the available clipart. For others it might be that Microsoft Office includes a grammar / spell checker in a minority language.
Perhaps the solution is with WINE, *if* and a very big if WINE could reach the stage where it can run close to 100% of windows applications reliably under Linux then their is a hope, although I can't see how this could happen without breaching some Windows patents and a china sized army of coders to keep up with the size of the Windows API.
You wouldn't have a very useful Linux system without XFree86 / XORG, Apache, Tomcat, SpamAssassin, Sendmail, QMail, Postfix, Perl, PHP, ISC BIND, ISC DHCP, Postgres, Webmin and the various other packages that are under non-GPL licenses.
VMWARE consolidation tends to be limited by your overall system RAM. I can only assume that you are making very small RAM allocations (128M-192M?) or you have a large amount of physical RAM available (12-16GB?)
Virtuozzo/OpenVZ and VMWare have strengths in completely different areas.
VMWARE is an excellent DR/BC solution due to complete virtual machine portability. However consolidation ratios (8:1 maybe) and performance are not that great, for consolidation you've probably only saved a few Us, but you have not really helped reduce the support burden, you'll still need lots of middleware / server management software to manage your estate. To actually get the most out of the DR/BC solution you also need an FC SAN and the complete Virtual Centre suite. If you've that kind of money to throw around then clearly you are in it for BC/DR purposes and VMWare is the right option. At this level you don't care if your consolidation ratios are 1:0.9 or worse.
Virtuozzo/VZ on the other hand wins hands down for consolidation and management; you can easily fit 20-30 or more VPSes on a single server; and whatever the consolidation ratio the responsiveness will always be better than the same server under VMWare. However there are some drawbacks, Virtuozzo doesn't give you complete portability; you can only host Windows 2003 guest servers on a Windows 2003 hardware node for instance and you are unable to install device drivers. Adding a new VPS takes about as long and uses about as much resource as creating a new user on a system.
I use both solutions; each definitely have their own place and couldn't be more different in their relative strengths.
hehe. That appears to work but you've forgotten the -Q switch or whatever it is. Good luck restoring your backups, some will work, some will not at all and will depend on the content of your database.
You don't get it.. Why would I pay $35 for Zidelook when I can buy exchange for ~$50 without all the integration issues.
I've played around with enough 3rd Party Outlook MAPI connectors (SLOX, SCALIX and various others.) to know that things are OK till the.PST file corrupts a bit, then it's game over or hours upon hours attempting to isolate the troublesome message. These problems do not exist with Exchange.
Don't even begin to talk to me about the messes I've gotten into syncing phones, pdas, outlook and these alternatives. Implementation details such as "All Day" meaning a bit field in one device, 0:00->23:59 in another, it's horrific to see peoples carefully crafted calendars breeding and multiplying before your very eyes.
I've been very patient searching for a solution, there is *no* release quality open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
One thing I've learnt is that those who most require calendar sharing / true groupware features are those that have the least patience for quirks.
Having wasted 2-3 years investigating open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange I've finally given up.
There is *no* open source exchange alternative that is worth bothering with, certainly none that have the level of finish as Microsoft exchange.
Almost all Open Source exchange alternatives shoot themselves in the foot by either pricing the Outlook connectors above or close to the cost of Exchange or pay the outlook element lip service and not include all features and hope that everyone uses their crummy webmail app. Outlook is an excellent e-mail client, perhaps a bit bloated, but easy enough to use.
Typical problems with open source exchange alternatives are:
1. None or poor support for Nokia Phones / Windows Mobile PDAs. 2. Use the abortion that is IMAP, absolutely slow, buggy and hopeless. 3. Poor implementation of groupware functionality within Outlook. 4. No optimisations for slow links / mobile. 5. No reliable or efficent offline capabilities. 6. Poor choice of backup / archiving add-ons. 7. Poor LDAP / Active Directory support. 8. Crummy management tools.
This is really not worth debating, there can be no open source exchange alternative unless there is a credible Outlook alternative, which for the moment there isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
The benefit of ActiveSync is that it allows you to pull from Exchange & Outlook. This means the device can talk to whatever Microsoft's offering of the day is without any middleware. In essence ActiveSync is an embedded native Exchange Client.
If Apple wanted to develop their own, this would entail developing their own means to interface with Exchange and Microsoft Office. It's no doubt far easier to just pay the licensing to Microsoft than develop an inferior cludge over POP3/IMAP.
Jason.
Apple's biggest cock-up is restricting carrier choice. I own an iPod touch and the platform is excellent, I'd love to have an iPhone but the UK Operator 02 has notoriously bad reception in my area. For business use we have established contracts and call rates as well as supporting infrastructure to reduce the cost of our calls from office to mobile. We are not going to change all that simply to get a new phone. We pay around £300 for our SmartPhones, hardware cost is not really the issue.
Jason
On XP putting a regular user in the "Network Configuration Operators" allows them to administer network settings without giving full admin priviledges. The power users group is all but an adminstrator anyhow.
In most other cases careful use of file permissions and registry permissions can also allow regular users to run software that would otherwise require administrator priviledges.
The programs that break down are not following guidelines that have been well established by Microsoft for many years, pretty much all Microsoft software works gracefully as a non-admin and the causes can be firmly placed with the 3rd party developers.
I'm currently in the painful process of removing all local admin / power user across a large user base with plenty of historical software. The only area where I am having significant difficulties are those users who are developing software (ie. Visual Studio and the like), it's not impossible, but certainly not easy for the average user or administrator.
Jason.
WM Supports Push e-mail in conjunction with exchange 2007.
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/features/owa_mobile.mspx
Jason.
Actually this is one of the missing pieces in the Google Apps puzzle. They've gained push e-mail and synching on anything that supports ActiveSync which includes Windows Mobile devices & iPhone/iPod Touch.
Once they finish off Google gears for offline gmail, then they have pretty much fixed the problem off offline / mobile access to GMail which makes Google Apps alot more appealing.
Most of the complaints against the use of web services is that you lose out when on the road or internet connection is down.
It's almost the Exchange Alternative everyone has been looking for.
Jason.
I think it's ridiculous that MS is making customers pay for this as an upgrade when it's really a very pretty service pack.
People don't upgrade their PCs any more, they buy new ones. There is no *need* to purchase a Vista to Windows 7 upgrade as Vista will be supported by Microsoft for the 5 years or so, which is the useful life of your PC.
The days of people replacing components in PCs are over which in turn means there is little point updating your operating system, get your update when you replace your PC.
This is why Vista is simultaneously a huge flop and a massive success. No-one is in place upgrading, but those who buy new PCs have Vista installed.
Jason.
"Without exception, every instance of this was slow or buggy or didn't actually do everything that the local app it replaced did, or just plain-out didn't work very well."
I quite agree - even taking this a step further some of the unixy terminal programs were often the best. Lot's of short-cut keys and no mouse to distract, yes these things can be a bit cumbersome to learn but given a few weeks or months of use the speed the people can use these things is astonishing compared to a Windows GUI app or a web app.
Web apps have there place and in my opinion is where lots of people use an application infrequently. If everyone in your company may need to access an application, but not extensively then a web-app is ideal. If it's what someone sits and works with all day, then a web-client is going to be a poor solution.
Jason
I agree - thin-clients are not often the best solution. If you need to put a centralised bandwidth hungry application out to a remote site or you have hundreds of users with limited identical needs, then they can potentially outweigh the other options through bandwidth savings. Another case is where there is application to install is so fiddly and error-prone whilst requiring weekly updates, that the cost of supporting this on a PC would be prohibitive. A school environment wouldn't fit any of these use cases, I'm betting that the same software is in use all year and that 6 weeks in the summer is plenty of time to get the development done.
Thin-clients are not a cost saver and should never be considered for that reason alone. The development of the centralised infrastructure requires great care and attention to get right, an admin who thinks that this is somehow easier in a thin-client environment will get a nasty surprise. A glitch on a regular PC might take a single machine out of service or provide some very limited performance disruption. In an thin-client environment this same issue could impact each and every one of your users.
I'm guessing that the school in question won't be able to afford a couple of admins who are competently able to administer a thin-client environment and once you start chucking Citrix licenses and the other middleware required to make the environment work smoothly you've pretty much wiped out and exceeded your savings.
I have helped a school implement a thin-client solution - this took a lot of outside help for them and they still need a lab with regular PCs for running photoshop and the like. Spending a bit of time learning how to configure PCs properly in conjunction with something like Microsofts SteadyState will be a superiour longer term option and will probably cost a lot less.
Jason.
University IT departments tend to like degrees, particularly those issued by their own department. The jobs in turn also tend to go those who've done extensive "free" work placements.
This is not typical IT environment and the same the world over.
Jason.
The whole point of a hashing algorithm like MD5 is that even a single bit change should change lots of random bits in the resulting hash. If it was predictable it wouldn't be suitable for it's purpose.
Jason
The reason these are blocked is due to viruses using them as a simple way to bypass virus scanners. Virus scanners cannot easily scan password protected .ZIP files.
.zip files an encryption mechanism.
I wouldn't consider a password protected
From the other side, the problem with people just like you is that when you leave, your replacement will not be hired for his ability to write apps or use FOSS. So the IT department will no doubt get a call from your now irrate manager or replacement demanding that IT support your systems.
I've seen this so many times within my own organisation, departments or teams have their IT guy who have historically done all the IT for them, doing a fine job of it. Then they leave, then the IT department have to pick up where this person left off, inevitably requiring a time consuming migration back to the corporate standard systems. If this arrangement is fully supported by appropriate management such that the replacements job requirement is such that they should have appropriate IT knowledge, the problem with this is that you were probably a 1 in 1000 candidate, finding a qualified competent solicitor (or whatever) who knows drupal inside and out is pretty rare.
Jason
You've missed the point with Access. Access is a very simple to use application development environment. Someone with minimal database and programming experience can cobble together straightforward applications. Discounting Microsoft Access as a toy really shows ignorance of the power of the platform, the database engine may have been limited particularly with scaling and multiuser performance, but it's SQL feature set was far superior to MySQL for many years supporting features such as subselects, constraints and foreign keys.
I'm not an Access fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it has a niche that is not filled by pretty much any other commercial or open-source database in that a "power user" can put together an application.
Dell's PDAs were as good as any other Windows CE / PocketPC PDA. The whole market was full of similar devices with almost identical features, the reason that dell pulled out of this market was competition from Windows Smartphone, Dell couldn't really compete with subsidised handsets from the cell-phone operators.
Dell are on their 3rd generation of blade and second generation of chassis. The fourth generation blade and third generation chassis are not too far away. The Dell chassis has fully redundant power and networking capabilities, I'm not sure what else you'd expect.
Dell would not sell an iSCSI SAN built-in or bundled with their blade systems, that makes no sense at all, the product would be equally useful to a HP customer or a Dell Rack or Standalone server user.
Jason.
As long as their is a SINGLE windows only app that is essential to a person's computer use then Linux will struggle to make it on the desktop. If you must have app xyz to conduct your work which is a Windows only app then you must have Windows. Sure a hobbyiest or enthusiast might run a virtual machine or second windows machine in order to accomodate the application, however for the typical home or corporate user this is going to be an unnessassary time expense. Certainly for the corporates the often touted cost saving advantage has just evaporated, perhaps even costing more with two seperate platforms to support.
I support perhaps 50 applications in some manner (various varieties of accounting, compliance, workflow, CRM, forms), pretty much each one of these applications are Windows only and each one would be a show stopper. This is perhaps why the government opensource / Linux projects rarely work, with so many specialised applications and services that cannot be met using Opensource software - weights and measures, health and safety, trading standards, cms, document management/archiving, building maintenance, roads maintenance, livestock tracking, town and country planning, building control, social care / social services, finance/accounting/procurement, legal casework, educational records, GIS / Mapping, the list is almost endless. Sure some of these apps might work under Linux, but not all and again their may be opensource solutions or customisations available, but the maintenance work and integration work trying to keep all this working smoothly is more than what can be reasonably managed by a typical IT department. This software is also the backbone of someone's working life, it needs to be the best possible software available to keep them productive. Their managers view of getting the best available system might not gell with the techies dream of Linux on a corporate desktop.
If just one game, one piece of hardware, one accounting package, one piece of compliance software is available for Windows only, then the battle for Linux will be lost with that user. In a corporate environment a single app could derail an entire Linux project. Why give yourself the overhead of supporting Linux AND Windows when you could just support Windows. Also Microsoft are getting very crafty with enterprise agreements / software assurance and are beginning to make certain applications only available to SA / EA customers (Bitlocker Disk Encryption / Softricity / Office Enterprise) a trend which I'm sure will continue until we are all hooked. Once an organisation has committed to these agreements there is no cost benefit from Linux on a selection of desktops.
There are similar problems with what is seen as a simple Microsoft Word -> OpenOffice Writer conversion. Whilst it's well known that nobody uses all the funcionality available within Microsoft Word, everyone uses a different feature set and in order for OpenOffice Writer to compete and gain anywhere near the marketshare of Microsoft Word it would have to duplicate virtually all of the functionality. Even for straightforward home / schools users, the killer feature might be the available clipart. For others it might be that Microsoft Office includes a grammar / spell checker in a minority language.
Perhaps the solution is with WINE, *if* and a very big if WINE could reach the stage where it can run close to 100% of windows applications reliably under Linux then their is a hope, although I can't see how this could happen without breaching some Windows patents and a china sized army of coders to keep up with the size of the Windows API.
Jason.
Windows XP Embedded is a cut down version of Windows XP and is generally used in POS / Instrumentation / Appliances etc.
The Smartphone / CE / PocketPC OS can't realistically be any more than $5 a unit.
Anyway don't fool yourself that the iPhone is OSX. It's running on an ARM device, iPhone is as much OsX as windows smartphone is windows XP.
You wouldn't have a very useful Linux system without XFree86 / XORG, Apache, Tomcat, SpamAssassin, Sendmail, QMail, Postfix, Perl, PHP, ISC BIND, ISC DHCP, Postgres, Webmin and the various other packages that are under non-GPL licenses.
Grandparent is correct Cannot change password, password never expires etc. are user account properties and can be set on a per-user basis.
Jason.
VMWARE consolidation tends to be limited by your overall system RAM. I can only assume that you are making very small RAM allocations (128M-192M?) or you have a large amount of physical RAM available (12-16GB?)
Jason.
Virtuozzo/OpenVZ and VMWare have strengths in completely different areas.
VMWARE is an excellent DR/BC solution due to complete virtual machine portability. However consolidation ratios (8:1 maybe) and performance are not that great, for consolidation you've probably only saved a few Us, but you have not really helped reduce the support burden, you'll still need lots of middleware / server management software to manage your estate. To actually get the most out of the DR/BC solution you also need an FC SAN and the complete Virtual Centre suite. If you've that kind of money to throw around then clearly you are in it for BC/DR purposes and VMWare is the right option. At this level you don't care if your consolidation ratios are 1:0.9 or worse.
Virtuozzo/VZ on the other hand wins hands down for consolidation and management; you can easily fit 20-30 or more VPSes on a single server; and whatever the consolidation ratio the responsiveness will always be better than the same server under VMWare. However there are some drawbacks, Virtuozzo doesn't give you complete portability; you can only host Windows 2003 guest servers on a Windows 2003 hardware node for instance and you are unable to install device drivers. Adding a new VPS takes about as long and uses about as much resource as creating a new user on a system.
I use both solutions; each definitely have their own place and couldn't be more different in their relative strengths.
Jason
If it has no Outlook connector then it isn't an exchange killer.
Jason
hehe. That appears to work but you've forgotten the -Q switch or whatever it is. Good luck restoring your backups, some will work, some will not at all and will depend on the content of your database.
Jason.
You don't get it.. Why would I pay $35 for Zidelook when I can buy exchange for ~$50 without all the integration issues.
.PST file corrupts a bit, then it's game over or hours upon hours attempting to isolate the troublesome message. These problems do not exist with Exchange.
I've played around with enough 3rd Party Outlook MAPI connectors (SLOX, SCALIX and various others.) to know that things are OK till the
Don't even begin to talk to me about the messes I've gotten into syncing phones, pdas, outlook and these alternatives. Implementation details such as "All Day" meaning a bit field in one device, 0:00->23:59 in another, it's horrific to see peoples carefully crafted calendars breeding and multiplying before your very eyes.
I've been very patient searching for a solution, there is *no* release quality open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
One thing I've learnt is that those who most require calendar sharing / true groupware features are those that have the least patience for quirks.
On your head be it.
Jason.
Having wasted 2-3 years investigating open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange I've finally given up.
There is *no* open source exchange alternative that is worth bothering with, certainly none that have the level of finish as Microsoft exchange.
Almost all Open Source exchange alternatives shoot themselves in the foot by either pricing the Outlook connectors above or close to the cost of Exchange or pay the outlook element lip service and not include all features and hope that everyone uses their crummy webmail app. Outlook is an excellent e-mail client, perhaps a bit bloated, but easy enough to use.
Typical problems with open source exchange alternatives are:
1. None or poor support for Nokia Phones / Windows Mobile PDAs.
2. Use the abortion that is IMAP, absolutely slow, buggy and hopeless.
3. Poor implementation of groupware functionality within Outlook.
4. No optimisations for slow links / mobile.
5. No reliable or efficent offline capabilities.
6. Poor choice of backup / archiving add-ons.
7. Poor LDAP / Active Directory support.
8. Crummy management tools.
This is really not worth debating, there can be no open source exchange alternative unless there is a credible Outlook alternative, which for the moment there isn't.
Jason