I really have a hard time with people saying that Office-Exchange is a killer app...
Now that everyone wants a copy of their email on every possible device they own, I find it a million times easier to have the mail hosted somewhere using Google Apps or outlook.com or any other mail service you prefer. For around 50$/user/year, small and medium-sized companies have absolutely no reason to buy and maintain expensive servers just for Exchange. Support technicians that specialize in Exchange are usually hard to find and/or very expensive, it also requires massive backup infrastructure on antiquated tapes and in case of a crash, restoring is simply painful. Simply not something that I would recommend unless they have full time IT employees (even then).
Then you need static IPs, have to check constantly to make sure you are not on someone spam black list and usually need an ultra-fast connection too for all the people that are on the road to receive and send mail at reasonable speed. Then that still won't protect you if you've got some sort of power failure or internet failure at the office and then nobody is able to receive/send emails until that's solved.
Maybe it still makes some sense for very large organization with full time IT employees but for everybody else, there's the cloud.
Just as other tech companies were able to switch their main focus from hardware to software for example, Microsoft will stay well alive and switch from an operating system company to just a regular software company and/or service company.
As their consumer market becomes fragmented, it will not make sense anymore to restrict Office, SQL and other products to one and only platform (windows). SO they will make money with the office360 and hosting emails/cloud servers with their outlook.com platform. Maybe continuing working on embedded devices like the XBOX and specialty hardware. As more and more devices use some kind of Linux flavor, Windows-based OS will become the odd ball so game development will become more standardized around OpenGL and maybe Wayland and other derivatives.
Even if they get a decent market share in phone and tablet devices, they will probably never reach a dominant position so they might as well release their money-making products and gain some market share across other platforms instead of closing the market to Windows-only devices and waiting for the next competitor to release a one-for-all-platform solutions and take over.
I think people complaining about details such as the Start Button on Windows 8 and the Metro interface are missing the big picture here. The tech world is changing because of more open platforms everywhere and not having a monopoly-ish position in any market changes their game completely.
That might have more to do with the limitations on the server side than on the client side.
Zimbra currently has the same issue with Shared Contacts for example. The contacts can be shared but the labels attached to each one of them is treated locally so every user in the office has to build their own labels. Not very efficient.
I posted a bug about this a few years ago and apparently it's still not fixed. Priority is given through voting and apparently not enough people care about this feature.
Maybe you missed the function but AFAICR the function has always been there.
Tools -> Account Settings -> Under Outgoing Server on the left, you can enter all the SMTP servers you need to use. You can select a default one over there.
Then you simply click on any account (click on the HEADER where the name is just above the Server Settings of each account. At the bottom of the window on the right, you will see "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" from which you can leave the default one selected or select a specific one to be used (from the list of SMTP entered above).
Also worth mentioning, Thunderbird is free. Exchange/Outlook are no. Plus using Outlook in an IMAP environment as always been a pain since it has to create an additional data file (so a different "tree" hierarchy in the folder view distinct from the main one) because the IMAP data file can not be used as a "default" delivery. Outlook will then maintain his own main data file on top of the IMAP one resulting in non-imap SENT and JUNK folders for example.
I believe that is accurate information on at least Office 2007 maybe even in 2010. It might be possible to tweak the settings and make it work more seamlessly but that's the default behavior when you add an IMAP gmail account for example. You don't have to deal with those annoyances with Thunderbird.
Despite the lack of an easy way to sync contacts, calendars and others with a smart phone which may be a show-stopper for some, Thunderbird is an overall excellent mail client. The funniest thing, is that my two main "selling" points with Thunderbird are exactly the speed at which the searches are executed and returned (which in my experience are so much faster in Thunderbird than in Outlook that I can't believe people Microsoft doesn't improve their software). The resulting behavior is that nobody typically uses the search in Outlook, they simply rather sort their inbox by sender, press the first letter of the sender and then scroll until they reach it. Not the most efficient way in my opinion.
The other killer feature for me in Thunderbird is a recent one, when a large file is attached to an email, a notice will show up at the bottom and will ask you to use the Filelink feature which will basically use UbuntuOne, Box.com and another service to automatically store and link files using one of these services. It is really a life saver for average non-geeks users which can seem to make a distinction between a 75k thumbnail JPG file and a 150 megs PDF catalog with pictures.
My typical user (used to) uses Outlook on a standalone computer using POP3 hosted on a third party company. No exchange. So if you want to compare apples and apples, I would say Thunderbird is faster at indexing, searching and display results than standalone Outlook. Maybe you are using Exchange in your example with the searches being indexed and returned from the server resulting in a faster execution?
I just realized while reading TFA that at these prices, it won't even come with the keyboard included. So add another ~100$ for the touch or type cover!
That's what I was about to say. Knowing the algorythm, they should brute force it and look at the results. Even if the results are impossible to detect automatically, this is when slashdot citizens come in and sort through the information.:)
Actually, unless you already know the company, neither the logo nor the writing is especially recognisable imho. The logo look like a cardboard color print test and because now the writing is in a simple font, it could be anything. Hardly recognisable to me. At least the previous logo and font were unique (or at least somehow distinctive). It almost seems as if after trying to copy iOS from Apple, they were now after the Google logo and color branding.
Apparently this is the "less is more" philosophy... but at the same time, it is plain and unimaginative. Isn't it bad for a company that aims to prove that they can reinvent themselves?
I don't own the energizer duo (and now won't even think about getting one either) but I own some Energizer AA batteries (2500 mAh) and their charger just sucks. It takes 16 hours to charge 4 batteries... I bought like 16 USB Cells and use them everywhere in the house for remotes and Rockband accessories. Using them side by side with the Energizers in Guitars and all, you couldn't tell they don't last as long as the other ones. Also if people are coming in for a jam and the batteries are a bit low, it only takes an hour to recharge the USBCell ones...
This might be a US thing I guess but here in Canada only your boss and the companies you required financing with are required to have it. I can't think of opening an internet account that requires a SSN....
Actually there is another feature of Gmail that was advertised through their blog. And it states that me+nospam@gmail.com is directed to me@gmail.com
So basically all the characters after the + sign (including it) in the email address is stripped to determine to receiver. You will see that the email has been sent to me+nospam@gmail.com and then can filter on it. If used intelligently, it can tell you which site is selling your email address to other 3rd party companies.
On the other side, Thunderbird default quick find-as-you-type search is about 1000 times faster than outlook. Even with Outlook 2007? Mine is instant on a 1.2GB exchange mailbox (running in cached exchange mode).
But it wasnt very fast at all with Outlook 2003 unless you installed Lookout. Actually I built a Windows XP computer for a friend. It's a AMD Quad-Core 6000+ with 4 Gigs of ram (yes it's still running in 32 bits). I also installed a hard disk with 10k RPM for faster disk access. His outlook is much less responsive with 2007 than it was in 2003. And it was not really fast to start with.
His.PST file is over 4 gigs but a lot of different things are slow in Outlook for unknown reason.
When pressing Send & Receive, it takes a few seconds and outlook is unresponsive during that period. Creating a new email and typing gives you the feeling that it takes a few seconds to process the typing and actually display it. Clicking on a column to sort and using the search takes awfully long. Of course we're not talking hours here but it's just slow enough that it doesn't make the experience pleasant.
I also have a mailbox in Thunderbird that's just a little bit under 4 gigs and it's nowhere as slow even on much slower hardware.
Everything else on that computer is a speed bomb and I even went to different web sites to help on tweaking Windows XP and Office 2007 for speed. That may have helped overall (hard to tell since it was already pretty fast) but have not changed a thing for Outlook.
... only companies that have an IT department [have Exchange]
That's not quite true. Exchange is part of Small Business Server, a bundle that also includes Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, Sharepoint Server and a bunch of configuration tools that make setting the thing up relatively easy even if you don't have an IT department. SBS is significantly less than $1k when you buy it preinstalled on a new machine and it's pretty popular with small businesses.
You're right about the prices, but even the cheapest SBS machine is a real nightmare when something goes wrong and someone needs to restore the mail after it crashed (or replace a hard disk on a PDC (Primary Domain Controller).
I don't know if the mentality is different here (Montreal) but consultants are usually telling people to stay away from such Exchange installations because usually these companies don't have the man power to install AND maintain Exchange.
When a crash occurs, they call their "tech guy", which is usually an outsider, and since most of the time this person is not qualified to restore an exchange server (because the company does not have any functional backup or any redundancy (RAID) solutions. -- yes this is a worst case scenario but it DOES happen it real world all the time).
Since the boss is unhappy about having lost his mail and not being able to send email for hours (or days), he asks the tech guy for a cheap and more reliable solution. Tech guy sets up all email accounts as POP/SMTP et voilÃ!
Another non-negligible point is that with the growth of the laptop segment, these laptop users need access to their mail wherever they are (at the office, on the road and at home). So setting them up with a POP account is a much easier solution.
Also correct me if i'm wrong, but you can teach a user on how to easily backup and restore their.PST file (even if done through a batch file) but good look showing them how to backup and restore their Exchange.
It has not been updated in years and the single database for all of your information makes it little more than a toy. I'm not sure what you mean by has not been updated in years. In 2003 they introduced the Cached Exchange mode, which makes transitioning between online and offline transparent and invisible to the end user. Thunderbird is just terrible with online/offline support. Maybe that means they did it right at first (mostly) or simply that they did not put a lot of effort in it. I would think it did not change much for *most* users. Some people like the new vertical view in Outlook 2003, I don't. On the other side, Thunderbird default quick find-as-you-type search is about 1000 times faster than outlook. Overall, Thunderbird has always been more responsive to me and this is always what I recommend. If they need a calendar, I tell them to use Rainlendar (www.rainlendar.net)
As for the latter part of your statement, I think you're confusing PST's, which hardly anyone uses, with an Exchange back end, which is much more common. I'm not really sure where you are taking your stats, but I remember seeing some market share analysis of mail servers a few months ago and Exchange was still second to IBM Lotus Notes (mind you, stats change often). I personally could count on my fingers the number of companies that have it.
This would include only companies that have an IT department and not the ones working with outsiders. All the others ones are using Outlook without an Exchange server, thus using.PST files. I have one customer using Netscape (no server) and another one using Zimbra (which I installed). Two more Zimbra installs are on the way.
Another point regarding this, since Outlook doesn't really play fair with IMAP standards (and Thunderbird does), I am switching most of these clients to Thunderbird. The only one that is reluctant is the boss and he is still happy using Outlook 97 from an old copy.
Years ago, they had a device advantage for sync but Open and portable are all the rage today. Not quite. All people care about are 'does it sync' and how much does it cost them to suppor the sync. For anyone who has had to support executives with palmpilots and handhelds, the Windows based handhelds with activesync against exchange is light years better than the Palm software. The latter still requires you to run as local admin to work, for frick's sake. I have to agree on this one. Sync is still an issue at the moment. Hope this new release is going to make a step in the right direction.
I was actually reading a lot of the comments. And the one that striked me the most, is to realize that both the 1st and 3rd paragraph are made up of 8 lines each.
Added together, that makes 16 which is equal to the number of floors the building has.
Could it be that the "S" in the 3rd paragraph points to an office in that building where that employee resides?
You guys are making a lot of jokes about this, but what about a question that simply ask to select the girl/guy from a list of 4 different pictures. That would make it really hard for a computer to figure that out. Not impossible but harder.
Or you could always try some kind of simple trivia that asks for question such as "Which one is a flower?" when shown pictures of animals/objects/flowers. Paint them with fake colors or simply back and white and you got a tough one. Still easy enough for a kid to figure that out, but kinda hard for a computer to detect patterns.
reptileqc
That would be pretty easy to circumvent this. Use a laptop/pda/router/basically any wi-fi device and tweak it to send the speed data that YOU want to use and there you go!
You still have to be careful though, you don't want to have to explain why you were driving at 155 km/h in a zone restricted to 150 km/h.:)
What's the big deal anyway?
Most companies have software installation policies that prevent most people from installing new software on their computer. You want to make it safe against spyware/adware? Give them a clean adequate browser (Firefox, Opera, etc) and open up every site!
That way even if they download stuff from their web-based email account, they still can't install it and by having a safe browser they are also shielded from viruses/adware that they could potentially get from browsing.
Problem solved... Next!
reptileqc
If you read the Netcraft article, you would have seen that he had problems other than just technical problems. He seems to have health problems too.
Maybe that's the real reason why he needed to shut it down.
Maybe someone nice with a few gigs to spare would make a nice offer to host the whole thing?
Slashdot Mirror
I really have a hard time with people saying that Office-Exchange is a killer app...
Now that everyone wants a copy of their email on every possible device they own, I find it a million times easier to have the mail hosted somewhere using Google Apps or outlook.com or any other mail service you prefer. For around 50$/user/year, small and medium-sized companies have absolutely no reason to buy and maintain expensive servers just for Exchange. Support technicians that specialize in Exchange are usually hard to find and/or very expensive, it also requires massive backup infrastructure on antiquated tapes and in case of a crash, restoring is simply painful. Simply not something that I would recommend unless they have full time IT employees (even then).
Then you need static IPs, have to check constantly to make sure you are not on someone spam black list and usually need an ultra-fast connection too for all the people that are on the road to receive and send mail at reasonable speed. Then that still won't protect you if you've got some sort of power failure or internet failure at the office and then nobody is able to receive/send emails until that's solved.
Maybe it still makes some sense for very large organization with full time IT employees but for everybody else, there's the cloud.
Just as other tech companies were able to switch their main focus from hardware to software for example, Microsoft will stay well alive and switch from an operating system company to just a regular software company and/or service company.
As their consumer market becomes fragmented, it will not make sense anymore to restrict Office, SQL and other products to one and only platform (windows). SO they will make money with the office360 and hosting emails/cloud servers with their outlook.com platform.
Maybe continuing working on embedded devices like the XBOX and specialty hardware. As more and more devices use some kind of Linux flavor, Windows-based OS will become the odd ball so game development will become more standardized around OpenGL and maybe Wayland and other derivatives.
Even if they get a decent market share in phone and tablet devices, they will probably never reach a dominant position so they might as well release their money-making products and gain some market share across other platforms instead of closing the market to Windows-only devices and waiting for the next competitor to release a one-for-all-platform solutions and take over.
I think people complaining about details such as the Start Button on Windows 8 and the Metro interface are missing the big picture here. The tech world is changing because of more open platforms everywhere and not having a monopoly-ish position in any market changes their game completely.
Just my thought.
That might have more to do with the limitations on the server side than on the client side.
Zimbra currently has the same issue with Shared Contacts for example. The contacts can be shared but the labels attached to each one of them is treated locally so every user in the office has to build their own labels. Not very efficient.
I posted a bug about this a few years ago and apparently it's still not fixed. Priority is given through voting and apparently not enough people care about this feature.
Maybe you missed the function but AFAICR the function has always been there.
Tools -> Account Settings -> Under Outgoing Server on the left, you can enter all the SMTP servers you need to use. You can select a default one over there.
Then you simply click on any account (click on the HEADER where the name is just above the Server Settings of each account. At the bottom of the window on the right, you will see "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" from which you can leave the default one selected or select a specific one to be used (from the list of SMTP entered above).
Also worth mentioning, Thunderbird is free. Exchange/Outlook are no. Plus using Outlook in an IMAP environment as always been a pain since it has to create an additional data file (so a different "tree" hierarchy in the folder view distinct from the main one) because the IMAP data file can not be used as a "default" delivery. Outlook will then maintain his own main data file on top of the IMAP one resulting in non-imap SENT and JUNK folders for example.
I believe that is accurate information on at least Office 2007 maybe even in 2010. It might be possible to tweak the settings and make it work more seamlessly but that's the default behavior when you add an IMAP gmail account for example. You don't have to deal with those annoyances with Thunderbird.
I guess results may vary.
Despite the lack of an easy way to sync contacts, calendars and others with a smart phone which may be a show-stopper for some, Thunderbird is an overall excellent mail client. The funniest thing, is that my two main "selling" points with Thunderbird are exactly the speed at which the searches are executed and returned (which in my experience are so much faster in Thunderbird than in Outlook that I can't believe people Microsoft doesn't improve their software). The resulting behavior is that nobody typically uses the search in Outlook, they simply rather sort their inbox by sender, press the first letter of the sender and then scroll until they reach it. Not the most efficient way in my opinion.
The other killer feature for me in Thunderbird is a recent one, when a large file is attached to an email, a notice will show up at the bottom and will ask you to use the Filelink feature which will basically use UbuntuOne, Box.com and another service to automatically store and link files using one of these services. It is really a life saver for average non-geeks users which can seem to make a distinction between a 75k thumbnail JPG file and a 150 megs PDF catalog with pictures.
My typical user (used to) uses Outlook on a standalone computer using POP3 hosted on a third party company. No exchange. So if you want to compare apples and apples, I would say Thunderbird is faster at indexing, searching and display results than standalone Outlook. Maybe you are using Exchange in your example with the searches being indexed and returned from the server resulting in a faster execution?
I just realized while reading TFA that at these prices, it won't even come with the keyboard included. So add another ~100$ for the touch or type cover!
That's what I was about to say. Knowing the algorythm, they should brute force it and look at the results. Even if the results are impossible to detect automatically, this is when slashdot citizens come in and sort through the information. :)
Actually, unless you already know the company, neither the logo nor the writing is especially recognisable imho. The logo look like a cardboard color print test and because now the writing is in a simple font, it could be anything. Hardly recognisable to me. At least the previous logo and font were unique (or at least somehow distinctive). It almost seems as if after trying to copy iOS from Apple, they were now after the Google logo and color branding.
Apparently this is the "less is more" philosophy... but at the same time, it is plain and unimaginative. Isn't it bad for a company that aims to prove that they can reinvent themselves?
I don't own the energizer duo (and now won't even think about getting one either) but I own some Energizer AA batteries (2500 mAh) and their charger just sucks. It takes 16 hours to charge 4 batteries... I bought like 16 USB Cells and use them everywhere in the house for remotes and Rockband accessories. Using them side by side with the Energizers in Guitars and all, you couldn't tell they don't last as long as the other ones. Also if people are coming in for a jam and the batteries are a bit low, it only takes an hour to recharge the USBCell ones...
Sometimes price is not everything...
Why would you need a USB charger when you can have the batteries charge themselves through USB?
http://www.usbcell.com/
Why did you have to give it in the first place?
This might be a US thing I guess but here in Canada only your boss and the companies you required financing with are required to have it. I can't think of opening an internet account that requires a SSN....
Yes that is great news indeed!
I am looking to replace an onboard (Asus / nVidia) video card by an ATI.
That might be contrary to what most people say around here, but I've always had more luck on Linux with the ATI drivers than the Nvidia driver.
Rep
Actually there is another feature of Gmail that was advertised through their blog. And it states that me+nospam@gmail.com is directed to me@gmail.com
So basically all the characters after the + sign (including it) in the email address is stripped to determine to receiver. You will see that the email has been sent to me+nospam@gmail.com and then can filter on it. If used intelligently, it can tell you which site is selling your email address to other 3rd party companies.
But it wasnt very fast at all with Outlook 2003 unless you installed Lookout. Actually I built a Windows XP computer for a friend. It's a AMD Quad-Core 6000+ with 4 Gigs of ram (yes it's still running in 32 bits). I also installed a hard disk with 10k RPM for faster disk access. His outlook is much less responsive with 2007 than it was in 2003. And it was not really fast to start with.
His
When pressing Send & Receive, it takes a few seconds and outlook is unresponsive during that period. Creating a new email and typing gives you the feeling that it takes a few seconds to process the typing and actually display it. Clicking on a column to sort and using the search takes awfully long. Of course we're not talking hours here but it's just slow enough that it doesn't make the experience pleasant.
I also have a mailbox in Thunderbird that's just a little bit under 4 gigs and it's nowhere as slow even on much slower hardware.
Everything else on that computer is a speed bomb and I even went to different web sites to help on tweaking Windows XP and Office 2007 for speed. That may have helped overall (hard to tell since it was already pretty fast) but have not changed a thing for Outlook.
That's not quite true. Exchange is part of Small Business Server, a bundle that also includes Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, Sharepoint Server and a bunch of configuration tools that make setting the thing up relatively easy even if you don't have an IT department. SBS is significantly less than $1k when you buy it preinstalled on a new machine and it's pretty popular with small businesses.
You're right about the prices, but even the cheapest SBS machine is a real nightmare when something goes wrong and someone needs to restore the mail after it crashed (or replace a hard disk on a PDC (Primary Domain Controller).I don't know if the mentality is different here (Montreal) but consultants are usually telling people to stay away from such Exchange installations because usually these companies don't have the man power to install AND maintain Exchange.
When a crash occurs, they call their "tech guy", which is usually an outsider, and since most of the time this person is not qualified to restore
an exchange server (because the company does not have any functional backup or any redundancy (RAID) solutions. -- yes this is a worst case scenario but it DOES happen it real world all the time).
Since the boss is unhappy about having lost his mail and not being able to send email for hours (or days), he asks the tech guy for a cheap and more reliable solution. Tech guy sets up all email accounts as POP/SMTP et voilÃ!
Another non-negligible point is that with the growth of the laptop segment, these laptop users need access to their mail wherever they are (at the office, on the road and at home). So setting them up with a POP account is a much easier solution.
Also correct me if i'm wrong, but you can teach a user on how to easily backup and restore their
This would include only companies that have an IT department and not the ones working with outsiders. All the others ones are using Outlook without an Exchange server, thus using
Another point regarding this, since Outlook doesn't really play fair with IMAP standards (and Thunderbird does), I am switching most of these clients to Thunderbird. The only one that is reluctant is the boss and he is still happy using Outlook 97 from an old copy. Years ago, they had a device advantage for sync but Open and portable are all the rage today. Not quite. All people care about are 'does it sync' and how much does it cost them to suppor the sync. For anyone who has had to support executives with palmpilots and handhelds, the Windows based handhelds with activesync against exchange is light years better than the Palm software. The latter still requires you to run as local admin to work, for frick's sake. I have to agree on this one. Sync is still an issue at the moment. Hope this new release is going to make a step in the right direction.
That would make a lot of sense to me.
I was actually reading a lot of the comments. And the one that striked me the most, is to realize that both the 1st and 3rd paragraph are made up of 8 lines each.
Added together, that makes 16 which is equal to the number of floors the building has.
Could it be that the "S" in the 3rd paragraph points to an office in that building where that employee resides?
Food for thought.
Alex
Biannual actually means TWICE A YEAR so the poster was right. Semi-annual is also correct.
n ary&va=biannually
I had the same conversation with someone a while ago and lost (assuming that it meant "every two years"). So now I remember what it means.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictio
reptileqc
You guys are making a lot of jokes about this, but what about a question that simply ask to select the girl/guy from a list of 4 different pictures. That would make it really hard for a computer to figure that out. Not impossible but harder.
Or you could always try some kind of simple trivia that asks for question such as "Which one is a flower?" when shown pictures of animals/objects/flowers. Paint them with fake colors or simply back and white and you got a tough one.
Still easy enough for a kid to figure that out, but kinda hard for a computer to detect patterns.
reptileqc
That would be pretty easy to circumvent this. Use a laptop/pda/router/basically any wi-fi device and tweak it to send the speed data that YOU want to use and there you go!
:)
You still have to be careful though, you don't want to have to explain why you were driving at 155 km/h in a zone restricted to 150 km/h.
reptileqc
What's the big deal anyway? Most companies have software installation policies that prevent most people from installing new software on their computer. You want to make it safe against spyware/adware? Give them a clean adequate browser (Firefox, Opera, etc) and open up every site! That way even if they download stuff from their web-based email account, they still can't install it and by having a safe browser they are also shielded from viruses/adware that they could potentially get from browsing. Problem solved... Next! reptileqc
For you angry fans... :
There are two simple solutions
1) Don't buy it
2) If you already bought it then return it
If everybody keeps their bought copy, they won't get the message.
If you read the Netcraft article, you would have seen that he had problems other than just technical problems. He seems to have health problems too. Maybe that's the real reason why he needed to shut it down. Maybe someone nice with a few gigs to spare would make a nice offer to host the whole thing?