Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps 251
netbuzz writes "The city of Boston, which employs 20,000 people, has become the latest large organization to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The city estimates that the move will save it $280,000 a year. Microsoft's reaction? 'We believe the citizens of Boston deserve cloud productivity tools that protect their security and privacy. Google's investments in these areas are inadequate, and they lack the proper protections most organizations require.' More and more customers aren't buying that FUD."
Hopefully they'll be more satisfied than Los Angeles was (PDF).
What they should have said was (Score:2, Funny)
What they should have said was, "We believe the citizens of Boston deserve the productivity gains that come from the ability to wildcard search through emails."
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Word is fairly underpowered for professional writing, but if you were an accountant, you'd be hard-pressed to find a replacement to Excel.
Microsoft Office's professional products are more Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and Access. Word is just something to round out their offerings, an easy-to-use, amateurish but sufficiently featureful product that'll get their foot in the door.
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If you walk past my office, and hear me swearing at my computer chances are I am using word. If you hear me saying "Stop fu*king helping me!" then you know for sure.
It has gotten so bad that when i have to write documentation, I do all my writing in something simple like notepad++, then copy and paste into word. do a little formatting, maybe a screenshot or two, save and send. This method makes Word a lot less painfu
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
If you hear me saying "Stop fu*king helping me!" then you know for sure.
You do know that you can customize features like the one you're bitching about? You do know you can turn them off, right? Indeed most of the things that people bitch about with Word are completely customizable. But don't let reality get in the way of your Fan Boi rant...
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You know what you call someone a fan boy, you lose all credibility.
But for the record, I believe in using the best tool for the job. In my experience Word is almost never the best tool. The one time that it does beat other tools is when I need to pass around a document, with people making changes. (I think google Docs might be better for this, but company security policy prevents its use.) I have Linux machines, Windows machines, and Macs. How a
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Can I turn off how terribly it reformats huge documents when you make minor changes?
Word is *not* a large document publishing package.
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Can I turn off how terribly it reformats huge documents when you make minor changes?
This type of thing is generally due to the user not understanding the application. And, yes, you can control how Word reformats documents, or even if it does or does not.
I manage Word documents that exceed 1000 pages. I don't see the issues you describe, but I have taken the time to learn and understand the functionality of Word.
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When I read this: If you hear me saying "Stop fu*king helping me!" then you know for sure.
All I could see was that dang paperclip tapping.
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But wait, isn't "a different way" to do things one of the huge advantages of the open source/UNIX way of doing things?
Yet you're using it as a negative if Word does the same thing?
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Take some courses on how to use word.
It has a lot of powerful features that are worth using, that are in no way obvious what they do, or how they work, and you don't even know what it's capable of unless someone shows you.
We (a university) offer a first year course that covers the basics of Word and Excel for just this reason, and it's narrowly focused on the academic world.
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You can do basic 3D with Excel in pivot tables, which is about all an accountant needs. A 3D spreadsheet has a number of great advantages, but it isn't something to push to everybody.
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What really gets me is...
People keep using Excel spreadsheets for databases. They send discreet versions of this "database" to everyone in the company instead of utilizing a secure reliable DBMS to store the data centrally.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be confusing professional with academic. It's hardly a big surprise you used LaTeX at college. It would be a lot more surprising if you'd been a professional using it.
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And you seem to have a false dichotomy. As a /professional/ academic, I do use LaTeX.
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If you have 28% message loss per year with Exchange - then your Exchange Administrator must be a moron. And not just an ordinary moron, the kind who wins moron contests and stuff like that.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a 0% message loss rate with Exchange. What's your point? Email is also delivered virtually instantly, provided our internet connection doesn't fail.
Almost like the Exchange administrators wherever you worked were complete imbeciles or something.
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Unfortunately the reality is, in the wrong hands pretty much any solution can seem shitty. Doesn't matter if it's Exchange, Postfix, Sendmail, Exim, or even Google Apps (I've managed to bollocks up my Google Apps configuration a few times).
And I would agree, older Exchange versions were a dog (like 5.5 etc). It's come ahead by leaps and bounds since then though.
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You know the NHS in the UK uses exchange, right? That's a pretty sizable organisation. The message loss there is zero, and it's trusted to send some pretty important (i.e. potentially life and death) information.
Oh, and turnaround is pretty much seconds too.. Not a Microsoft fan here, but it really does sound like your exchange admins didn't have a clue. If you had admins, and it wasn't a company that let some 'external' entity set up a bodge job on the cheap, and just let it run unattended because "the
Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:2, Insightful)
Still sounds pretty valid to me.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No shit. I don't even use google for my personal email. I have an account...its where I let the spam go.
Microsoft, as much as I dislike exchange, is right here. Its not like there are not many alternatives, both free and commercially supported, which could be migrated to if they really wanted to drop that fee. However, going to a third party controlled cloud? Not just that, but the major one that so many people are using that it is, quite litterally, one of the biggest and juiciest targets in the world?
No t
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is that Microsoft's privacy track record is worse.
When George W. Bush demanded all search engines hand over search data tied to IP addresses for all users, Google was the only search engine to refuse. Microsoft handed that data right over.
Microsoft has ad campaigns suggesting Google employees are actively reading your email, even though they know that is an outright lie, the very definition of FUD.
Even worse, Microsoft is a hypocrite because they scan your email to serve up contextual ads as well.
Microsoft also has a patent on selling your private data to the highest bidder.
Google isn't giving your private data to anyone. They just serve you ads. Microsoft outright sells your data to people without your knowledge. And when they know they can't compete with Google on price, their only response is FUD.
http://rt.com/usa/yahoo-microsoft-campaign-political-862/ [rt.com]
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:5, Funny)
When George W. Bush demanded all search engines hand over search data tied to IP addresses for all users, Google was the only search engine to refuse. Microsoft handed that data right over.
Of course, this was MSN search in those days, so there were only about 14 people's search records apart from a few million searches for "google toolbar"
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No, they receive the results of searches for users that have the Bing toolbar and the option to send your search queries and results to Microsoft turned on. Not at all the same thing.
And I'm preeeeetty sure that Google Toolbar does the same thing.
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Pay for Google Apps and get some serious privacy then -- the free service has to generate income somehow.
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Google Apps now has the same privacy policy as regular free Google services.
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:5, Interesting)
I switched my company over to Google Apps.
30 Users. With Drive for sharing, Groups and aliases. It works really well for us with extremely simple administration and really good uptime.
Simple, Flexible and inexpensive.
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Its not like there are not many alternatives, both free and commercially supported, which could be migrated to if they really wanted to drop that fee.
How about Lotus Notes?
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Not a smart idea (Score:2)
Re:Not a smart idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it depends on what you expect out of an email system. One thing is for sure, Exchange was always a rickety beast, and the level of codependency between Exchange and other elements of Windows over the last few versions have gone through the roof. For basic email and scheduling, I'd gladly leave Exchange behind, but we have a government contract (I'm in Canada) which strictly prohibits the storage of certain highly sensitive data outside of Canada, and the last time I contacted Google about it, they just brushed it off. So, here I am, getting ready to upgrade to Exchange 2013.
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Microsft are the acknowledged experts on FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
Only $280k? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that number is wildly conservative. That's crazy, when you consider the costs associated with:
* Multiple FT "Exchange Admins"
* Needing people on-staff who actually understand email
* If they were using something like Forefront and/or additional spam services as well (additional $$$)
* Dozens of servers they no longer need to maintain maintain and replace
* Tens of terabytes of fast, redundant storage they no longer need to keep on-premises
Due to the cost of such a large migration (will they be migrating existing mail, I wonder, or just keeping it on a network-mapped share for archival access?) I have to wonder how long this will take.
I'd have thought the per-year savings would be closer to a million than a quarter mil, personally.
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TFA says it will still cost the city ~$800k to make the move... the $280k is reported to be the savings from dropping what they are currently doing.
That's a whole lot of money to what? Move a large bit of data to the cloud, retire a number of on-prem servers and re-train people?
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The only problem is that Google Docs are not guaranteed. You don't have a contract with Google that says, "We agree to provide this forever." WIth Office, assuming you don't choose to go with their rental model, you have a copy of a piece of software that you can just keep using.
So in five years, when Google realizes that even though Docs is popular, it isn't
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1) The estimated savings is $280k per year. So in 5 years they'd have saved $1.4 million. There's also a direct correlation here between savings and cost to move back to Office. If stopping
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In all fairness, Google has a tendency to keep any retired services running for Apps users (Wave notwithstanding). If they don't, then they tend to migrate the data to a comparable service automatically (e.g. all Google Video data being migrated to Google Drive).
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The difference is that all of those upgrade decisions are under your control. If you don't want to upgrade those machines to the latest version of OS X or Windows, you don't have to do so.
To be fair, at some point, you'll be forced to do so by the inability to get systems that still run the old OS, so there almost always will eventually be a requirement to periodically update your software to be compatible with newer versions of the OS. However, you typically have years to plan for it. That's a far cry
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So this year, even with an 800k non-recurring cost, they save 280k. Sounds like next year is the buig payoff.
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I was referring to the 800k they are spending to move as the 'lot of money'.
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I'm still waiting for the Linux version of Active Directory. Until then, I don't think they're going to have an easy time moving away from Exchange.
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I believe Samba [theregister.co.uk] now supports Active Directory.
But AD on Linux doesn't equate to an easy migration from Exchange. In the business world, Exchange is still king and the integration between email, calendaring and the Outlook client has not yet been replicated in an effective manner by its competitors.
Re:Only $280k? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know - Thunderbird and the Lightning calendar plugin do me just as well as Outlook and its inbuilt calendar does (better actually, since Outlook decided you didn't need to know what appointments you had coming up tomorrow [microsoft.com] something I found useful for early meetings)
Link the calendar with gmail calendar, and the email with gmail emails... you've got pretty much 100% of the functionality Outlook gives you. (without the flipping Facebook integration Outlook 2013 now shoves at you, or the integration with skydrive). I use it (when I can't be bothered to read my mail using my phone, which seems to be my default view of Gmail nowadays) and it just works.
If you need centralised user accounts, OpenLDAP does that, though its tricky to make that work with a bunch of Windows clients, it does work [erikberg.com] though its not out-of-the-box. This is how it should be, after all AD is just a fancy LDAP server anyway, but with a special Windows-only protocol that Microsoft had to hand over as part of their agreement with the EU (IIRC). Good to see the Samba team has finally waded through the walls MS must have put up and got samba 4 working as a full AD server.
Re:Only $280k? (Score:5, Interesting)
When people say AD they don't mean the LDAP part with centralised user accounts. That's been doable for ages.
When windows admins talk about AD, they are talking about all of the things that you can do with group policy and how those policies apply to different containers in a hierchical or cross cutting way, depending on configuration.
With AD and GPO you can:
-choose who has access to which desktops or servers and at what level in a granular or structured way (web admins have admin on web boxes but not mail servers, etc)
-choose what machines have what software installed and in what way
-set things like storage quotas (mailbox or otherwise) depending on a user's position/job
-delegate a login server and storage cache depending on a user's physical location
-enable and disable OS features (developers get IIS and debugging, people in finance don't)
-configure access to shared mailboxes/other resources
So if Jim moves from finance to web development, you drag and drop is user into another OU and add him to 5-10 groups on the AD server. Next time he logs on his access levels, what software is installed, what mail he has access to, his quotas, etc all change instantly.
This CAN be hacked together with a bunch of scripts, a custom repository, NIS/openLDAP, and some other stuff in Linux, but it's not well documented, well supported, or something you can ask ANY linux admin to do and they will do it in the same way.
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Nice, except it doesn't really work that way in practice, and certainly not instantly. Setting up and maintaining the configurations comes with an army of people, who seem to hack it together with a bunch of scripts, a custom repository and each variant of Win has a separate team. In stark contrast our UNIX farms tend to have much more stable configurations, with much simpler convention-based deployment and environment management.
It's a lot less impressive when Jim's machine - after the obligatory 4 minute
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So, edit the groups file. Remove Jim's id from the finance group and add it to the web group. Yp could handle that.
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You do realise that Windows domains at greater than Windows NT 4 functional level don't have Primary Domain Controllers right? Are you saying that Samba 3 can act as a FSMO Master role server in a Windows 2003 functional level domain?
(The answer is no by the way - only Samba 4 can do this, and even then the functionality is still buggy according to the Samba project).
Side note, SMB isn't used for domain communications, it's LDAP/S and Kerberos (well, Kerb5 or whatever it's called). Your post appears to co
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its called samba4
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Multiple FT "Exchange Admins"
With a unionized workforce, when you drop Exchange you still keep your Exchange admins and they keep their pay grade. Even if their primary job function disappears, they can be hard to lay off so they often end up sitting twiddling thumbs for 35 hours a week, taking home $100k plus serious bennies until they choose to retire and collect their pension.
Depends on the contract. When I was a minion for the Department of Redundancy Department for a large national gubb'mint with black helicopters in all 50 states and the District of Confusion, I was shuffled from task to task without any contractual limits (although my pay grade did vary based on assignment). Do you have personal knowlege of the Boston City Civil Service IT contract? Please answer yes or no.
Of note... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of note... (Score:5, Interesting)
An equally interesting link would be: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ [techrights.org]
Where they show that Consumer Watchdog is actually a PR/lobbying firm hired by MS.
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Google Apps for Goverments... GAG...Classic Acronym
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I'm not suprised (Score:4, Informative)
I do think that office 365 is a very nice response to cloud office suites but unless there is still a problem since that 2011 letter about the LA contract I don't know how they will break into that market. Google is a name that most IT people think of when they think of cloud processing suites. We started using 365 about 6-8 months ago and it works fantastically in my opinion. I also do know that other people have gone with google though because it's a big name and it does what it says it does. As far as I know there haven't been any complaints about google.
Does anyone know what happened between google and the city of L.A. after this was released? I hadn't heard about it. I would be interested to know what the security issues they had were and if they were able to be resolved. This letter is considerably old in terms of technology advancements.
Re:I'm not suprised (Score:4, Informative)
I couldn't find anything recent, but this has a summary: http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/10/google-apps-hasnt-met-lapds-security-requirements-city-demands-refund/
It also appears that consumerwatchdog.org may have been hired by Microsoft to attack Google: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/
Other MS products? (Score:2)
Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more (Score:2)
Until Google decides to pull the plug. Beware!
Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering Boston are paying them for the service, the likelihood of them dropping the email service is no higher than the likelihood of their ISP dropping their connectivity...
In either case, since the services are standards based they can easily migrate to an alternative, should the need arise.
MS could just as easily drop support for exchange, leaving them with a security nightmare that is intentionally difficult to migrate away from.
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How many paid services has Google shut down so far?
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Google Video for Business. Gone.
(According to Google, "use Google Drive instead").
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He's saying he's a fucking moron. He's just doing it in an obtuse, roundabout way.
Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying Google Apps will bomb?
Too soon!
The PDF linked to the LA implementation... (Score:2)
It's interesting to see the kind of convoluted side bar going on with LA. While the TFA pointed out Boston is going to use Google Apps, LA seems to be tied up in CSC drudgery. I can't understand how or why it would be so hard to do this kind of project, I mean I do have experience in this area so it doesn't seem so damn complex. Sure, lots of mailboxes, security requirements but that's done day in and day out. Oh wait, CSC is the sub here LOL, never mind.
Groupwise and CSC in the same project? ... Doomed
20'000, 280'000 (Score:2)
$14
Spreading FUD with Facts? (Score:2)
More and more customers aren't buying that FUD.
But then the summary goes on to explain that another company re-neg'd on this deal... indicating it's not all FUD?
I don't care about gdocs or office, but how could say it's FUD, when LA has switched back to office because of actual - documented - problems?
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Except there were none, it was a privacy angle pushed by the MS lobby to attack Google. http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ [techrights.org]
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Good luck to them, they will need it! (Score:2)
Try to create a spreadsheet with a moderate number of rows and you're toasted, specially if you use any kind of formula.
BTW, everything done using the super Google Chrome browser so there would be no complaints.
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No, really - they suck. We've had a business unit within our company try to use google apps and its crap. If you want to get off microsoft office, there are other options - Libreoffice, whatever. But Google apps just simply are not there yet for a great many users.
Give them a shot first, and try to actually use the service day to day before jumping in, because we found it inadequate. YMMV.
280,000 saved/20 000 employees (Score:2)
is a nominal 10 bucks a year
wow
for all the head ached, and very, very inferior GUI and user experinece of Gmail, not to mention the security issues, and the politics of having Gov't email running thru a service that looks at mail, they are saving 10 bucks a month
what is the psychology that leads people to dis word, a perfectly fine program ?
Sure, it has idiosyncrasys, but show me a program that doesn't
Sure, it has bugs and fails, but show me complex, or even simple, program that doesn't
I write 10-20 page do
Good luck (Score:2)
Google Docs and Drive are down... (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, in delicious irony, Google Docs and Drive are down and inaccessible.
"Google Drive documents list goes empty for users "
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57583952-93/google-drive-documents-list-goes-empty-for-users/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=statusnet [cnet.com]
https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=google%20drive&src=typd [twitter.com]
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That's some pretty bizarre behavior, considering, at least on my personal Google account, I've been on GMail and Google Docs on my desktop, notebook, iPhone and Nexus 7 all at the same bloody time without any issue.
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I'm pretty sure hundreds of millions of users are logged into Gmail on a web interface while also using their Android phones, and they don't have all their email accounts locked.
I smell a bullshit astroturfer.
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Making a ridiculous statement that anyone knows is patently false is the reason I'm calling bullshit.
Again, anyone with any smart phone can test this theory that logging into Gmail on your computer and mobile device at the same time does not lock your account.
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Maybe Boston should worry about saving their city instead of saving a paltry quarter million dollars on a stupid exchange system.
Because their email system caused or allowed the bombings?
If we used the "why are we doing X when we have not cured cancer / stopped war / my favorite issue" argument for everything... then all of humankind's effort would be placed into a single thing... leaving us without food, housing, clothing or electricity.
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#OfficeCausedBostonBombings
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Why would you not care what microsoft are doing? Would you not care if they decided to stop producing security updates for exchange? Being stuck with a closed source proprietary product that's no longer being updated is not a good situation to be in.
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The OP was addressing cloud security. If a company runs an internal email server, it doesn't care what Microsoft or Google do with cloud security, since it's not using their cloud services. Securing its email system falls pretty much on the company, not the cloud provider. A part of that security is the security of the software itself, so of course I would still want Exchange security updates, but other than that, I don't give a crap how good the security of those cloud services are. I only care how goo
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In this scenario, there'd be no shared calendering, no contact management, and no remote web access (and those are just the items in Exchange that *I* use). Who knows what other functionality would be missing if people listened to this advice...
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So run zarafa alongside postfix on your debian/rhel/postfix server... It provides all the features you mention.
Ofcourse, who's to say the users actually want or need any such features? Many only ever use email, and exchange/outlook is about the worst combination available for a pure mail server.
Re:A better idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh booking meetings in a calendar is ~50% of the average corporate managers daily activity. The other 50% is attending said meetings.
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You're right that a lot of people in corporations will only ever use email, however you will find that many more will also use the calendar features as well as all the other multitude of functionality supported by Exchange & Outlook. And when you have many people needing this functionality, it doesn't make sense to support multiple configurations to support both classes of users.
For many businesses, hiring competent Exchange admins is far easier than hiring multiple admins who specialise in Zarafa &
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Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin both connect to gmail calendar and email and work just as much as you'd expect from Outlook. I don't notice any significant difference, even though I generally use both from my phone nowadays.
Only you don't get the social-networking integration and cloud storage hell that Outlook 2013 wants you to have, and you can see tomorrow's meetings in your todo list. Crazily enough, the gmail option is a lot better than the exchange one from v2013 onwards. Just you wait and see w
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Actually, according to the article you supplied a link for, the sticking point that Google failed upon was part of the original requirements. There were changes to some of the FBI's requirements after the signing in 2009, but the changes were not those that Google has failed to deliver upon.
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Oh. A chair joke. How original.
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YOU! Start running ballistic calculations for my transcontinental chair! NOW!"
Don't worry as long as they use Microsoft software!
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mod up a lot
esp the last point - the idea of someone who doesn't use a computer telling people what email to use is bizarre
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In my experience, having seen a business unit within our group attempt to use google apps and fail miserably and spend the money again on re-buying their own infrastructure I suspect they will be back within 6-12 months.
I know this isn't what the slashdot crowd want to hear, and I'm sorry... but Google apps is crap. The functionality just is not there. If you want to get off microsoft there are plenty of options - for a business who does anything more than the most basic of email or spreadsheets, Googl
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