Xiaofan Chen wrote: > My company was originally using Novell with Pegasus mail. It is rather > troublesome to use. Upgrade to Exchange greatly reduce the problems. Oh, painful. Last time I saw Pegasus Mail in a production environment was around 1993. Exchange/Outlook would definitely be a step-up from that! > No Linux on sight for coporate world yet. We are still using Windows XP > with Novel server and IBM AS400 ERP server and Oracle server. Fairly good choices! XP has been one of the better Windows releases, Novell servers rarely (if ever) crash, AS400's are workhorses, and Oracle... well, everyone deals with Oracle, and it works. > And a Dell Windows computer is cheaper than a Dell Linux computer if > you want the support. True. > Do not get me wrong. I like Linux and I like open source. However I do > think that the free alternative is not that cheap after all in the coporate > setup. You seem to think I'm talking about Linux. I wasn't. I use Thunderbird and Firefox on Windows every day. Some of my work machines are required to use Windows XP, but not required to have Office or Outlook installed. One of the long-term benefits of tools like Thunderbird and Firefox is that they're almost perfectly cross-platform. I run T-Bird and Firefox on Linux, Windows, and even Mac OS X. They all look and act 100% the same, other than perhaps how they launch Java virtual machines and Macromedia Flash for those websites that need those add-ons. >> That's my opinion on it anyway... a server or server farm with >> appropriate RAID, speed, and capabilities for 10,000 users on Exchange >> is enormously expensive, compared to say a farm running postfix, >> Courier-IMAP, and clients running Thunderbird or Evolution. >> > Nanyang Technology University of Singapore has a massive Exchange Server > setup (20000 to 30000 users or more, including alumni account, maybe > 60,000 or more). It is said to be much cheaper than SUN and Digital Unix > based solution. Oh, Sun. Yeah, gold-plated. Sun charges too much. Seen their stock price lately... down down down she goes. Nice hardware, but much of the value in Sun is: a) Binary compatibility between OS releases that's better than Linux *by far*... releasing binaries for Linux (especially statically linked ones) is a hideously painful process because of all the different versions of glibc, gcc, etc. b) Solid hardware that just runs and runs. Telecommunications networks use Sun boxes for this reason. Downtime isn't allowed or expected, and is always an emergency. When configured correctly, Sun machines in high-availability clusters simply don't go down more than a few minutes a year, or when upgraded on purpose. But if you can handle a little bit of downtime, a Compaq/Dell/HP (or generic) server running any other Unix'ish variant that your sysadmin is comfortable with can provide service *like* a Sun at a much reduced overall cost. This isn't limited to Linux -- Yahoo runs mostly on BSD, for example. Hotmail also -- used to be all BSD, slowly (and painfully) converted over to Windows after Microsoft bought them. Last I checked, still using BSD for mail reciept front-end servers, but haven't looked in a couple of years at their SMTP HELO messages. (OpenBSD is still considered by many to be the most secure OS ever out-of-the box, and hardest to "un-secure" by making mistakes at the admin level... in Unix-like OS's anyway. Novell isn't bad either. Pretty hard to hack a Novell server if it's on an internal network behind a firewall and is running IPX without IP!) ;-) >> If the organization can culturally deal with using an off-board >> calendering app (or better a web-based one on their Intranet), since >> it's rare to see Outlook calendaring used extensively BETWEEN >> organizations... they can save boatloads of money on software licenses >> and hardware. But the cultural shift is sometimes harder than the >> technological one. > > Outlook is very convenient with the same organization. Between > organization, it is not much useful. If your organization grows to have a lot of timezones, you'll find Outlook's calendaring becomes much more "brittle". Also when people leave the organization, if they scheduled a standing meeting, that meeting will have to be removed by an administrator, and a new one will have to be scheduled in its place -- it's not easy in most environments to have another person "take over" a meeting's ownership. Additionally, if the organization is purchased/aquired and e-mail accounts change and the admins aren't careful, Window's/Exchange's authentication mechanisms will no longer think you are the owner of your own calendar events after your e-mail address is migrated to another Exchange server. (My current employer somehow messed that one up -- we were fighting with messed up and duplicated calendars for a month or more.) None of those is a huge problem, I'm just saying, Outlook calendaring is far from perfect. Eventually you run into bumps. > Web-based is the buzz word now. In the real world, I hate the web > service thingy. After they move the AS400 terminal based ERP application > to web-service, I need to spend 10 minutes on a 1minutes task originally > on the AS400 terminal. AJAX is helping with this, making the client side feel more like a real application and not some "click and wait" web page. Google Maps is a good example of that type of technology. It's big "buzz" in Silicon Valley these days to say you're working on an AJAX application, but really all it is doing is taking advantage of features that were there in JavaScript all along and integrating the browser app and server better via events hidden from the user. >> Many organizations "front-end" Outlook with regional or departmental >> Exchange servers, and do the heavy mail transport lifting behind the >> scenes with Unix or Linux. The bigger the organization, the more likely >> they have a system like this in the "back room". > > Yes Outlook support other server as well. Outlook express news reader > is much better than a lot of Unix email client when comes to news reading. I like RSS readers better these days to gather up my news, but if you mean USENET postings, OE isn't bad. >>> 4) Anti-top-posting sentiment is more religious or historical than >>> it should be justified. Some old timers make it a rule and try to >>> impose it to other users. They are still doing it, however only >>> on some unix-centric mailing list which by no means should be the >>> norm now. >> It's grammatical, not religious. Unless you call English professors and >> great Writers and Editors, "Father" or "Reverend". ;-) >> > > Okay I do not do that . In my dictionary there are no words called > "Reverend". ;-) > I am a free thinker and do not believe there is another one high high above. ;-) Understand. :-) >> Of course, some of the debates that language people get into, and the >> proliferation of more and more slang into English would tend to make me >> agree -- perhaps English should be taught as a religion! You have to >> believe grammar is important, or you will use words like, "Shizzle my >> zizzle" in daily language. (No offense meant toward Snoop-Dog, >> Flava-Flave, or any of the rap music crowd!) >> > Luckily English is not taught as religion. (GRIN) Hopefully you understand I was joking to make a point. Culturally that explanation method is a very difficult to use, and still not offend someone in this very International group on PicList. >> I understand your point - I just think when we're trying to communicate, >> adding complexity in any form is backwards. Top-posting adds >> complexity, bottom-posting doesn't. Contextual posting adds less >> complexity, but has the added benefit of helping the reader separate the >> ideas into digestible pieces. >> > > I do not agree that "bottom-posting doesn't add complexity". To scroll > to the bottom adds a bit of complexity involved. To leave two empty > lines waste bandwidth. Start from the empty line is the natural thing > to do --> top posting adds less complexity. Interesting. I never thought of it that way! > > Context posting above your name may not be a good idea. ;-) >> Nate Another good point! Agreed, that can be confusing! 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