

Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System - leelin
http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N29/webmail.html

======
mseebach
> Christine C. Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for IS&T, said, “We are running
> Exchange servers in order to offer Microsoft Exchange. This is an optional
> infrastructure solution for those departments who will benefit from an
> _integrated e-mail and calendaring solution_.”

For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and
calendaring. I'm running Zimbra (community edition) for a few clients, and
they like it, but alternatives to Exchange, even a good protocol, seem scarce.

KDE's Kontact looked promising for a while, but appears abandoned.

~~~
viraptor
TBH, MS solution is the greatest one I've ever seen. Integrated email,
calendaring, group based notifications, phone system, IM integration... it
works great. You can even call your voicemail to get your emails read to you
over the phone! (or schedule a meeting in a similar way, automatically putting
it in your calendar)

There's one "but" - you have to go MS all the way. You cannot use those
features without windows and their web ui is a complete disaster. That's one
of the reasons it should never be used at any technical university IMHO. As
soon as you touch anything MS, you're in the area where standards don't apply.

~~~
itgoon
I tend to agree. I came from an Exchange background, and went all around
trying different alternatives. There's nothing out there that quite compares.

I'm currently using Zimbra, and it is good enough, but it just isn't as nice.
And "good enough" isn't really good enough. Whoever wants to topple Exchange
is going to have to do better than this "me too" crap.

How about actually integrating the contacts, tasks, schedules, and email in
some intelligent way?

------
jrockway
Scheme -> Python, Cyrus IMAP -> Microsoft Exchange

Does anyone detect a pattern?

~~~
blub
Getting on with the times?

~~~
mahmud
If it was Sendmail, maybe. But not Cyrus IMAP.

(for the uninitiated; read the "Internet Mail" chapter of Unix Hater's
Handbook for MIT admins struggling with Sendmail, circa 1990 ;-)

~~~
moe
In all fairness, Cyrus is a nightmare.

The opaque mail-store was a good idea when performance was an issue for mail
servers - nowadays it just gets in the way constantly, especially when
something breaks. The ACL system has been ridiculously broken for as long as I
can remember. You can assign pretty much every letter of the alphabet to a
mailbox/user but, for example, you cannot give a user delete permission on a
folders content without giving him delete permission to the folder itself.
Some ACL flags tend to interact funny with each other and nevermind trying to
have users alter permissions (e.g. share folders) through their IMAP client...

This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm honestly surprised someone was still
using this dinosaur in production. ;-)

That said, moving to Exchange is truly a shame for a tech university. I
haven't looked at zimbra and the ilk for a while. Are they still so bad?

------
tybris
Somehow that seems a little embarrassing. The "greatest" technical university
in the world needs Microsoft to take care of its e-mail?

~~~
mahmud
Have you seen what's been coming out of MIT Press in the last 8 years? They
went full on pop-psych with their "internet and society" type publications. I
have seen books on gamer anthropology, virtual currency and the "web mind"
sort of stuff coming out of MIT Press. A weird cross between Wired and
Kuro5hin. They want to create "leaders" and "visionaries", i.e. people who
make it to business magazine covers dressed in geek-chic lab-coats, holding
microscopes and calculators, while in reality, running a fully outsourced bio-
startup out of Manhattan :-D

~~~
rbanffy
Suddenly it comes as no surprise the best modern OSs we use today are more or
less simple improvements on an OS that is about as old as me. And I am not
talking about Windows...

Did everybody abandon progress? Did we outsource it to China?

------
chanux
What they currently use is Cyrus done by Carnegie Mellon University.
<http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/>

~~~
Hoff
Apple is moving from Cyrus to Dovecot with Snow Leopard Server.

------
1010011010
GMail has an "integrated calendar". It even syncs with outlook, if you have to
have that piece of software. Why pay for Exchange instead of use GMail? If MIT
wanted to offer gmail at an MIT domain name to students and staff, there's
"google apps".

Why is exchange needed at all?

------
rbanffy
Oh boy. I am so sorry for them... It... breaks my heart.

