> 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.
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.
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?
As loathe as I am to admit it (and I still won't recommend or adminster it) Exchange is reasonably decent for the end user. You need to keep a sacrificial Windows install/VM for the rare cases you need an Outlook-specific feature but most of the daily functionality is accessible from other clients.
Between Thunderbird and a Blackberry I only really dip into Exchange to set new filters anymore.
MIT has plently of hackers that could just roll their own. The most suprising part is that they didn't do that, and just went with the packaged solution.
You'd be surprised at how much home-grown stuff we run around here (I'm a grad student at MIT). All of the school-owned computers still run Athena OS, everyone uses Kerberos, emacs still rules the day..I once saw a secretary use the `finger` command to look up a phone number and couldn't believe it.
The problem is all the home-grown stuff is inevitably pretty low-level compared to today's solutions. Sure, there are plenty of hackers around to build OSS replacements for all our needs, but these hackers are students and professors: their main job is to do research, not implement enterprise software.
So I think the decision to move to outlook was probably based on the simple fact that it offers a lot of nice features that we don't currently have.
we just had a debate on this a week or two ago on HN. the eternal optimism of a hacker is usually a sign of inexperience, imo.
so sure, a few MIT students could "roll their own" in 12-18+ months. It likely still won't be as feature complete nor user friendly, and they spent 25% of their university time re-inventing the wheel.
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.