Robin Laing wrote:
If you are just doing email it doesn't make much sense to be locked in
to a proprietary server. Unfortunately there hasn't been any real
alternative to exchange or notes if you need calendar/scheduling tied
to email. Our company has widely distributed offices and depends
heavily on conference calls with everyone calling a bridge number at
the same time. I'd never remember the times if outlook or my phone
(treo w/outlook sync) didn't beep at me - and they change all the time
as people have to reschedule. Even if an alternative to exchange
existed, it would be pretty hard to change all the infrastructure at
this point.
You are so correct. I have never used any other feature than email. Any
calender function was working well with iCal. Even my boss wants to go
back to Mozilla as Outlook has lowered his productivity.
The calendar feature really is valuable if (and only if...) everyone who
works together uses it to schedule calls, meetings, etc. This will only
happen if the boss uses it. When I was running evolution against
exchange/owa it seemed to get the calendar right and even tied the
alarms into the gnome toolbar clock. But then it broke for a long time
and I switched to imap access.
His comment was about the Calender feature that only a few people
actually use is the reason by this forced shift. An IT person told me
it was a make work project for a particular person.
Besides the usual calls/meetings/appointments that land in individual
calendars of everyone involved, we have a 'scheduled maintenance' public
calendar where all approved changes to our production networks and
equipment are scheduled. That's managed by a group that tries to
minimize conflicts and do everything after normal business hours but if
anything breaks you can look there and easily see what has changed
recently. It wouldn't absolutely have to be in exchange but it is nice
that it works exactly the same as individual scheduling and adjusts
automatically in response to emailed updates even if you haven't opened
them. But again, things like that don't work unless the boss enforces
it - and for a small group in one place it might be overkill. We usually
have 15-25 changes every evening.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
