> I've spent some time looking for a comparison chart showing > features for various e-mail and calendaring servers and services,
> and am coming up short (I can find charts for *clients*, but not > servers or web services). Does any know of such a resource? This is already outdated, and I'm barely even comfortable with it anymore. Also I'm not quite sure how relevant it is anyway, but this was some work I did a few months back: http://nedharvey.com/Comparison%20of%20Collaboration%20Email%20Services.pdf or http://nedharvey.com/Comparison%20of%20Collaboration%20Email%20Services.docx > [Background: I'm on a task force that's looking at some questions > about e-mail and calendaring. The college's central IT > organization currently runs Zimbra as its main mail service (for > students and faculty/staff), with some departments (including > mine) and even a couple of individuals running their own > independent mail services. In my work, I passed over zimbra, due to fears which have disappeared now. I have heard people saying good things about zimbra, but haven't gone into detailed evaluation myself. If I were to revisit this subject now, I would test zimbra extensively, as I have for Kerio, Google, and Exchange. With any of these evaluations, the real meat is in the details. I mean seriously. At a cursory look, or even if you ask some regular user, any one of them will pass. But if you really try to mimmick all the things that will happen with support ... Find something that isn't working, request help from support ... Actually thoroughly test all the little details that you think are safe to assume work just fine ... My work over the last 1-2 years has really led me to this conclusion painfully. No, you can't just assume that when you invite somebody to something that they'll receive the invite. No, you can't just assume your PDA will be compatible because there's a chart saying "iPhone supported" or "Blackberry supported" or whatever. You have to actually do it, and actually press every button, and actually repeat and test the whole solution, top to bottom, start to finish, and do it with more than one user account, and truly interact and thoroughly test the whole thing. I know. That's massively time consuming. It sounds so horrible you would never do it, even if somebody told you to. But take it from me. Do it. Find a way. Make the time. Make a big deal over it, because if you plant your whole organization into some solution that you regret - boy oh boy do you regret it. You'll never live it down, and the pain will never stop. The only solution would be to switch off to another server, and by that time, nobody believes you anymore. "Why should we believe the next one will be any better?" > There are two major trends that seem to be driving this > discussion. First, there are people who would like to see the > college using a single calendaring system to make it easier for > them to schedule meetings. Second, there have been a number of > educational institutions outsourcing e-mail service to external > providers, notably Google and Microsoft, both of whom offer > tailored service plans for educational institutions. I do IT consulting. I work for more than one company. At two locations, we use Exchange 07 with Outlook 07, and at another location, we use Google Apps Premier. There are not enough hours in the day for me to describe all the reasons I love the exchange solution and hate the google solution. I am not sure what the most important factors are for you, so I'll just list a few of the most important factors in my opinion: . Google is cheaper. Just over $4/user/month. By comparison, a cheap exchange provider (I would recommend sherweb) is $10 per person per month. I love sherweb, and I love their product, and their support, but if you use them, you have to trust them to do their backups and stuff. If you need more control of your data, you'll need a more expensive plan. . I take back what I said above. Although google has a smaller price tag than exchange, I would say they are not cheaper overall, due to productivity loss and support cost, which is not included in the price tag. This is assuming lost productivity or functionality is worth money, which is true for a business, but again, I can't valuate that for your situation. . Everything in exchange simply works, provided the server is 07 and the client is Outlook 07 or Entourage 08 EWS. It's compatible with every client and every PDA you have anywhere, and all the services are rock solid. There is only one point of weakness: If you use IE, then OWA is great. But if you use something other than IE, your only web option is OWA Light, which is just ok. I will point out, however, that the recommended mode of operation is to assume you usually use one or two or a few computers. You're expected to install a client on each one, and use that instead of the web interface. It works better, but the web interface is available when you're visiting somebody else's computer. So despite the grade A interface for IE, and grade B interface for non-IE, it doesn't matter too much. You don't usually use the web interface. This ain't much of a weakness. . My users have major compatibility and reliability problems with google calendar. I'll give you details off list if you want, but I think it would just be too much for online discussion. Suffice it to say: Events whose reminders don't happen, or happen at the wrong time. Invitations that go the way of the Bermuda Triangle, never delivered, never returned. Can't invite or interact with groups. Unreliable client sync on any platform for offline usage (most platforms). Stuff like that. The system is simply unpredictable and prone to fail. You never know when google is changing something behind the scenes, so you never know when problems are going to come up or go away. It's a moving target, and I won't say it's always for the better. In fact, I have not yet noticed a time when some bug went away that was previously reported, but I have noticed bugs mysteriously appear and sometimes re-disappear. . Google support is utterly horrible. Beyond useless. And I'm not a "free" customer. I pay them $1500/yr for 30 users. Their support is so bad, it's a detriment deeper than if I had no support whatsoever. I'm not kidding. I'll go randomly pick an example. Have a look here <http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=16eee21f37a017 e6&hl=en> . This was just a 10 second google search to find - it's so typical, it's really easy to find a million similar examples of somebody having a problem, reporting it month after month, and often with no response ever. By comparison, there has never even been one time that I've needed MS support, although I have some colleagues who have used MS support. They had to pay MS for support incidences when Exchange 07 was very young. Overall, MS support met their expectations, which is to say, they quickly resolved issues that were limited to MS, and they slowly resolved issues which were beyond MS. Particularly Apple Mail clients having IMAP problems resolved slowly, but were eventually resolved. . There's no reasonable way to backup your google data. If one of your admins makes a mistake, or some user makes a mistake, or if Google goes the way of AIG or Enron or GM or Fannie Mae . Or if they ever have "a TJ Maxx" . or if whoever hacked the cia <http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9609/19/cia.hacker/index.html> gets into a mood for google damage . or whatever . then your domain is purely out of luck, end of story. Without any backups. This email is already too long. I'll cut it there.
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
