On 2013-12-10 10:02 AM, Edward Rudd <ur...@outoforder.cc> wrote:
You have been lucky where you work then:) The "political" nature
comes in when some Executive @ the company gets it stuck in his head
that we *HAVE* to switch to Exchange but does the dog and pony show of
letting the IT department trial several alternatives (Zimbra, etc.)
only to ignore all of the facts that prove Exchange is the only option
that doesn't meet any of his criteria and choose it anyway. So now
that company has an Exchange server used by everyone EXCEPT the IT
department and the critical web application (which still use the Cyrus
+ Postfix server). And the Exchange server has to be rebooted once a
month. And the rest of the employees (including the owner of the
company and that one Executive) gripe and complain about how they
loath Outlook, but he's the one who wanted it in the first place..
The political aspect is all about irrational non-logical conclusions
made by non-IT people in a company. So you really have to stack the
deck proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ROI on Exchange
doesn't exist. Now if they are wanting things like "push" or native
Outlook integration.. take a look at z-push, openchange and SOgo.
which all run on-top of your existing infrastructure to add those
features. (all open source too)
Exactly.
I at least will be insisting on trialing SOGo, as we already have paid
for enough support from them to get it fully up and running.
But, as I said, the one thing that I may not be able to counter, that
I'd like to be able to counter, is the belief that our NOT being on
Exchange Server might somehow DECREASE the 'perceived' value of the
company, as relates to a potential buyout question.
Personally, it seems to me that if company A (that is an all
Microsoft/Exchange shop) wants to buy company B, that is not using
Exchange (say, uses SOGo, with clients being able to choose between
Outlook or Thunderbird for their desktop client), whether or not company
B is using Exchange on the backend would be a very minor detail - as
company A could always simply migrate company B to Exchange after hey
bought them. In fact, it might even make it easier, since, instead of
trying to integrate an existing foreign Exchange system into their
existing one, they could simply migrate the emails and users into their
existing system.
--
Best regards,
*/Charles/*
