We've actually been struggling with the same issues in our company: a
CEO hellbent on getting Exchange into the organisation, even though he's
the only person in the company who doesn't use a computer!
Fortunately the Finance Director knows a bad deal when he sees one, and
once I'd shown them the cost associated with running a legitimate
Exchange machine (including the extra firewalling, VPN'ing etc), he
fortunately decided it wasn't a cost effective solution. We have e-mail
already, so Exchange wouldn't bring us anything new there. The only
stuff we would get is the groupware/calendaring/scheduling capabilities,
which we've managed to live without so far.
The just two days ago, my CTO ran into quite a neat site:
www.intranets.com (I have no affiliation with this lot at all).
Basically a bunch that provide Intranet services, with the added bonus
that you get a modded Intellisync which Sync's your Outlook Calendar
events with the online Calendar, and allows you to share your calendar:
in other words, a helluva lot like Exchange! Can't remember the exact
costs involved, but it was truckloads cheaper than doing our own
Exchange implimentation!
So if its groupware facilities you're after, have a look at this bunch.
Their interface doesn't work 100% with Firebird, but I can live with
that. I also can't sync Evolution with it, but hey, I can also live
with that, if it means I don't have to bring Exchange into my network!
Later
Konrad
On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 01:52, Rossz Vamos-Wentworth wrote:
> Kevin Reed wrote:
>
> > I know that this is not a good idea, but not being an Exchange admin, I
> > don't have a good list of reasonable reasons why this is a bad idea.
>
> Others have already covered the reasons to not expose Exchange to the
> big bad world, so I won't repeat that.
>
> I'm trying to think of good reasons to run Exchange at all. I can only
> think of a single reason to use Exchange -- the meeting
> planner/calendar, which is a rather nice office tool. I wish someone
> would come out with a Thunderbird plugin and associated server side
> software that provided this functionality.
>
> --
> Rossz
>
> --
>
> ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##
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* Konrad Michels
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* Surfkitchen Limited
* +441189298079
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