On Monday 10 February 2014 13:32:01 James M. Pulver wrote: > I am very skeptical of cloud offerings. I run my own e-mail server at home > using Citadel on SL6, which does do calendaring and e-mail, but I don't use > calendaring. It's integrated in the web UI, but the UI is pretty 90sish. > > I would recommend staying away from Office365 / Microsoft's cloud e-mail > service. The two organizations where I know people who have moved to it > both find it far inferior to previous in-house e-mail with more frequent > downtime and unexplained hours long e-mail lags almost weekly. > > There are plenty of e-mail services available, and I would probably have > gone with Rackspace e-mail if I didn't want to cheaply host multiple e-mail > addresses at home (the cost is not prohibitive for a business however... > It's really not prohibitive for a home user either, just running a server > is cheaper for my situation for personal e-mail).
I would add that gmail is a bit of a pain, at least initially when migrating large amounts of mail from Exchange. One organization I work for switched a few months ago and I'm still having weird issues where gmail's not-exactly- IMAP service reflects gobs of email in the IMAP client's inbox from time to time that is supposedly old/archived. Once that happens it all shows in the web interface and in the client that way. Its also odd that gmail seems incapable of actually telling you how much mail you have from the web interface -- reports are wildly inaccurate approximations, and with large volumes specific entries will appear at one time and not at others, as if the backend is of the "eventually consistent" variety. Not sure the origin of this strangeness, but its unnerving to not know volume counts for things like compute farm notifications and really annoying to have 9000 emails that were supposed to have been filtered previously just appear in the inbox at random, requiring manual running of a filter (which sucks over IMAP at that volume) and this happens in Thunderbird, Kmail and the Opera client, so it seems not to be a problem on that end. The calendars thing is... well, not anything that can integrate with a serious project management tool, so its useless for my purposes, so I can't speak to that. Office 365 is simply insufficient for editing of largish documents (technical-spec length -- which is precisely the sort of thing you need collaboration support for). Google docs has the same problem, but does a little better if you run your browser on an overpowered gaming rig -- which is ridiculous when it is remembered that the task at hand is just editing a document in most cases... I'm not trying to bash the concept of some of these services, and for those with lighter needs (probably most people) I'm sure things work just fine. But for those with more serious needs the situation still seems to favor dedicated email hosting (and in our case since none of the calendaring services really integrate with project management tools, they are sort of irrelevant), and native document editing programs that can deal with version control systems (might sound silly, but LibreOffice/git with a few scripts does quite well for small team/large document collaboration). Replacement for Exchange? gmail and 365 don't really fit the bill either, at least not for my needs. But even a totally insufficient solution can feel like a good alternative to an overworked system administrator -- email is one of the funkiest, stupidest, most overregulated, over attacked insecure remnants of the old trusting trust internet.