Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
This one time, at band camp, Phil Scarratt wrote:
Places always say they want all this stuff and generally never use
anything beyond email.
In my first job (2 jobs ago) as an IT consultant we used synchronized
Exchange calendars as religiously as email. All appointments scheduled
for us were sent via email and placed in the calendar by a project
coordinator. When clients called to schedule on-site calls, all the
coordinator needed to do was look at our calendars and book them in an
empty slot. The rule of the company was if you have nothing in that
Exchange time slot, it means you're free...so every time you had
something on, you *must* put it in the calendar regardless of whether
it's business-related or not. This system has worked incredibly well for
us, and everything was so organised...no one missed meetings or could
say "oh I didn't know".
- requirements are generally:
+ email
+ private and shared calendars
A lovely idea, nearly always implemented wrong so it doesn't work. I
worked at one place (one of Australia's most famous dot.bombs) where the
clocks on all the computers were wrong by up to ten minutes and the
computers were locked down so much individual users couldn't change
their own clocks. So you'd have people arriving to meetings over a
period of twenty minutes.
Now I work at an all-Linux company. If you didn't have admin rights (as
in Ubuntu admin being able to sudo), you wouldn't be able to change the
time either.
I regularly get global emails at my current work saying that the
resource-booking system is broken and to use bits of paper stuck to the
doors of the meeting rooms instead.
+ sync to PDA (typically a Windows one of course)
Who really ever does this?
We're seeing a huge surge in Blackberry usage. Again in the same job I
spoke of earlier we had Blackberry phone PDA's synchronizing with
Exchange. If you were consultants on-the-go you would find that it's
really really (and really) convenient.
+ private and shared contacts
Yeah like this will ever be accurate or up-to-date. I worked for a big
corporate once who had an _amazing_ LDAP infrastructure. You could
build an Org chart from it. Implemented in OpenLDAP. Never seen a
place with Exchange where there hasn't been something seriously wrong
with the data.
At my current job we use LDAP quite extensively as well and it has
worked for us. 100% open source environment.
+ home folders available for download only
Not quite sure what this is and I've never seen it implemented in the
real world in Exchange.
MS is still iffy in this department.
I'm not directly defending Microsoft. I have used Linux since 1997 and
would recommend it for most tasks but you have to admit that's it's not
the solution for everything and everyone. I'm not even going to comment
on Linux vs MS on this DET issue because I do not know their specific
requirements and situation.
Carlo
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