[PLUG] Governor backs plan to aid open source movment

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Wed Jan 26 03:54:42 UTC 2005


On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, AthlonRob wrote:

> Getting them to migrate off Exchange would be like trying to get a 
> cat to migrate off catching birds.

I can't speak for the state of Oregon, and I'd never wish on anyone
the job of Exchange Administrator, but I know the frustration of 
looking for a bona fide calendaring solution that can stack up with 
Exchange.

Oracle makes one (well, Mr. Ellison opened his pocket book and bought 
Steltor's product) that's quite good, but it's not terribly well 
integrated with any clients save its own. MeetingMaker has one that's 
used at Synopsis (among other places), but I haven't installed the 
demo yet. Of course, these are both proprietary products.

We in the Free Software community haven't written a good replacement 
yet. UW is working on a Java-based product, but it's too fragile at 
this stage, and I don't know if its feature set really matches the 
needs of corporate scheduling.

IOW, Exchange offers more than e-mail transport and delivery: its 
users have a best-of-breed calendaring server. There just isn't a 
suite of Free software products that can replace it. For now, anyway.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>



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