[buug] RE: Buug digest, Vol 1 #388 - 8 msgs

Brian Sobolak brian at planetshwoop.com
Tue Oct 15 11:13:54 PDT 2002


Rick Moen said:
> Quoting Todd Lee (todd at LANtech-HI.com):
>
> The executwits who get the hots for Exchange Server don't _just_ want
> group discussion, and they don't _just_ want GUIfied group discussion.
> They want "integration".  They want the same client software (e.g.,
> MS-Outlook) to do everything and anything, without their feeble little
> minds having to grasp the distinctions among e-mail, group discussion,
> and scheduling.
>

I was just having this dicussion yesterday.

In my experience, people don't even use this "groupware" functions they're
buying in the first place.  Beyond meeting scheduling and *maybe* group
address book, I can't say that I've ever really seen these features used. 
The times that I have were at tiny companies were people could communicate
with one another directly, so putting things in a shared folder actually
made sense.

The Lotus Notes/Exchange Servers of the world are basically very, very
crappy, extremely overpriced mail clients.  Because 90% of the time,
that's what they're used for.

> If you tell him the executive staff want it anyway, he'll say "OK, since
> your executive staff want something really rather stupid, I'm going to
> have to spend a lot of time doing dumb, pointless work to put it
> together, so for that and to compensate me for what will probably be a
> significant support burden, I'm going to charge you a bunch of money and
> use proprietary licensing."
>
> And so here we are.
>

I saw this in action recently.

The guy that sits across the hall from me argues that even though THE
ENTIRE COMPANY thinks pretty much that Notes stinks, we should keep it
because the cost of transitioning away from it would be too high.  When I
told him that for the cost of what we pay for one year's worth of Notes
software I could build and buy the email, calendaring, and "groupware"
software for the entire firm, he finally started listening.

I think a big part of the problem is that when the discussion is only
"Notes vs. Exchange", the idea that you could use something else is
shocking.

Does Microsoft use Exchange for Hotmail?  I doubt it.  I'm *sure* Yahoo
doesn't.

brian

ps I've been thinking about writing a series of "groupware" articles for
DaemonNews, basically covering tools such as mailman, weblog software,
calendaring, etc.  Time to get crackin'.






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