[Gllug] OpenChange and SOGo

[John Edwards]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 11:34:45AM -0800, Walter Stanish wrote:
> Honestly, my advice would be to get your company to fork the few bucks
> for Google hosting and let the pain of hosting your own email
> infrastructure, spam filtering, configuration, sync setup,
> cross-platform setup instructions, proprietary protocols, etc. become
> a dirty remnant of the past.  SMTP is so painful these days that it's
> WORTH paying someone else to do it. 

Unless you happen to *be* one of those people that is being paid to
deal with it (and other problems).
;)

SMTP itself is easy (at least with a modern system like Postfix).
Spam and virus filtering are a little harder - it is impossible
to get them 100% accurate but easy to block 99%+ of the crud.

For reading email Cyrus IMAP is quite good, and most email clients
deal with IMAP well - with the inevitable exception of Microsoft
Outlook and some mobile phones.


> And with mobile access demands,
> the cost of proprietary solutions that provide the critical fluff
> ("how can i book a conference room?") and calendaring support ...
> basically google's offering is pretty hard to turn down.

I use Google for some personal calendars and it regularly becomes
temporarily unavailable or fails to update, sometimes forcing you to
log out and back in to fix it. This happens once or twice a week from
different machines (mostly Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 10.04). Not a problem
for casual use, but could be a pain for business or automated use.


> Not that I've ever used the paid version .. but I would do so in a
> SNAP vs. waste the time setting this stuff up manually again and being
> forced to support it for a heterogeneous mobile and desktop user base.

Others have mentioned the data protection issues, but as with other
"cloud" services there is also the issue of data backup/archive. Not
just a "whoops the server has gone up in smoke lets get yesterday's
backup" level but the "what was the contents of that document from
March before someone else messed it up last week" level.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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