[Wolves] Linux and Exchange / Outlook

[Ron Wellsted]

On Wed, 2004-04-28 at 09:32, Katherine Goodwin wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> After various things to do with shared calendaring coming up on our
> wishlist at work, and after discussions with a few people at the Expo
> (Hello Ron *wave*), including some customers of ours, it seems that one
> of the things that prevents some people in businesses from feeling that
> they can try to convince people to move to Linux is the lack of the
> shared calendaring bit of outlook and exchange.
> 
> I've done a bit of reading into what is available here, and I'd like to
> try out some of the alternatives so that I can evaluate them for
> customers, but my biggest problem is that I'm not sure exactly what
> outlook does in this respect!
> 
> So, does anyone or has anyone used the calendaring stuff in
> outlook/exchange?  If so, what features do you use and find the most
> useful?

Hi Kat, good to see you made it back ok

The main feature that exchange offers to users that I have been unable
to find a true match for (yet) is the automatic publication of a user's
free/busy information.  If you create an appointment in your calendar
and mark the time as either busy or tentative, other users will be able
to see that time slot as being busy/tentative (but not the details).

The other feature is the ability to create a public folder as any type
e.g. a public calendar, contacts, notes, tasks or email (even nntp feeds
which appear as a public folder hierarchy  called "Internet Newsgroups")

Exchange also implements a "Single Instance Store" on mailboxes and
another one for the public folders.  This means that if the same message
is sent to several people on the same mail server (using the same
mailstore) only one copy of the message will exist in the mailstore, and
the mailboxes will contain links to this single copy (sound familiar? cf
hard links on files under *nix).

The biggest problem with exchange? (apart from being closed source)? 
Everything is stored in ESE (Extensible Storage Engine) databases (known
as the Information Stores).  This makes it very difficult to backup or
virus scan (expensive 3rd party s/w required) and in the event of a
crash, at best a slow recovery process, at worst a total loss of the
information stores and all their contents.

-- 
Ron Wellsted
http://www.wellsted.org.uk
ron at wellsted.org.uk
N 52.567623, W 2.137621