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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but you've clearly never worked in a large company that had an actual IT department. There are many, many companies where what goes on your machine is what the company chooses. You are either forbidden, or prevented, from installing anything else.

Those people are forced to use Outlook.

Also, your average employee is unlikely to replace Outlook with the 'better' solution of extracting calendar information using 'gnus using elisp'.

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>Those people are forced to use Outlook.

Or even better, Lotus Notes. Ick! What will save us from that hell?

I forward my Lotus Notes to gmail... though that will have to stop soon, for PCI compliance reasons. For calendaring, I manually export every day to ics, munge it through some sed scripts, and then sync to gcal with gcaldaemon.

Apparently the 8.5 client sucks slightly less, but I can't get that til I upgrade to Leopard.

don't work at those places. they sound like they suck.

Sorry, but you've clearly never worked in a large company that had an actual IT department.

yes actually i do. and no, no one cares what email client i use

name three real companies where every employee is FORCED to use outlook

assuming you modded me down because you can't name three real companies where every employee is FORCED to use outlook

Using telnet or netcat to access the exchange server is better than using outlook.

Utter, utter nonsense.

In non-software companies the applications on the desktop are centrally managed and it's just not possible to use workarounds that engineers would find acceptable.

It's not nonsense, it's my opinion - having used outlook. I simply don't understand how anyone can bear to use outlook.

If I was forced in the workplace to use it, I'd quit. Same with IE6. If a company forces you to use either of those, they're clearly not going to be around very long.

If you'd quit a job because of the mail client on your desktop, that's your right. A colleague of mine recently gave notice because she didn't like the coffee in the cafeteria, and that was her right too.

Like it or not, Outlook and Exchange are still the best-in-class solution for enterprise messaging, which is why they're used. If you can't understand why that is, then I hope you've never worked in an enterprise. Perhaps you'd prefer Lotus Notes?

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any means; I have a Mac and use Gmail every day. But being able to put aside one's biases and pick the right tool for the job is the difference between an IT professional and a zealot.

What does Outlook do well for "enterprise messaging"? What does "enterprise messaging" even mean?

BTW I would rather change career than become an "IT professional".

Integrated groupware services, including email, calendaring/scheduling, global address list, distribution lists, folder/calendar sharing, distribution lists. Built-in webmail, mobile services, out-of-office. Integration support for Blackberry for push messaging, enterprise IM (LCS), anti-spam and anti-virus services, voice messaging, fax messaging... the list goes on.

Obviously, practically none of this is stuff you can't find elsewhere. But if you know of a single other offering as complete as Exchange, I'd love to hear about it. And perhaps the biggest point of all: extensive integration with Active Directory, which is the directory service of choice in a huge percentage of enterprises.

The reason there is no other software with exactly these features is that only people in IT departments (thanks to MS brainwash) really think these features need to be sold together.

It is just like creating a beast with 800 heads, which will kill anyone that touches it. The result is that every one of the services you mentioned is poorly implemented in Exchange.

The real solution is to use open standards to create applications in each of those areas that can really solve individual problems. That is how software that really works is created. Thanks to M$, we are far away from a decent solution in these terms.

OK, only people in IT departments want integrated solutions. Except they're the ones buying the software. So what's the problem?

Integration is not a bad thing. If you don't like the way Microsoft does it -- whether it be the quality of their implementation, or their disregard for standards compliance, or whatever -- that's cool, and I don't even disagree. But business decisions are made based on the bottom line, not on ideology. If Exchange meets the business requirements, and is cheaper to administer than a hodgepodge of other technologies, pragmatically it just doesn't matter if it doesn't implement IMAP exactly to spec.

I'm not a big fan of MS, but they're just giving the market what it wants here. If you can do better, please do.

I'm scared now. I never want to work in a corporation again. Ever.

oh the same old blather. what your post boils down to is the lame "meeting maker" crap layered on excrete. nothing else in your list is noteworthy or unique.

What's noteworthy about Exchange is all of that comes together, in one package, with documentation, that integrates with your existing MS domain users and groups that manage desktop and server access, with a support contract from a single vendor, and as much as it sucks, it generally "works". Plus you can put up a job listing for 2 Exchange admins, and get folks who know how to configure/maintain the whole system.

Trying to build all those services yourself using open source options, tying them all into an LDAP server, is an amazing pain. Does everyone need all of that? No. But honestly I can't imagine trying to handle the mail, shared mailboxes, messaging, scheduling, booking resources (conference rooms, equipment, etc..) for a Fortune 500 using the other options I'm aware of.

It may be "blather" to you, but it's generally pretty important stuff for a large company.

What exactly is so unbearable about Outlook?

Trying to find any email in it takes a day.

Not in Outlook 2007

My Outlook 2007 inbox begs to differ, but Google Desktop solves the problem pretty well.

If a company forces you to use either of those, they're clearly not going to be around very long.

Sorry, I really would like to agree with you, but there are plenty of companies with IE6+Outlook worker bees that show no signs of dying anytime soon.

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