Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System

tech.mit.edu

11 pointsleelin23 comments

> Christine C. Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for IS&T, said, “We are running Exchange servers in order to offer Microsoft Exchange. This is an optional infrastructure solution for those departments who will benefit from an integrated e-mail and calendaring solution.”

For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and calendaring. I'm running Zimbra (community edition) for a few clients, and they like it, but alternatives to Exchange, even a good protocol, seem scarce.

KDE's Kontact looked promising for a while, but appears abandoned.

MIT has plently of hackers that could just roll their own. The most suprising part is that they didn't do that, and just went with the packaged solution.

You think that the worlds best minds are spent building a calendar?

Why not? They could make a hell of a calendar.

Having spent a decade at MIT, I'd be happy to place somewhere in the middle of that pack.

And I'm building a better calendar.

You'd be surprised at how much home-grown stuff we run around here (I'm a grad student at MIT). All of the school-owned computers still run Athena OS, everyone uses Kerberos, emacs still rules the day..I once saw a secretary use the `finger` command to look up a phone number and couldn't believe it.

The problem is all the home-grown stuff is inevitably pretty low-level compared to today's solutions. Sure, there are plenty of hackers around to build OSS replacements for all our needs, but these hackers are students and professors: their main job is to do research, not implement enterprise software.

So I think the decision to move to outlook was probably based on the simple fact that it offers a lot of nice features that we don't currently have.

we just had a debate on this a week or two ago on HN. the eternal optimism of a hacker is usually a sign of inexperience, imo.

so sure, a few MIT students could "roll their own" in 12-18+ months. It likely still won't be as feature complete nor user friendly, and they spent 25% of their university time re-inventing the wheel.

TBH, MS solution is the greatest one I've ever seen. Integrated email, calendaring, group based notifications, phone system, IM integration... it works great. You can even call your voicemail to get your emails read to you over the phone! (or schedule a meeting in a similar way, automatically putting it in your calendar)

There's one "but" - you have to go MS all the way. You cannot use those features without windows and their web ui is a complete disaster. That's one of the reasons it should never be used at any technical university IMHO. As soon as you touch anything MS, you're in the area where standards don't apply.

As loathe as I am to admit it (and I still won't recommend or adminster it) Exchange is reasonably decent for the end user. You need to keep a sacrificial Windows install/VM for the rare cases you need an Outlook-specific feature but most of the daily functionality is accessible from other clients.

Between Thunderbird and a Blackberry I only really dip into Exchange to set new filters anymore.

I tend to agree. I came from an Exchange background, and went all around trying different alternatives. There's nothing out there that quite compares.

I'm currently using Zimbra, and it is good enough, but it just isn't as nice. And "good enough" isn't really good enough. Whoever wants to topple Exchange is going to have to do better than this "me too" crap.

How about actually integrating the contacts, tasks, schedules, and email in some intelligent way?

wouldn't something like this but standards-based be just as nice?

For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and calendaring.

I wonder if they considered IMAP + CalDAV with Thunderbird + Lightning or Mail + iCal on the client.

Scheme -> Python, Cyrus IMAP -> Microsoft Exchange

Does anyone detect a pattern?

Getting on with the times?

If it was Sendmail, maybe. But not Cyrus IMAP.

(for the uninitiated; read the "Internet Mail" chapter of Unix Hater's Handbook for MIT admins struggling with Sendmail, circa 1990 ;-)

In all fairness, Cyrus is a nightmare.

The opaque mail-store was a good idea when performance was an issue for mail servers - nowadays it just gets in the way constantly, especially when something breaks. The ACL system has been ridiculously broken for as long as I can remember. You can assign pretty much every letter of the alphabet to a mailbox/user but, for example, you cannot give a user delete permission on a folders content without giving him delete permission to the folder itself. Some ACL flags tend to interact funny with each other and nevermind trying to have users alter permissions (e.g. share folders) through their IMAP client...

This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm honestly surprised someone was still using this dinosaur in production. ;-)

That said, moving to Exchange is truly a shame for a tech university. I haven't looked at zimbra and the ilk for a while. Are they still so bad?

Somehow that seems a little embarrassing. The "greatest" technical university in the world needs Microsoft to take care of its e-mail?

Have you seen what's been coming out of MIT Press in the last 8 years? They went full on pop-psych with their "internet and society" type publications. I have seen books on gamer anthropology, virtual currency and the "web mind" sort of stuff coming out of MIT Press. A weird cross between Wired and Kuro5hin. They want to create "leaders" and "visionaries", i.e. people who make it to business magazine covers dressed in geek-chic lab-coats, holding microscopes and calculators, while in reality, running a fully outsourced bio-startup out of Manhattan :-D

Suddenly it comes as no surprise the best modern OSs we use today are more or less simple improvements on an OS that is about as old as me. And I am not talking about Windows...

Did everybody abandon progress? Did we outsource it to China?

What they currently use is Cyrus done by Carnegie Mellon University. http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/

Apple is moving from Cyrus to Dovecot with Snow Leopard Server.

GMail has an "integrated calendar". It even syncs with outlook, if you have to have that piece of software. Why pay for Exchange instead of use GMail? If MIT wanted to offer gmail at an MIT domain name to students and staff, there's "google apps".

Why is exchange needed at all?

Oh boy. I am so sorry for them... It... breaks my heart.

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