The process certainly did not move as quickly as we might have liked, having complained about the state of affairs with respect to our email and calendaring system for probably almost a year now, but we’re finally free of Exchange and onto what we hope will be a solution that is more understanding of our multi-platform (James = Windows, Cote = Mac, me = Linux) needs.
Our new system is graciously hosted for us for free by MACCIuS, and by group consensus we’ve agreed to give them a trial period to see if we’re comfortable with their uptime and overall reliability. If we’re not, we have multiple other options available to us, ranging from Google to our latest customer Scalix.
Given our 1and1 fiasco, which didn’t attract the sort of attention you want when you’re responsible for the IT decisions, we’re very sensitive about the ability of a hosting provider to meet our needs. As Cote and I were discussing the other day, downtime isn’t necessarily our primary concern. Yes, we rely on email and need it to be up to be most productive, but of greater importance is the transparency and reporting with respect to that uptime. In that respect, our soon-to-be former provider ASP-One was actually quite respectable, as they were very proactive in notifying us about downtime for patching, security fixes and the like. Every service – yes, even Google – will experience outages. What’s important is how that inevitable downtime is handled; a lesson that Salesforce.com seems to have taken to heart. We’ll see how MACCIuS does in that respect.
At any rate, we are now – all three of us – effectively off Exchange for the next 30 days at a minimum and will be reporting on what works and what doesn’t. Personally, I’m hoping that MACCIuS gets around to updating their Zimbra instance to 3.2 which includes support for themes; while the UI itself is well designed and laid out, the brushed metal look just doesn’t do it for me.
My only remaining email related to do is to figure out how to import my backed up Evolution data back into Evolution. You’d think they’d have that figured out, but no dice. I tried just dropping the .evolution folder into /home/sog and it spat it back out and refused to import my old data. Not fun.
But anyhow I’m glad to be on a platform that lets me see my colleagues calendars (the only way to do it on Linux was to first create an appointment which would give me free/busy) – not to mention export them, if it should prove necessary.
Will keep you posted on our findings, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to know let any one of us know.
Update: Fixed about a dozen typos; I just can’t work in that tiny form that Flickr provides.
