Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System

http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N29/webmail.html

by leelin • 17 years ago

11 23 17 years ago

tech.mit.edu

chanux• 17 years ago

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

Hoff• 17 years ago

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

tybris• 17 years ago

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

mahmud2• 17 years ago

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

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

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?

jrockway• 17 years ago

Scheme -> Python, Cyrus IMAP -> Microsoft Exchange

Does anyone detect a pattern?

blub• 17 years ago

Getting on with the times?

mahmud2• 17 years ago

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 ;-)

mseebach• 17 years ago

> 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.

tsally• 17 years ago

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.

trapper• 17 years ago

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

eob• 17 years ago

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.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

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.

viraptor• 17 years ago

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.

skorgu• 17 years ago

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.

itgoon• 17 years ago

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?

riffic• 17 years ago

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

wmf• 17 years ago

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.

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

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

1010011010• 17 years ago

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?

Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System

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