This summer, the Uni moved to a new mail system.  We left behind the customized IMAP over TLS/SMTP over SSL setup for a newer, supported and more advanced setup.  The new back-end is Zimbra Collaboration Suite.  Being that this isn’t only a mail system, but a collaboration suite (hence the nifty title) it’ll also support calendaring and IM.

Pre-migration, my group used Thunderbird to access their mail via IMAP over SSL.  When there weren’t server problems (of which there were a few) this was a fast, easy and slick method of managing email.  We had access to an LDAP server for campus addresses and Thunderbird was especially apt at narrowing down your list of addresses as you filled in a To:/From: field (this is something I miss on a daily basis).  For personal and collected addresses there was the Thunderbird address book.  TB provides strong searching utils (quick search and advanced), tagging (custom tags, not just colored, nameless flags) and threading (something I used for lists, came in VERY handy).  That’s just out of the box, with add-ons, applying notes to messages and working with PGP messages is trivial.

For years, TB served us and did it well.  The only complaints I got, were about missing features, of course, the features weren’t missing, it was always a lack of know-how on the part of the complainant.  Well, that’s almost true, TB was lacking in some respects, and it was lacking in our infrastructure as much as in TB.  Obviously, the lack of calendar integration was an issue.  Our calendar system was proprietary and TB (even with the Lightning plugin) wasn’t going to work with it.  You also had the personal address book and other configuration options stored on the desktop instead of the server.  For me, that was always less than ideal.

Enter the new hope, Zimbra.  Zimbra has been dubbed an Exchange killer and as such is supposed to allow you to do everything Exchange can do (and more) without having to run Exchange.  I like this idea (it’s the love of F/OSS that pleases me here) and for the most part, Zimbra fits the bill (this isn’t going to be a review of Zimbra).

Now that we have back-end software that supports MAPI (Exchange protocol), I decided to give Outlook (OL) a shot.  As a matter of fact (and to save time and whining) I’ll just tell you, I recommended that we move to Outlook, got the approval and did the deed.  We’re all using it now and will be for the foreseeable future.

We use OL for a single reason, integrated mail, address book and calendar.  I had a difficult time opting to go with OL, it IS a weak mail client.  I have lists of annoyances, but this is because I like software that works, makes working with it easy and generally doesn’t suck.  That said, I’m betting that the integration will make the lives of my people easier.  In the end, that’s my job.  Find what’s best for them, show them how it’s best for them and make it work.

Time will tell what happens.  Today we’re still using the old calendar and client to access it.  Essentially all we’ve done is change mail clients.  Once the calendar service is rolled out, perhaps my dislike for outlook will ease up a bit.  I’m hoping so.

Oh and the results…  For the most part, people are completely indifferent to pretty OK.  To them it’s just email, click new, add address, add subject (sometimes), fill in the body and click send.  If it works, it’s good.  I have a few folks (more technical people) who realize that in the email department, we did downgrade, but they understand why and we’re changing how we do things to fit the OL way.

I hope to do some playing with folder sharing (something we couldn’t do with IMAP and TB) I’ll post about it and hopefully have some nice things to say

Stay tuned for Summer in Review, Episode 2: Attack of Dell Image Direct (note: titles are subject to change without notice).