Bug 0 review pls

[Dan Shearer]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 07:58:24PM -0400, Aaron Kincer wrote:
> Focus on the core technology that makes Microsoft infrastructure take deep
> roots. They are (IMO):
> 
> 1) Exchange
> 2) Active Directory
> 3) Sharepoint
> 
> Attacking these is not strictly a server issue. For many people, they
> couldn't care less about their operating system as long as they've got their
> MS Office/Outlook running. The Wine team is part of the solution

I got a bit lost here, can you explain how you see Wine helping deliver
solutions that don't come from Microsoft?

> For Exchange, the non-free version of Zimbra works great for Outlook
> connectivity.

Zimbra is fine for people who are able to modify their client Windows
machines. And that is something many, many large corporates refuse to
do, often for very good configuration management reasons. Until recently
this has been an impasse, because nothing else is a native Exchange
server except for Exchange. OpenChange is addressing that impasse.

> The problem is that creating fully open source software to fill enterprise
> niches is non-trivial and the best model of it so far I've seen is Samba.
> The Samba team deserves some serious credit for the work they've done.

With SAmba the barriers have been first and foremost non-technical.
Thanks to legal work in the EU the non-technical barriers have gone
away, and now Samba development has changed nature dramatically. For
Intrepid, there won't be a full Active Directory server. But there can
potentially be two kinds of proxies in Intrepid (CIFS and AD) that will
help stop companies making their internal borg bigger.

> On the off chance that anybody is good friends with Warren Buffett, see if
> you can convince him to make significant investment into Yahoo  with strings
> attached so that they will open source all of Zimbra. That would really
> turbo charge this idea. Hey, it could happen.

Zimbra can only help in the rip-and-replace scenario, which is pretty
rare in large corporates. Zimbra can't be dropped in to a group of
Exchange servers, it can't natively interoperate with MAPI clients and
existing MAPI infrastructure including backup tols, it can't be a MAPI
client itself. In an Exchange infrastructure with thousands of mailboxes
you have to commit to replacing all of the servers *and* all of the
surrounding infrastructure.

I'm not against Zimbra, but I don't think it addresses the most common
use cases involving Exchange in corporates.

-- 
Dan Shearer
dan at shearer.org