What the users really need (Was An alternative to Exchange)

[Richard Brown]

Hi All

Clifford asked a very important question and although the other thread
started to pull out some useful apps I thought I would answer Clifford
in a different thread. Clifford said:
*** Start ***
Richard, a lot of people say they want an Exchange replacement but
don't dig any deeper than that. What is it that your users need to do?
You
might be surprised at how many useful free services, like Google Apps
and Airset, there are that will achieve most things that people need.
If
you really want to host your own, there is no shortage of open source
web-based applications that can do the job. Google will yield lots of
them. I found a few that were quite interesting searching on
ma.gnolia.com, e.g. <http://opengoo.org>, <http://egroupware.org>,
<http://group-office.com>. I'm sure delico.us would have some too.
There are also many portal type of applications too.

It all depends on the needs of the organization. Often, users have no
idea what they really need. Most of them use the tools that they have
available to them and often do things that could be better-automated
with using different or complementary tools. In most smaller
organizations, there is typically no one who has systems design or
engineering expertise so they use computers as essentially glorified
typewriters, adding machines, or faxes. The unfortunate thing for
small organizations is that they often have the same needs as large
organizations, albeit on a smaller scale, but they don't budget
anything for IT. The few small businesses that "get it" and invest in
IT have a competitive advantage over their competitors who don't.
*** End ***

So to explain.I have just started to manage the companies IT structure
and it is totally disorganised. We have a user whose laptop needs
repairing but I can't do it during the day because she needs it. So I
suggested she uses a different machine whilst I repair it but she has
lots of stuff personal to her job on it. Things like bookmarks, email,
files, etc. But we have servers why doesn't she use them... So a list
of needs:
1. File server
2. Mail server - this would collect all mail and then redistribute it
to the staff. They all have personal email addresses (i.e. john at ....)
3. A central place to host company bookmarks
4. A central address books that contain tags and categories for ease of use
5. A central calendar
6. A way to send notes to staff
7. A web server to serve an intranet

This answers the question but we are also looking at:
8. Replacing Sage
9. Replacing MS Office (not so easy at the moment because they do a
lot of access calculations in conjunction with Sage!)
10. Installing a crm

For me the urgency is to migrate users away from having data stored on
their own machines so they can simply shift to a new computer if a
repair is needed!

Thanks for all the help.
-- 
Kind regards
Rich
http://www.cregy.co.uk
Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Romans 12 v 1