>>Olson:
“The problem would be how to implement Exchange.”
Agreed. At the IT Exchange (aptly named), when Tom Davis queried the group
about "Campus Exchange", I asked if we were just talking about Exchange, or
rather Exchange plus AD as a whole. Consider that there are _many_ AD
domains on campus (several of which AIS maintains), and many units not
running AD run some other form of NOS (such as Novell). I imagine (and this
would be an excellent case study) that the University as a whole wastes a
significant amount of resources duplicating the effort supporting
NOS\infrastructure (labor, hardware, licensing, support…)
Further, since we’re already scarce on resources (read: man hours) a more
centralized IT approach at MSU would allow people to focus on the mission of
their department, and put less focus on being a jack-of-all-trades (master
of none).
Honestly, I think the impact of decentralization should be heavily
considered in these financially difficult times.
>>Surato:
“The biggest negative I can see is that it is a Microsoft platform. It
does scale, but it is also less secure (in my opinion)…”
I don’t think that it being a MS platform is a negative, nor does that
make it less secure. This is often the case when the administrator of said
Windows system lacks the tools\training required to maintain it properly.
>>Murray:
“…their applications product support for non-Windows systems, in my
experience, hasn't be great but rather poor.”
A lot of different systems could potentially be impacted by even the thought
of “Campus AD”. However, I think that understanding and mitigating these
types of problems would be a significant part of the research phase.
>>Zimbra:
I think Zimbra is novel (no Groupwise related pun intended), but really it
feels like an OSS knock-off of Exchange to me. Plus, to get all of the
features, you’d need to get the “Enterprise” (or similar) version, at
which point I’m not certain that the cost savings (per CAL) would be great
over Exchange. I will, however, say that Zimbra’s web UI is very slick.
-Tony
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