[NCLUG] Why Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose

[Mike Loseke]

Thus spake Mike Loseke:
>  We recently (within the last year) went through a review of lots of
> products and solutions for a single calendar system. We're currently using
> a mix of Netscape calendar (IPlanet), Exchange, the calendar that ships
> with Solaris/CDE and a few others. Of course, none of these can interact
> at the calendar level fully. The goal of the review was to find a single
> solution that would serve both PC and Unix users with a native client with
> full feature sets across platforms. Believe it or not, we found one.

 As a side note to all this, it was interesting reviewing all these systems
and talking to the vendors face to face. We had a group of about 12 people
doing this and about 4 or so of us were pure unix-heads, mainly there to
make sure the unix community at work didn't get the pointy end of the
stick in our eye.

 Among those who presented to us in person, Steltor was by far the most
impressive. The sales guy was very honest (they are a Canadian company,
so I think it's genetic) and straightforward. He was very upfront about
areas in which their product was lacking, I think mainly because they were
very minimal areas. In fact, their product lacks most in the support of
the Outlook client. Their plugin deactivates alot of menu selections in
Outlook (those that tickle features on the Exchange server directly) and
the information presented in the Outlook client is lacking when compared
directly to the native Steltor client. This was nice for us unix folks
because for once the Windows guys were the ones being left out. :-)

 Interestingly enough, the Microsft presentation was the worst. It degraded
quickly into a Windows 2000 presentation as Exchange depends directly on
so many of their integrated services (MS-LDAP for one). They of course
had no unix clients at all, but they do have a web interface. However,
the web interface is different depending on what browser you're using and,
of course, the Unix guys are using primarily netscape - many features are
missing in the netscape interface as compared to the IE interface, and I
do mean alot. Even the initial screen looks crappy and completely different.
Questions about operating in a mixed PC/Unix environment were brushed off
quite politically as well.

 After all of the presentations we had over a week of in-depth, hands-on,
review we took an all-hands vote about which solution we thought was,
overall, the best - both for the company and in their personal opinion.
Steltor won with a 100% vote. And believe me, we had some serious MS-zealots
in that room too. I was very surprised.

-- 
   Mike Loseke    | all this net feterage... it's got to be what
 mike at verinet.com | phantom pains feel like...