On Monday 10 February 2014 13:32:01 James M. Pulver wrote:
> I am very skeptical of cloud offerings. I run my own e-mail server at home
> using Citadel on SL6, which does do calendaring and e-mail, but I don't use
> calendaring. It's integrated in the web UI, but the UI is pretty 90sish.
> 
> I would recommend staying away from Office365 / Microsoft's cloud e-mail
> service. The two organizations where I know people who have moved to it
> both find it far inferior to previous in-house e-mail with more frequent
> downtime and unexplained hours long e-mail lags almost weekly.
> 
> There are plenty of e-mail services available, and I would probably have
> gone with Rackspace e-mail if I didn't want to cheaply host multiple e-mail
> addresses at home (the cost is not prohibitive for a business however...
> It's really not prohibitive for a home user either, just running a server
> is cheaper for my situation for personal e-mail).

I would add that gmail is a bit of a pain, at least initially when migrating 
large amounts of mail from Exchange. One organization I work for switched a 
few months ago and I'm still having weird issues where gmail's not-exactly-
IMAP service reflects gobs of email in the IMAP client's inbox from time to 
time that is supposedly old/archived. Once that happens it all shows in the 
web interface and in the client that way. Its also odd that gmail seems 
incapable of actually telling you how much mail you have from the web 
interface -- reports are wildly inaccurate approximations, and with large 
volumes specific entries will appear at one time and not at others, as if the 
backend is of the "eventually consistent" variety.

Not sure the origin of this strangeness, but its unnerving to not know volume 
counts for things like compute farm notifications and really annoying to have 
9000 emails that were supposed to have been filtered previously just appear in 
the inbox at random, requiring manual running of a filter (which sucks over 
IMAP at that volume) and this happens in Thunderbird, Kmail and the Opera 
client, so it seems not to be a problem on that end. The calendars thing is... 
well, not anything that can integrate with a serious project management tool, 
so its useless for my purposes, so I can't speak to that.

Office 365 is simply insufficient for editing of largish documents (technical-spec 
length -- which is precisely the sort of thing you need collaboration support 
for). Google docs has the same problem, but does a little better if you run 
your browser on an overpowered gaming rig -- which is ridiculous when it is 
remembered that the task at hand is just editing a document in most cases...

I'm not trying to bash the concept of some of these services, and for those 
with lighter needs (probably most people) I'm sure things work just fine. But 
for those with more serious needs the situation still seems to favor dedicated 
email hosting (and in our case since none of the calendaring services really 
integrate with project management tools, they are sort of irrelevant), and 
native document editing programs that can deal with version control systems 
(might sound silly, but LibreOffice/git with a few scripts does quite well for 
small team/large document collaboration).

Replacement for Exchange? gmail and 365 don't really fit the bill either, at 
least not for my needs. But even a totally insufficient solution can feel like a 
good alternative to an overworked system administrator -- email is one of the 
funkiest, stupidest, most overregulated, over attacked insecure remnants of 
the old trusting trust internet.