Informed Email

While I’m not surprised that the Exchange 2007 Outlook Web App doesn’t work on my Droid X, I’m still disappointed.

The Outlook Web App is actually not that bad, and while I initially really liked the Droid X, its actually decreased in reliability, and over time, I’ve discovered I have many complaints about it, such as the poor keyboard performance and the not-so-intelligent type ahead.

There are a couple things I like about the Exchange 2007 Outlook Web App, such as the calendar. In general though, I can’t accept that Microsoft doesn’t support any other mail clients besides Outlook. That is totally anti-competitive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Department of Justice took their butt back to court!

UPDATE: I was wrong! Exchange 2007 Outlook Web App does work with the Droid X browser. One of my co-workers also has a Droid X and said it worked for him, so I gave it a second try and voila! Indeed, the Outlook Web App (OWA) in Exchange 2007 does work with the WebKit-powered Droid X browser. The screen is tight, but its definitely usable and useful.

• https://rubygems.org/gems/viewpoint

At work we’ve upgraded from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2008 and as such we have to stop using the POP3 gem and instead use the Viewpoint gem.

So far, for checking and downloading emails and attachments, its working fine.

One of my co-workers has the bright idea to convert the Exchange format emails to regular mail, so that we could continue to use the standard TMail gem for parsing and data processing.

I would have preferred to use DavMail to continue to use POP3 or an IMAP client, but Viewpoint seems fine for now.

I recently switched from Mac OS X to Debian at work, and one of the hurdles was accessing the Microsoft Exchange server.

I tried Empathy because it reportedly has support for Microsoft Exchange, but was stymied by the fact our server is running Microsoft Exchange 2007. Empathy supports 2003 out of the box, and there is a plug-in to support 2007, but only under certain circumstances; all I could get was an MAPI authentication error.

Thankfully, there is DavMail! Its a small java-based proxy that can connect any type of mail client that supports IMAP or POP to an Exchange server.

But Wait! There is MORE! iCal and LDAP are supported, too!

Yes, its true. Its quite nice that it can support basic e-mail (I’m using Thunderbird, actually Iceweasel since I’m on Debian), but with the Thunderbird Lightning extension, it also supports shared calendering!

On top of this, addressing of emails can be supported by LDAP, meaning auto-complete of emails known to ActiveDirectory, that is actually quite nice.

Zimbra versus Microsoft Exchange

I’m glad to have recently checked out Zimbra, an enterprise level email hosting and serving solution that competes with Microsoft Exchange. Frankly it looks a heck of a lot better than Microsoft Exchange on the cost factor, as well as the fact that it leverages, interacts, and can be integrated with open source email projects. For example, Zimbra uses Postfix (I LOVE Postfix), and it can use MySQL, Postgres, or OpenLDAP, among others.

I wish I had been exposed to Zimbra prior to migrating one of my customers to Google Apps for Business with GMail and the supposed support for Outlook. That was a total disappointment.

While I’ve only seen a demo of Zimbra so far, like the title says: Zimbra Looks Quite Nice.

Who Makes Zimbra

Zimbra is brought to us by the same folks who bring us vSphere: VMWware. Surprising, huh? I think so, anyway.