3 ms·

Microsoft Exchange Is MIT’s New Email System

11 points by leelin 17y ago

chanux 17y ago
What they currently use is Cyrus done by Carnegie Mellon University. http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/
- Hoff 17y ago
  Apple is moving from Cyrus to Dovecot with Snow Leopard Server.
tybris 17y ago
Somehow that seems a little embarrassing. The "greatest" technical university in the world needs Microsoft to take care of its e-mail?
- mahmud 17y ago
  Have you seen what's been coming out of MIT Press in the last 8 years? They went full on pop-psych with their "internet and society" type publications. I have seen books on gamer anthropology, virtual currency and the "web mind" sort of stuff coming out of MIT Press. A weird cross between Wired and Kuro5hin. They want to create "leaders" and "visionaries", i.e. people who make it to business magazine covers dressed in geek-chic lab-coats, holding microscopes and calculators, while in reality, running a fully outsourced bio-startup out of Manhattan :-D
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Suddenly it comes as no surprise the best modern OSs we use today are more or less simple improvements on an OS that is about as old as me. And I am not talking about Windows... Did everybody abandon progress? Did we outsource it to China?
jrockway 17y ago
Scheme -> Python, Cyrus IMAP -> Microsoft Exchange Does anyone detect a pattern?
- blub 17y ago
  Getting on with the times?
  - mahmud 17y ago
    If it was Sendmail, maybe. But not Cyrus IMAP. (for the uninitiated; read the "Internet Mail" chapter of Unix Hater's Handbook for MIT admins struggling with Sendmail, circa 1990 ;-)
    - moe 17y ago
      In all fairness, Cyrus is a nightmare. The opaque mail-store was a good idea when performance was an issue for mail servers - nowadays it just gets in the way constantly, especially when something breaks. The ACL system has been ridiculously broken for as long as I can remember. You can assign pretty much every letter of the alphabet to a mailbox/user but, for example, you cannot give a user delete permission on a folders content without giving him delete permission to the folder itself. Some ACL flags tend to interact funny with each other and nevermind trying to have users alter permissions (e.g. share folders) through their IMAP client... This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm honestly surprised someone was still using this dinosaur in production. ;-) That said, moving to Exchange is truly a shame for a tech university. I haven't looked at zimbra and the ilk for a while. Are they still so bad?
mseebach 17y ago
> Christine C. Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for IS&T, said, “We are running Exchange servers in order to offer Microsoft Exchange. This is an optional infrastructure solution for those departments who will benefit from an integrated e-mail and calendaring solution.” For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and calendaring. I'm running Zimbra (community edition) for a few clients, and they like it, but alternatives to Exchange, even a good protocol, seem scarce. KDE's Kontact looked promising for a while, but appears abandoned.
- tsally 17y ago
  MIT has plently of hackers that could just roll their own. The most suprising part is that they didn't do that, and just went with the packaged solution.
  - trapper 17y ago
    You think that the worlds best minds are spent building a calendar?
    - garply 17y ago
      Why not? They could make a hell of a calendar.
    - sanj 17y ago
      Having spent a decade at MIT, I'd be happy to place somewhere in the middle of that pack. And I'm building a better calendar.
  - eob 17y ago
    You'd be surprised at how much home-grown stuff we run around here (I'm a grad student at MIT). All of the school-owned computers still run Athena OS, everyone uses Kerberos, emacs still rules the day..I once saw a secretary use the `finger` command to look up a phone number and couldn't believe it. The problem is all the home-grown stuff is inevitably pretty low-level compared to today's solutions. Sure, there are plenty of hackers around to build OSS replacements for all our needs, but these hackers are students and professors: their main job is to do research, not implement enterprise software. So I think the decision to move to outlook was probably based on the simple fact that it offers a lot of nice features that we don't currently have.
rbanffy 17y ago
Oh boy. I am so sorry for them... It... breaks my heart.
1010011010 17y ago
GMail has an "integrated calendar". It even syncs with outlook, if you have to have that piece of software. Why pay for Exchange instead of use GMail? If MIT wanted to offer gmail at an MIT domain name to students and staff, there's "google apps". Why is exchange needed at all?

11 points by leelin 17y ago

What they currently use is Cyrus done by Carnegie Mellon University. http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/

Hoff 17y ago
Apple is moving from Cyrus to Dovecot with Snow Leopard Server.

tybris 17y ago

Somehow that seems a little embarrassing. The "greatest" technical university in the world needs Microsoft to take care of its e-mail?

mahmud 17y ago
Have you seen what's been coming out of MIT Press in the last 8 years? They went full on pop-psych with their "internet and society" type publications. I have seen books on gamer anthropology, virtual currency and the "web mind" sort of stuff coming out of MIT Press. A weird cross between Wired and Kuro5hin. They want to create "leaders" and "visionaries", i.e. people who make it to business magazine covers dressed in geek-chic lab-coats, holding microscopes and calculators, while in reality, running a fully outsourced bio-startup out of Manhattan :-D
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Suddenly it comes as no surprise the best modern OSs we use today are more or less simple improvements on an OS that is about as old as me. And I am not talking about Windows... Did everybody abandon progress? Did we outsource it to China?

jrockway 17y ago

Scheme -> Python, Cyrus IMAP -> Microsoft Exchange Does anyone detect a pattern?

blub 17y ago
Getting on with the times?
- mahmud 17y ago
  If it was Sendmail, maybe. But not Cyrus IMAP. (for the uninitiated; read the "Internet Mail" chapter of Unix Hater's Handbook for MIT admins struggling with Sendmail, circa 1990 ;-)
  - moe 17y ago
    In all fairness, Cyrus is a nightmare. The opaque mail-store was a good idea when performance was an issue for mail servers - nowadays it just gets in the way constantly, especially when something breaks. The ACL system has been ridiculously broken for as long as I can remember. You can assign pretty much every letter of the alphabet to a mailbox/user but, for example, you cannot give a user delete permission on a folders content without giving him delete permission to the folder itself. Some ACL flags tend to interact funny with each other and nevermind trying to have users alter permissions (e.g. share folders) through their IMAP client... This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm honestly surprised someone was still using this dinosaur in production. ;-) That said, moving to Exchange is truly a shame for a tech university. I haven't looked at zimbra and the ilk for a while. Are they still so bad?

mseebach 17y ago

> Christine C. Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for IS&T, said, “We are running Exchange servers in order to offer Microsoft Exchange. This is an optional infrastructure solution for those departments who will benefit from an integrated e-mail and calendaring solution.” For better or for worse, the world has come to expect integrated email and calendaring. I'm running Zimbra (community edition) for a few clients, and they like it, but alternatives to Exchange, even a good protocol, seem scarce. KDE's Kontact looked promising for a while, but appears abandoned.

tsally 17y ago
MIT has plently of hackers that could just roll their own. The most suprising part is that they didn't do that, and just went with the packaged solution.
- trapper 17y ago
  You think that the worlds best minds are spent building a calendar?
  - garply 17y ago
    Why not? They could make a hell of a calendar.
  - sanj 17y ago
    Having spent a decade at MIT, I'd be happy to place somewhere in the middle of that pack. And I'm building a better calendar.
- eob 17y ago
  You'd be surprised at how much home-grown stuff we run around here (I'm a grad student at MIT). All of the school-owned computers still run Athena OS, everyone uses Kerberos, emacs still rules the day..I once saw a secretary use the `finger` command to look up a phone number and couldn't believe it. The problem is all the home-grown stuff is inevitably pretty low-level compared to today's solutions. Sure, there are plenty of hackers around to build OSS replacements for all our needs, but these hackers are students and professors: their main job is to do research, not implement enterprise software. So I think the decision to move to outlook was probably based on the simple fact that it offers a lot of nice features that we don't currently have.

rbanffy 17y ago

Oh boy. I am so sorry for them... It... breaks my heart.

1010011010 17y ago

GMail has an "integrated calendar". It even syncs with outlook, if you have to have that piece of software. Why pay for Exchange instead of use GMail? If MIT wanted to offer gmail at an MIT domain name to students and staff, there's "google apps". Why is exchange needed at all?