a query

[James Laver]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:
> On 3/13/08, Dave Hodgkinson <davehodg at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  >  On 13 Mar 2008, at 04:42, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>  >  >   Exchange
>  >  > is unquestionably a bloated resource hog with some odd habits but it
>  >  > offers integrated calendars and webmail and suits usually like it.
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  > What he said.
>  >
>  >  I've replaced a badly configured and maintained Exchange system with
>  >  sendmail/imap
>  >  and it was fine for a time, especially as it was on a Rackspace server
>  >  so the road
>  >  warriors and home workers could get at it.
>  >
>  >  Calendaring became a Big Issue though and there seems to be no
>  >  alternative.
>
>
>  Yes there is, Google Apps,
>  http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/business/index.html
>  http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/business/applications.html
>
>  New hotness, "Team Edition"
>  http://www.google.com/apps/business/index.html
>
>  IT decision makers,
>  http://www.google.com/apps/admins/index.html
>
>  This would work out _much_ less than your existing spend.
>
>  I've moved about a dozen folks that were my clients to various Apps
>  flavours and everyone of them has been happy (if not very happy). I've
>  been happy too as my servers don't have to process all that goddam
>  spam any more :-)
>
>  Paul (who gets >100K spams/month, on this domain)
>

In a similar vein, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have similar online
calendaring and meeting systems, and there are smaller independents
like Zoho.

It's probably worth mentioning that 37signals (who developed that
bloody awful ruby framework, rails) also have a hosted system called
Backpack, here: http://backpackit.com/

We use Google Calendar here at work, and are quite satisfied, for what
it's worth.

--James