To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side. We originally interpreted the title of Lionel Barrow's blog post, "Don't even consider starting with …
By default, they're gone. They're not in inbox, they're not in deleted items, they're not on any calendars.. they're gone. A couple weeks ago I had to ask a coworker to re-send a meeting invite, as schedules changed after I declined a meeting.
The setting _does_ exist. Just another wtf from this app.
Bonus points? If you have Outlook set to text-only mode (security settings) - because you want to be able to create message rules based on URLs of links (which you flatly can't do unless your e-mail is set to text-only), then replies to meetings are sent .... apparently as an empty e-mail, I'm told. A subject and no body. It doesn't update the recipient's calendar whether you're attending or not, they just get a nothing.
And how many years (decades ?) has it taken them to figure out that requirement.
I went and looked up how to do it, because like others I have reasons to want to see declined meetings - one being that things change, I might not have been able to attend when I was invited a couple of weeks ago, but now another meeting has changed/moved/been cancelled so now I can attend. Two IT systems, one's already been downgraded to Win 11, but not the full M365 experience - so no setting there. The other has (fortunately from a user's perspective) had the Win 11 rollout delayed, and again, no setting there.
As an expert, I get many invites I just reject outright. But I still want to be available to answer any questions (through a chat, or call-in as needed) that arise in said meeting. So for me, this is a frequent need. Your milage will vary, of course. But to be able to choose "Reject, but keep" would be nice.
And the part about forwarding invites as e-mails (but updates are not effectuated), that's a major issue.
Of course, my major gripe is that when a calendar invite has been sent out, any and every change — even just adding a single item to the agenda — generates a new invite that people must accept or reject. (I prefer to reserve people early and add itemised agendas later.)
Tentative says "might attend", which often causes the meeting chair to delay the start a few minutes in case you do.
There are a lot of meetings which I definitely won't attend, but need to know when they are happening.
Maybe there's a task I need to do before it so the people who are going have something to talk about, or there's something I need to do afterwards like chase the secretary for the minutes. Or simply "most of the team is busy, don't consider organising anything then"
Sure, I can create my own reminders, but those won't get updated if the meeting changes.
I used to decline many meetings with "tentative", and would let the organizer know I wouldn't be there but could potentially step in for a moment or two if I was needed.
That had the benefit of not wasting my time with the 98% of crap they didn't need me for, while still blocking out that timeslot thus reducing the likelihood of someone else trying to invite me at that time so I'd have more free time to actually do work.
Now I suppose you could devise some sort of "decline, but keep the meeting in my calendar, and inform the organizer that I will potentially be available during that time for a moment or two" option, but who wants to have a dozen options for a response to a meeting invite to cover every possible option. Tentative offers the way to keep the meeting in your calendar, and communicating with the meeting organizer is better than a short list of canned responses would be (so he could ask me "what sort of queries would you like me to take to you, versus just sending you via email after the meeting is complete?" and I can further break things down if necessary)
Whether you can get away with doing this depends on your management. I never had issues because I was always a consultant, and if managers wanted me present at a meeting I felt had little value I would say "well if you want to pay me my hourly rate twice a week for this meeting I feel is not the best use of my time that's your call". On one gig that was an SAP installation they had an hour long morning meeting every day of the week, that everyone (well "everyone" defined large enough that it included me, and about 25 others) had to attend. Most of the time was talking about issues that I not only had nothing to do with, I had no idea what the heck they were even talking about. And the same was true for others in the 3-5 minutes that might have touched on something that had to do with me. So I'd dial in and surf the internet until I heard a particular voice that signaled they were now dealing with stuff I had to pay attention to.
Try the New Outlook
You have to if you are using a Mac - sure your existing emails and calendar entries are still there but, if you are using Exchange Online, you *have* to use New Outlook. Otherwise it doesn't sync.
Caught us out when we migrated a bunch of people to Office365. They didn't like the "new" Outlook so switched it back to classic then complained about no new emails arriving..
Groups in the Microsoft world are a mess.
Exchange mastered groups, Entra mastered static groups, Entra mastered dynamic groups, AD mastered groups, Office 365 groups. (Have I missed any?)
Each flavour has slightly different features & capabilities and you can't always mix them. Nor can you convert between them.
Groups usually support nesting - but applications need to be specially written to support nested groups: It's hit and miss as to whether nesting will work. So you end up writing scripts to de-nest groups. (In an ideal work you'd used dynamic groups - except updates can take 24 hours and not all applications support dynamic groups)
>>Groups in the Microsoft world are a mess.
They were pretty straight forward back in the day. Sadly they have suffered the ravages of time and software "improvements"
>>Exchange mastered groups, Entra mastered static groups, Entra mastered dynamic groups, AD mastered groups, Office 365 groups.
>>(Have I missed any?)
Yeh. InTune groups - they work worse than any of the others....
The siloing of products inside Microsoft has lead to the dog's dinner that we suffer today. Every silo has "NIH syndrome" with respect to things developed in other silos and then someone decides it should all be OneMicrosoft and here we are with sticky tape barely covering the cracks.
>>In an ideal work you'd used dynamic groups
Yeh - I would if I could define the rules based on any Entra/AD user attribute rather than just the ones Microsoft deem sensible (State or Province, Company, Department, Custom Attribute[1-15]) and also have multiple rules with definable logic for each group (like you can for (on prem)AD GPO targetting; yeh that isn't great either but that's a UI thing rather than a functionality thing). As it is I have to mangle the usage of state, company & department to not mean what they imply to get anything that vaguely fits my use case.
None of this was designed at a larger scale. It's a mess because the industry has been messy.
Taking SharePoint as an example, it was built to provide a web-based Groupware system.
Microsoft's first attempt at Groupware was Exchange Public Folders, which were pretty bloody awful yet somehow still exists today. Meanwhile the web was happening, everyone wanted an Intranet, and Microsoft had no product for this. Well - they had IIS as a server, they had Office putting out HTML, but unless you wanted to upload your files via FTP or maybe tinker with WebDAV (remember that?), you were out of luck in Microsoft's portfolio.
Meanwhile, Lotus Notes has gained a webserver and can publish your applications to your intranet without much work at all. Yes, they're ugly as hell, but this is 1998 and most websites are ugly as hell - what terrifies Microsoft is that you can convert Notes applications to web applications with a few simple changes to your servers.
So SharePoint was born. It was a supermarket sweep trolley dash of technologies, taken from various Microsoft teams - Office, Development Tools, Server. It was such a rush job that a version 2 came out fairly quickly afterwards that broke compatibility with the first version.
SharePoint was never designed to scale up, or to be easy to integrate. It had a reputation as being a big, heavy, awkward product that nobody loved, but that fitted with company's IT strategy so was used anyway.
The fact that we're still using it is mildly shocking. SharePoint should have died years ago. It's one of the least popular offerings from Microsoft - for all their audiences. Developers, administrators, users - they tolerate SharePoint, knowing that better solutions are available but that this is what the IT strategy says we have to use.
The real surprise is that, having bought Groove, they then decided to integrate it with SharePoint and later use the Groove sync client to create OneDrive. Again, that wasn't part of any long term plan. It just happened. Microsoft needed personal storage, and they rummaged around in their product bag to see what they could cobble together quickly.
Give it twenty years, people will be saying the same thing about Google's platform. Their big advantage currently is that they offer a lot less, so there's less to integrate. That can't last...
The fact that we're still using it is mildly shocking. SharePoint should have died years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if they decided not to kill it but to carry on and push corporations onto it at about the same time they were told to open up SMB. No money goes to Microsoft if everyone can set up their own Samba servers.
Exactly. Nothing was designed, it was just accreted in various pieces with nobody to coordinate it. That's why you have so many Everything Apps and things don't play nicely with each other. They were created in complete isolation then stapled together.
Teams is a great example - the reason that is SUCH a flaming piece of crap even by MS standards is that it's just various 3rd party apps they bought and glued together with bandaids and bodily fluids and a lot of hammers and saws.
Don’t forget that Microsoft Small Business Server was in the mix too, and many saw SharePoint as taking the same ethos and scaling it up for the enterprise. The challenge has always been that SharePoint is a bit of a question mark. What exactly is it supposed to be? It’s not a great document management system, it’s not a great file share… in fact, I could list a thousand things it isn’t. But you get the picture.
From day one, you had SharePoint Team Services for individuals and small teams, and SharePoint Portal Server for enterprises. The latter was pitched as a central portal for storing files, managing versions, and indexing content across file shares and Exchange public folders.
If I had to summarize what SharePoint was meant to be at the beginning, it would be document management:
Central repository: A place to store and organize documents with versioning, check-in/check-out, and metadata, so files weren’t just random Outlook attachments.
Intranet/Portal creation: A “single front door” to corporate information.
Search across systems: Indexing capabilities to crawl file shares and Exchange public folders.
Basic collaboration: Team sites for calendars, task lists, announcements, and links.
In short, SharePoint was originally meant to solve this problem:
“We have thousands of files scattered across network drives and email. Nobody knows what’s current, where to find it, or who owns it. Let’s create a central, web-based system where people can store, search, and collaborate on documents.”
But like most things it took the original complexity it was trying to solve internalized it and then layered it's own complexity on top. This was against a backdrop of iterations of outlook, exchange, every flavour of groups you can think of, tied into teams etc to give you what you have today. It wasn't designed on a clean sheet of paper for a greenfield site, and it shows,
> Taking SharePoint as an example, it was built to provide a web-based Groupware system.
I am not disagreeing here, but let's take a step back.
Email is a thing. We know what email is. It's older than the ARPAnet.
We know what a calendar/agenda planner is. They predate electricity. Ditto address books.
All good. There are our core 3 functions, which Outlook got big by integrating into 1 app.
Remember, Win95 did not come with a web browser, but it came with an email client, and Windows for Workgroups came with Schedule+. Remember Santayana: know your history, or else.
Fine. Outlook combined 3 well-established apps. Exchange provided the server. Based on MS Access databases, FFS, because MS didn't own a SQL server yet -- Sybase hadn't sold MS its crown jewels yet.
Now, for the $64,000 prize: what is "groupware"? What does it do?
:-D
Email is a thing. We know what email is. It's older than the ARPAnet.
I had intra-BBS emails (FidoNet?) back in the mid-late 1970s.. Was slow (depending on how many hops away the reciepient was and how often your BBSOp dialed out) but it worked..
Lotus Notes did the integration much earlier… as did, I think, Netware and others… Microsoft was just more skillful at using its Windows/Office monopoly to convince customers that Exchange was what they needed. Given them credit for that but those who agreed the deals should be on the naughty step trying to solve many of the problems they helped cause!
FWIW Access was used because it was proprietary; Microsoft always prefers to use something it owns entirely. This is also why the world got Arial and then, pewk, Verdana, because Microsoft would not buy decent typefaces.
Have you seen what you need to run an Exchange 2019 server? I'd like to see that benchmarked against something like OpenXChange + IMAP, though I'm not that happy with WebDAV for files…
I'm pretty sure that I'm a so-called "digital native", seeing as I've been using computers near daily for well over 60 years now, and the thing that evolved into what we now call "The Internet" since before TCP/IP was invented.
I do not use either Microsoft or Alphabet products. At all. Ever. Not in my personal life, not in my businesses, and not within the corporations I consult for. IMO, the offerings of both companies are equally insane.
And yet somehow, I manage to do many computery thingies on a daily basis, with minimal difficulty and almost no swearing.
Imagine that.
And my degree from SAIL helps to ensure that I will never use the bad joke that is today's iteration of AI ...
> I do not use either Microsoft or Alphabet products.
That's nice, son. I have to use MS at work, because that's the easiest thing for corporate IT to do. Working at home, I actually get most of my work done on Linux.
I have to use Google on my phone because what's the alternative? Apple's walled garden where I can't get anything done at all? No, Google at least (for the moment) lets me unlock my bootloader and get root access so my apps can manage GPS and cell data as necessary.
I'm sad that Microsoft threw in the towel with Windows Mobile. They weren't great, but at least they would have been some sort of pressure on the Google/Apple duopoly.
> I'm sad that Microsoft threw in the towel with Windows Mobile. They weren't great, but at least they would have been some sort of pressure on the Google/Apple duopoly.
100% this.
It was a viable competitor -- but by then MS had lost all the execs who knew that there _was_ a plot, let alone what it was.
MS could afford to prop it up indefinitely.
(Ditto Blackberry IMHO. It could have licensed BB10 out.)
Instead... we have $100B in the bank and no clue. What do we do? Let's build datacentres and flog the space below cost to, er, um, to hurt Amazon, and, er, to win market share!
seeing as I've been using computers near daily for well over 60 years now
Assisted with building a Nascom 1 in (mumble) 1977 ish (and used it to - hand coding assembler was one of the first things I learnt until we bought the Zeap compiler..
So similar vintage I guess - I was 12 at the time.
Progressed to a BBC Model B (with a brief diversion to a Sinclair Spectrum) then an Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, a PC running DOS (then OS/2, then linux) then various homebuild DOS/Windows boxen.
Now mostly MacOS/linux/FreeBSD. I do have an old Lenovo Windows laptop but it's mostly for doing stuff that isn't as easy on MacOS (*cough* ebook DRM on books that I buy).
What's lacking here, and needed for any large software undertaking, is someone, call them product manager, architect or maintainer, to take an overview. It might be necessary to meet some proposals with an outright "No". Otherwise it might be "That sounds like a good idea but integrate it with the rest to make it look as if it was designed in from the start".
Hosting confidential material -- emails, documents, and other files -- on some third party's servers -- third parties against whom you have no effective recourse against for data loss, exposure, or misuse -- is foolish, if not (in the case of businesses) breach of care, or of fiduciary duty, or whatever it's called.
Ease of use does not mitigate the risk.
Even if that's what "everyone else" is doing.
> Hosting confidential material -- emails, documents, and other files -- on some third party's servers
I will not name names, but...
I tried to tell management at 2 out of 3 big enterprise Linux vendors this. They did not believe me.
I can't prove it but my strong suspicion is that of the big 3, two run on Gmail and the other on MS 365.
All 3, of course, make, provide and support 100% of the tooling to run their own infra, all internally on their own packages.
I recall at least a decade ago raising this.
My manager was busy "upselling" clients onto 365 and away from the mail server we ran. Based on assuranceslies from MS, he'd tell them it's all OK you can specify data to be kept on UK/EU hardware. I'd love to be able to go back and say "told you so" now it's officially out in the open that MS cannot guarantee your data sovereignty or security on 365, and hence most business use of it is actually illegal as you cannot apply the measures required by GDPR (pre or post brexit.)
I was a Notes guy at a reseller and we went to some free SharePoint training when that came out. What a mess! You needed 3 servers to replace one Notes server. What killed Notes, aside from gajillions dollars of Microsoft marketing and the big partner certification push, was the Outlook client. The Notes mail client was a kludge.
Which is kinda ironic when you think about the current state of the Outlook client. Sure makes the Notes client look good. My immediate relations all still use Pegasus mail, which still works just as well as it always has, but we have one friend who is addicted to buying new computers and I end up supporting Outlook. What an unbelieveable dogs dinner the new Outlook client is. After an hour of trying the other day I still didn't find a way to give him black text on white, which he wants because he claims white on black is giving him eye trouble.
They have to. They're all out of ideas, so the only way to grow their business is to create new problems by breaking things that were already solved, and then selling it as a new feature or bundled in that all-encompassing package that's $365/user/mo.
What I hear when I read this article is, "I'm used to Google, so Microsoft sucks." I use Google for most of my personal work and Microsoft for professional work, and each product suite has its foibles. In the case of Microsoft, as others have pointed out, the M365 product suite is an accretion of products which were lashed together via kludgy programming interfaces and which work Well Enough. SharePoint Server was an absolute abomination to administer, and I don't envy anyone who has to do so. Conversely, Google also works Well Enough, although I have my own complaints with the Gmail Web interface and with the craptastic Google Meet (or whatever the current branding is), and administration is obviously not even a question because All Your Data Are Belong to Google.
In short, neither suite is beyond reproach. Microsoft kludges are more obvious, perhaps, and Google definitely has an edge with the mobile experience, but I suspect that most users can find plenty to dislike with both suites.
> What I hear when I read this article is...
Wrong.
Sorry, but I think you are misreading it badly.
Parallel: Orwell. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
You're responding: "no they aren't."
That is to misunderstand the point. The point is: _we must say this but it is not true._ Second level (of N): some are equal but not all. 3rd: we will permit some equality but it won't apply to all. Etc etc.
The point is not "A is bad, B is less bad, therefore, B is better than A."
"Better" is an absolute judgement. It's too broad.
The real points here include but are not limited to:
• both are bad
• 1 is a lot more capable than the other
• however, contrary to popular belief, simpler does not mean less good
• there is a level of "good enough for arbitrarily complex business needs" here and both exceed it
• complexity is bad but can go unseen when everyone's used to it
• you can in fact rip out a huge amount of complexity and leave something good enough
• aiming to compete by rivalling features that accreted over decades is a bad plan
The "AI koan" of Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine applies here:
«
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
»
Since 4Y at the Reg has given me a very depressing idea of some people's reading skills, let me illustrate the gag with the longer original gag it's based on:
«
A homeowner calls in a plumber when the boiler breaks down.
The plumber arrives, studies the machine, then produces a hammer and gives it a hefty whack.
The washing machine starts working again and the plumber presents a bill for £200.
‘Two hundred quid?’ says the customer. ‘All you did was hit it with the hammer!’
So the plumber gives them an itemised bill:
‘Hitting washing machine with a hammer – $5. Knowing where to hit it – $195.’
»
Turning it on and off does work, but sometimes, the key thing is knowing when it's OK and which bit to turn off.
Neither company knows this any more.
The real point being: if you understand the system and can identify the essentials then you can assemble a much simpler system that does just those essentials and thus outcompete an incumbent.
*BUT* a key problem is the people. They will hold on to the old system desperately, even if it's expensive, because it's hard and they know how to use it.
Which brings us to Max Planck's principle:
«
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
»
It's 1/3 of a century since Windows NT now. It's over 1/4 since Outlook+Exchange. We are now in the situation of being unable to replace things 'til the olde phartes who cling to it die off.
(Or retire.)
*BUT* when considering this, it is vital to also remember that Linux is slightly older than NT, and Internet Mail is older still.
So they are not the obvious replacements they look like because they're free.
There's room here to do this again and replace both.
I see parts of this in real time. I am a boomer in IT, an MS shop, about to retire. Surrounded by Zoomers and Millennials. IT took away our suite's printer because Zoomers don't print and they don't normally use email. 90% of communication happens in Teams. When we share file folders, the SharePoint folders are presented via Teams. So the old systems are fading back.
... with which Exchange integrates well enough,
Other IAM solutions of course exist, but AD is "simpler" to setup (designing a forest properly is not) and fully integrated with Windows, and allows for far better permission management.
As long as Windows client dominates company, replication what AD can do with Linux is much more complex. I've been always surprised Linux distro can't offer anything like AD, and sitll stubbornly hide enhanced permissions.
Exchange started to become an issue when some bright spark thought that building it over .NET and Powershell was a good idea, because Linux works alike. That's the issue with "digital native", they don't understand IT. Someone told them Unix was the best OS ever designed (it was not, and it is even less now, showing all its age), so they needed to copy it - and whoever copies Unix is doomed to replicate its many design flaws. That's why smart people who full understood Unix, like Dave Cutler, stayed away.
The architecture underlying Outlook and Exchange is more complex than many thing. It's a messaging architecture that can exchange many different types of items. Lotus Notes is not much different.
Outllook lost some nice features it had in the past - because many users can't go past the "Google Mail" way of using email. It could have been improved, but Nadella needs cheap developers, and it's going to kill it instead.
Still nobody could replace it with a real groupware system. Everything based on "open standards" is usually a kludge - and that's one the main Linux issue, everybody develops just a piace, and you get them stuck togethter in some ways. Most people need a well rounded application developed end-to-end.
Sharepoint is probably the worst of them - but again, what's the replacement? Alfresco? NextCloud? Again, web standards are pathetially inadequate for many tasks... and we saw the results. And Gogole is part ot the issue of moving everything "to the web" so it could control users and hoard data - givnmg them lame web applications with ugly UIX, but hey, they are "free"....
> AD is "simpler" to setup (designing a forest properly is not) and fully integrated with Windows, and allows for far better permission management.
I certainly agree AD is the de facto standard in big dumb companies nowdays -- you'd have to be blind or in denial not to.
But citing "fully integrated with Windows" as the advantage seems a bit unfair. I mean, it's obviously true, but would you say something designed for and unique to Linux is "fully integrated with Linux"? I tend to think terms like "locked in" and "proprietary" are more appropriate.
I do take your real point, though: Linux et al have no over-arching directory services and group-policy mechanism like AD. SSSD et al have tried, but in some ways it's as big a bodge as AD, and generally only part of the puzzle anyway.
I'm glad you distinguish between "simpler" and "designing is not" wrt AD; I won't pretend at all to be a Windows AD admin -- far from it -- but I've had to use it around the edges in a couple past jobs, essentially amounting to data entry tasks, following the corporate docs and instructions, and to say it was a confusing muddle and exercise in frustration is putting it mildly.
I'm an old Unix (and BSD, and Linux) person, so perhaps my brain isn't wired in ways receptive to using Windows in general and AD in particular. But I suspect it's equally true that it's pretty easy to cobble together a right mess of AD, with just a few "simpler" clicks.
