Calendar

March 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Categories

Active supporter of WikiPedia
Support Wikipedia

Geocaching

Profile for uwezi

Brave New World

Today my employer, Uppsala University, will migrate our email system from an open-source and Unix based one to Exchange Server. At the same time we are all encouraged to migrate ourselves to using Exchange/Outlook for the sake of the benefits.

Well, I will not, ever…

Some working group in the administration has decided that it would be best, if everyone would be using the same system for emails and calenders – it’s a bit late for that I would say. And they have decided that MS Exchange is the best.

In order to disencourage other clients they also disabled the POP3 protocol to the mail server, because it is “unsecure and outdated” – instead they now use “RCP over HTTPS”, but they – for now – will also tolerate the use of IMAP.

The thing is, that by now everyone of us teachers and researchers has developed her/his own workflow. I am expecting chaos. And with the track record of the other central administrative systems run by the university, I expect more chaos in the future.

I just want to be able to fetch my emails, if the university thinks they have to keep copies of them for archival purposes as a public organization, then they can do it anyway, no matter if I keep them on an Exchange server or just transport them through a stupid mail server.

For a calender, well I need a reliable calender where I can manage both my private and job-related times. Google does this job for me, right now Uppsala University uses a mediocre system called TimeEdit, which is not flexible at all. I don’t know what there is planned here, will Exchange be additional to TimeEdit, will it replace TimeEdit, who knows.

I can understand that using a centralized system is useful in a slimlined administrative organization, where every employee can be equipped with an identical system. But here we are using different computer platforms, software, languages,…

Obviously the administrators would be very happy, if they were alone and could determine everything here at the university. Their ultimate goal must be to get rid of all these stupid researchers, teachers and students who just mess up their daily work – what are these useful for anyhow?

MS Outlook Web App - a survival mechanism for Outlook/Exchange refuseniks.

MS Outlook Web App – a survival mechanism for Outlook/Exchange refuseniks.

2 comments to Brave New World

  • Hi Your main web site loads up really slow if you ask me, I am not sure who’s issue is
    that however , wikipedia starts up relatively fast.
    Nevertheless, I have to thank you for adding awesome article.
    Everyone who stumbled on this web site must have noticed this content extremely very helpful.

    I ought to tell you that you really have done brilliant job
    with this as well as expect to check out more wonderful stuff through you.

    I already have you bookmarked to look at blogs you post.

    • uwezi

      Thanks for your comments!

      I don’t know why and if my blog loads slow where you are. The site is hosted by a commercial provider in Germany.

Leave a Reply to uwezi

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>