Email

Google Apps Sync

I’m not sure how many people have picked up on an announcement that Google made last week, but it definitely caught the attention of my dev team. (For those that may be new to this blog, I work for a company that offers Hosted Exchange and Hosted OCS services.)

Here’s the announcement.

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

One Character == World of Suck

Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.

Background

A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do. So, we decided to roll our own. It wasn’t that hard to reverse engineer what was being set for users, groups and contacts. There were a few obstacles of coarse but we were able to get a pretty good provisioning system setup. However, this too had its faults. Sure we had total control over the code and could update things as we needed. But we were still working in a void. We really didn’t know _everything_ that was happening on the system that needed to actually happen. Plain and simple, we were missing things. Not to mention future services would require the same amount of dev time reverse engineering what needed to be set. That’s not a scalable solution.

George W. Bush’s lost e-mails

There has been a lot reported about the Bush administration’s missing email issue. The main details are this. A 1993 court decision stated that emails fell under the Presidential Records Act which requires the president to preserve documents related to the performance of his official duties. Seems pretty reasonable that the White House should keep a record of every email that is sent.

The Clinton Administration answered this decision by adding an archiving system to their Lotus Notes email system.