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to disencourage other clients they also disabled the POP3 protocol to the mail server, because it is “unsecure and outdated” – instead they now use “RCP over HTTPS”, but they – for now – will also tolerate the use of IMAP.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