Managing Exchange with multiple tools

Test Center review: In Tackling Exchange management from all angles, we inspect products that bring the lacking capabilities of reporting, alerts, diagnostics and troubleshooting to Microsoft's e-mail platform. The solutions are from DYS Analytics, Microsoft, Quest and Zenprise. The best option naturally depends on your needs and expertise but, in the words of Logan Harbaugh, "there is no single all-around Exchange management product that will solve all of an administrator's problems."

Open source: Salesforce.com says that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and will release the free AppExchange tookit for Eclipse. Also at the EclipseCon show, vendors are pushing ALM, rich-client technologies and ALF, or Application Lifecycle Frameworks.

Columnists' corner: Neil McAllister writes that desktop Linux is still a hard sell for the hardware players and, what's more, not even the upgrade headaches bound to be brought on by Vista can significantly reduce Windows momentum. But there are options and Linux desktop problems are not insurmountable.

Best of the blogs: Ticketmaster has one of the worst privacy policies around, according to Ed Foster, in Reading Ticketmaster terms on the clock. Indeed, the company claims that limiting the amount of time one has on each screen where tickets are selected it prevents a customer from holding up a ticket for too long, but the practice makes it rather difficult to actually read and understand the privacy policy. "Just skimming over the words without much comprehension, it still took me almost ten minutes, and I've probably read more sneakwrap agreements than just about anybody except those who write them. If I'd actually been buying a ticket, I would have had to start over three or four time," Foster writes.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 20, 2006 11:03 AM