X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Date:         Mon, 14 Sep 1992 12:47:39 PDT
Reply-To:     Novell LAN Interest Group <NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET>
From:         "(Richard Warner)" <rick@SJSUMCS.SJSU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: e-mail, cc:mail or Microsoft Mail
              "NOVELERR@suvm.acs.syr.EDU" at Sep 14, 92 11:14 am

>
> > I've been asked to choose between cc:mail and Microsoft mail, I don't have
> > a lot of time to test them, and I haven't begun yet, but I'd be gratful
> > if you would relay you impressions, good and bad, of both products,
> > if you wish, e-mail me direct and I'll post a summary.
>
> I don't have any experience with cc:mail, but we are just about to do a major
> evaluation of MS Mail 3.0.  The only problem that I have with MS Mail 3.0 is
> that you have to create mail IDs for each user manually.  It has no way to
> read the bindery (like, say, PMail) and setup the users that way.  Does anyone
> else know of a way to have this done automatically.  When I spoke to MS they
> said "It will work automatically for LAN Manager.  Novell doesn't have good
> enough APIs for us to be able to do it for NetWare."  Yeah, right.  Anyway,

"Yeah, right" is right on!  Network Courier, which MS bought out and
is the core of the current MS Mail was able to read the bindery!  MS
took this out, apparently.  Next time you talk to the MS rep about  this,
aks him why the program that MS Mail was derived from, in large part,
could do it if the Novell API is so bad. :-)

> that's my .02 worth.  I would love to hear what kind of choice you make as we
> are about to make the same decision.
>
> Mark Boyd
> Pepperdine University
> boyd@pepvax.pepperdine.edu

I was part of a task force for a large corporation that looked into a
lot of standardization issues.  The biggest one was e-mail.  We did a
major evaluation (6 months long) about 3 years ago, and then did
a minor re-evaluation every 6 months after that.  In our initial
eval, we went through something like 20 e-mail pretenders, and then
narrowed the field to 2 - cc:Mail and Network Courier (now MS-Mail, for
the most part).  We chose cc:Mail in the end for a couple of reasons:
technical support and a better array of clients.  At the time technical
support was close; cc:Mail won here because they were local and Network
Courier was Canadian.  Given the problems I have had with MS tech support
I would say the choice would probably be clearer now.  On the client side,
at that time cc:Mail had a DOS client, a rather primitive Mac client,
a Windows and OS/2 client almost ready to go, and were working on UNIX
clients.  Network Courier had a DOS client, a mediocre Windows client
and were working on a Mac client.  In the intervening period cc:Mail
has widened this lead, with a darned good Windows client out now, a
much better Mac client, and UNIX clients starting to ship.

In our semi-annual re-evaluations we were never fully satisfied with
cc:Mail, but found that all the alternatives were behind and falling
further behind.  Things we were unhappy with were the lack of bindery
support (now in cc:Mail), some security problems (fixed in a maintenance
release a couple of years back), lack of X.400/X.500 support, and
a paucity of gateways to other key mail systems (DEC All-in-one, for
example).  But no one besides Network Courier had the bindery support
(and now it is gone), and everyone else had fewer gateways and less of
a vision of where their product was going.

Now that I spoke on the admin side of things, let me say that the users
loved cc:Mail.  The interface was a quick learn, they could attach
multiple documents of various types, we were able to add-in fax as
a mail type (cc:Mail's own fax product), and everything worked.  Our
client base was large - and distributed.  Our 'campus' had dozens of
buildings all linked via a backbone with a central cc:Mail gateway to
route mail between local 'post-offices'.  Plus we had the entire US
sales force (thousands of sales folks  around the country) using the
remote version to dial-in to a dedicated sales LAN.

One other key advantage to cc:Mail, one we came to love after we started
using it, was that it has an 'import/export' add-in.  This allowed us
to write custom 'mail-enabled' applications.  The most extensive was
a series of programs for providing sales data in spreadsheet form to the
sales force from information in a corporated database.  A salesman would
initiate a request via a mail item with a specific header to a special
user name.  Mail for this user was exported each evening, mail messages
were parsed, and based on the content of these queries to the mainframe
database were created.  The program then connected to the mainframe,
ran the queries, gathered the results, and converted the results to
1-2-3 spreadsheets.  The import/export module was then used (again) to
create a reply to the salesman with the proper 1-2-3 spreadsheet added
as an attachment.  There are now dozens of similar mail-enabled
applications running at this site - all dependent on the import/export
module.

Now for my semi-disclaimer.  I have no affiliation with Lotus or
cc:Mail.  Officials of cc:Mail and myself have discussed the possibility
of a position, but all of my opinions about cc:Mail were formed prior to
the start of these discussions.

+-----------------------+-------------------------------------+
|   Richard M. Warner   |   Internet:  rick@sjsumcs.sjsu.edu  |
|                       | CompuServe:  71121,2257             |
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------+
|  ** DISCLAIMER:  All opinions are strictly my own.  I work  |
|                  hard enough at forming them!               |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
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