What You Make Them Use

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I men­tioned a while ago that I use Google Apps per­son­ally, par­tially as a way to eval­u­ate it but mostly as a way to get all my e-mail into one place.

Regardless of the prob­lems I had with Google Apps, I even­tu­ally moved all of my work e-mail back to my work account, and split every­thing back up. Obviously, the ques­tion of why I’d go back — par­tic­u­larly since Google Apps has fixed some of the big­ger (i.e. non e-mail rea­sons) why it sucked for my pur­poses, includ­ing the inte­gra­tion with other Google tools (except YouTube, grum­ble grum­ble), and the Gmail mobile client finally being able to send from mul­ti­ple accounts.

The rea­son is sim­ple: at work, we main­tain an in-house Zimbra setup, and if Zimbra sucks, then those of us who are respon­si­ble for it to know all the ways it sucks, and fig­ure out how to make it sucks less. I’m not say­ing that Zimbra sucks, of course (though it cer­tainly has it’s moments), sim­ply that if you’re sup­port­ing a tool over for some­one else to use, you had bet­ter be inti­mately famil­iar with it. If I’m not using it, then there could be some weird issue that we’re not mon­i­tor­ing for, and we’ll get bit­ten by it.

This is, hon­estly, more often a prob­lem in oper­a­tions than devel­op­ment: on the devel­op­ment side, we’ve all run into APIs or toolk­its that were so bad it was incon­ceiv­able that the design­ers actu­ally tested them, but few peo­ple actu­ally develop those APIs. In oper­a­tions, it’s not entirely uncom­mon for IT to carve out spe­cial access for them­selves (after all, they have root any­way), and for­get about the lim­i­ta­tions of the unpriv­i­leged user.

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