Saturday, April 25, 2009

UQ switches to MS Exchange Labs

The University of Queensland is switching over to Microsoft Exchange Labs for student email accounts. In the past I have redirected all my university email to my personal GMail account and I wished to continue that.

This turned out to be a ridiculously complicated process, that I would have never figured out without the instructions. Furthermore it can only be done in IE 7! Obviously the IT staff haven't walked around with their eyes open, otherwise they might have noticed how many students have MacBooks.

From my brief exposure to this service, it seems like a really bad idea to try and clone a desktop application (Outlook) in a web browser. Having to double-click is completely inconsistent with the normal browser paradigm.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Having worked in the some of the last organisations at UQ to switch over to exchange the staff hated it just as much as everyone else. It led to higher down time, poorer support for "alternative systems", slower reponse times, poorer searching capabilities and so on. The university decided to impose something which was an overall negative to the general population.

Given their other wonderful IT projects, such as the financial system debacle, they have wasted much money and generally reduced the overall effectiveness of the students and staff.

I don't understand.