Microsoft announces SQL Server for Linux

Whether people like exchange or not, it's functionality has more than 15 years of business cooperation behind it's features. Microsoft did one thing very well for a very long time and that was to work with enterprise customers to satisfy feature requests. People complain about all the things office can do that most people don't use but those features come from extensive feedback and customization requests by enterprise customers. Exchange is the same game, it may do a lot of stuff badly but it's combined features are often significantly ahead of anyone else. And there are a lot of those features that are killer features for a lot of businesses.

Reading that technote, it sounds essentially identical in practice to the existing single master replication available in pg core. Note the recommendation of doing all writes on one node, for performance reasons.

>in their quest to use the toys on offer instead of supporting interoperable alternatives.

To be fair, it used to be a lot easier to make a free alternative to commercial offerings. In many cases, they were solving relatively simple problems, and it usually *looked* easy to duplicate with your own code, even though it often ended up being a lot harder than it seemed. (the Linux kernel is a good example; as Linus has said, if he had any idea how difficult a problem creating a kernel was, he would probably never have started it.)

In 2015, when you look at a commercial piece of software, a lot of the time it's obvious that building something equivalent would take years of focused effort, probably from a large team. That's pretty discouraging.

I didn't talk about videoconferencing? Actually that's the one thing that wasn't activated, nor anything I see used often.

When I say calling, I mean that either my (Voip) phone starts calling that person or the Lync call itself. With screen sharing, I mean sharing the things on your screen. E.g. say you're working on something and your colleague is a continent away. I'll check his status, ask if he can has some time and share screen, etc. This works really well, even in groups and with low bandwidth links. It takes no time to setup. It is so easy that it is used for everything. Another example is e.g. a meeting with various people? The "host" shares their screen and write down minutes. All visible to all. If needed to discuss something else, the host switches to that.

There's various other solutions that could be done. But none work as nicely as this. Keep in mind that I've only covered the basics.

> I think it all might be a bit overrated, "international business" or not.

If you're imagining/assuming all kinds of inefficiencies you'll never grasp what I'm explaining! Various people do work inefficiently yeah, but that's not the topic.

I said international business with a reason; that sometimes you don't know the timezone someone is in, nor when they get to the office or leave the office. When I want to call someone, it is handy I can see if I have a reliable way to see that they're available (without needing to ask) plus a very quick way to call them (without needing to know their phone number). Something such as "last seen" is nowhere near good enough.

Regarding your "email is easier": Not always! Sometimes calling resolves things way quicker. In that case, it _is_ super efficient to see that they're at their desk, plus being able to call in 3 sec max. Going back and forth via email takes time and might continue for days (easy when you have timezone differences).

Now regarding personal life, yeah, I highly prefer Free Software and use it almost exclusively. But to have a great free software solution, you'll also need to understand what considerations other people make. I said in my original comment "as a user", because 1) apparently Exchange and Lync are horrible to administrate 2) I use it because I get paid. Fortunately I don't have to care about #1.

I'd like more people to have an understanding in what some (proprietary) software makes possible. You'll not convince the world with just a "but it is free software and open standards"! I'm not advocating to use Lync/proprietary solutions, I want either a free software solution which can at least comes close to what I'm used to, or that people have an understanding of how far off free software is in this regard. If you included me in your "brushing away group", then you've completely missed of what my post was about. Understand how I work with Lync, and make something better (as free software).

> You have a low bar for excellence...

You have a impressive ability to dismiss what I said!

Nice to bring up that Lync doesn't work nicely on Mac OS X. To add: it also doesn't work on *BSD, nor Linux (if you ignore Android). It also isn't free software, tied into Active Directory, hosting it is apparently terrible, etc.

Ok, for you it is horrible because you're using Mac OS X. However, that doesn't change its featureset nor what Lync is able to do. Summarizing that I have a low bar is laughable. Have you seen 20.000+ people interacting using Lync (+all the rest it needs and integrates with). I haven't checked every suggested alternative, but a lot of the alternatives are quite inefficient or limited feature wise. While Lync integrates every time of communication as well as meetings, etc.

In my other comment I already addressed that vendor lock in is bad, I'm not advocating people should use it, etc. Further, loads of businesses take a different approach. As said I use this solely at work.

The Mac client is admittedly pretty crappy but they are scrapping it and rewriting it right now, based on the Skype codebase, and should have the new one shipping by the end of this year, I've seen it although I'm not in the beta test group. I think people have been much happier with the Skype-based client than the old OCS based client.