At my new job I’m forced to use Outlook for email, unfortunately. Most of my past jobs have had Outlook as a standard, but the company was small enough that it didn’t create any waves to have one person using a different client with IMAP. But I’m kind of scared to do that at this company because everybody tells me I need to have my calendar public, and they are always sending invites to meetings and such.
Anyway, I found out how to get to the company’s webmail today, and figured I’d try it from home to see if it works. I’m a diehard Linux user at home, and use SuSE Professional exclusive as my desktop OS. My new company uses Microsoft Exchange 2003 for their email server, and the webmail component roughly mimics Outlook in a web browser. I very much expected to get a ‘You must use Internet Explorer’ message when I tried to login. But much to my surprise, not only did I get the login prompt like normal, but it let me in and everything worked flawlessly!! I was utterly blown away, because Microsoft has rarely shown any desire to play well with others, and with a product as complicated as webmail, I fully expected them to use proprietary technology that only IE would recognize. Well, congratulations Microsoft. You got this one right.
