Topic: A thing of beauty

[jmsadie]

I have been installing literally thousands of networks over the previous 30 years. Starting with IBM mainframes for 10 years, then Novell, Lantastic, OS2, WFW3.11, NT, various flavours of Linux, SME server, and all the way to Microsoft Server and SBS 2003. My take on SME is as follows:

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SME server is a thing of beauty and engineering excellence!

It is the perfect philosophy statement - it says exactly what it means, nothing more and nothing less. It is even artistically perfect, with pleasing colours and perfect screen layouts. The menus are clear, and errors messages are relevant and easily understood. It installs quickly and works reliably. It has the best human interface of ANY product I have ever seen in the previous 30 years. All-in-all it is a thing of beauty that will be a joy forever. I would marry it if I could.

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The only small commendation I have is that there is no easily accessible common shared address book feature for Windows users. The best one I have found so far is Shared Contact Manager, available from www.novascape.com. It uses a standard single database file in a common share on an ibay on SME. It automatically imports all the addresses from Outlook Express and Outlook. Even proper mass-mailing features are included. It also works even on normal Windows peer-to-peer networks. And the cost is very reasonable.

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A perfect network solution is to use SME server, and Xandros Business edition Linux on clients. The Xandros Business Edition can even join Windows (or SME) domains, and also even integrate into Active directory.

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My suggestion would be to provide a paid-for subscription for e-mail only support - something like $10 per incident, payable in $50 units, valid for one year. This support could merely be a link to a FAQ in your forums. That way a common database containing all common FAQS could be developed, and only made available for paid support. Links that were accessed and paid for should stay available to the user that paid for that support.

This money could be used any way the SME team sees fit. To provide such an amazing product for free is not really fair to the people who contribute to it. That way continual development could be assured.

[jmsadie]

An important point re my previous post:

The beauty only refers to the BLUE interface, NOT the old ORANGE interface, as is now again on the Beta 7 release. I surely do hope that the BLUE interface will be the standard interface.

[jackl]

jmsadie,

Have you tested the Shared Contact Manager with large contact lists ie >3500 addresses. We have tried several similar solutions all work fine when only a few hundred contacts are involved, but on large databases it takes a while for outlook to import from the database causing long delays on startup. According to the website the demo version is limited to 10 contacts so there is no way of knowing how it will handle several thousand contacts. Could you shed some light on this?

I agree with your comments about SME and a common address book would make it even better. Many of the web based solutions miss the point of a common address book in that many of our clients use their contacts database to automate their snail mail using mailmerge macros for MS word, so it is also the integration of the shared contacts list with MS Office that is vital in some cases.

Regards
Jack

[jmsadie]

Have not tested the shared address / shared contact program from www.novascape.com with that number of addresses before. However, we use the program in Windows and have clients that use it with SME server. Since the whole address book seems to get loaded into ram, I would think that the only problem would be that it would slow down if you have a large database, and not enough ram. But memory is cheap these days. Also, I have contacted www.novascape.com before, and they were quite helpful. Maybe you could address this question to them?

[kruhm]

if you're upset about the colors, just change them in the CSS's

[jmsadie]

As a Linux novice: "change the colors in CSS" does not mean anything to me. Where and what is CSS?

I am happy to edit text files etc, and would really appreciate more specific info on how to do that.

Would it be possible to change it completely to the logo and colors as used in V6.5? That - to me - is beautiful.

[kruhm]

It has nothing directly to do with Linux, it has to do with web pages/web sites.

DEFINITION
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CSS.html

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT CSS
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

QUICK TUTORIAL & EXAMPLES
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

V7beta uses CSS's

[jmsadie]

Thanks, will work through your suggestions.

I do have a fair view of what is going on, but where exactly - which directory/folder - are these CSS's located on V7?

[kruhm]

/etc/e-smith/web

[compdoc]

I kinda liked the whole orange thing. no accounting for taste, I guess...