I am a network administrator with a company that is based of the retail industry and have several stores scattered throughout the state. Each store has a handful of computers, with each being used by several different employees. (In other words, no employee has their very own PC.)
When I started with the company, some people used Outlook, some used Outlook Express and it was a very sloppy setup. Since then, I’ve removed Outlook from my store PCs and enforced users to start using Outlook Web Access (OWA) through our Exchange 2000 server. I even put a link to our OWA site on our local intranet homepage so that my users wouldn’t have to remember the URL. My problem is that I constantly find myself trying to convince people that OWA is not a crappy product and that our retail employees use email very little so that this solution is the best option. to my boss, employees and even the owner of the company as the best solution for our retail stores where we have multiple users using the same PC. The owner of the company think Outlook is the savior of the software world and he along with the rest of us at our headquarters use Outlook because we have our own PCs. However, he along with others think that all of our employees should use it even though he doesn?t understand the mechanics behind authentication and it?s use at our retail stores. Some employees use the excuse of not being able to spell check email. To rectify that problem, I installed a program that integrates with Internet Explorer and allows them to spell check. Problem solved. However, I still hear people moan and complain about how they wish they had Outlook or Outlook express. At my last job, we used Lotus Notes and several employees including myself used the Lotus Notes web mail from home and had no problems. We loved web based email!!
How can I convince my users and upper management that using OWA at our retail stores is the most sensible solution in our situation and that it works just as good as Outlook and Outlook Express?