Over the last two weeks I’ve had lots of experience and fun with Citrix and have managed to learn more about Citrix, Windows, Flex and mandatory profiles. I’ve managed to play with all sorts of interesting toys and problems since I’ve had to play with this, and all of it coming from the guy who has a full time Linux desktop and a Mac (very fond of my Mac). We’re amalgamating and all of the other shires (maybe 200 people) don’t really want to move away from their near and dear Outlook client nor do they seem very co-operative for much else. So we end up having to provide them with Outlook instead of Notes.

What we have been trying to do rather unsuccessfully is get IBM’s Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook to play nicely together with everything, including the Hummingbird DM extensions for Outlook. We’ve tried every combination of settings and a few versions of DAMO to get things to play nicely and it really isn’t.

Initially we had some success with getting DAMO to work nicely with Outlook. It takes us a lot of effort to get a user set up with both DAMO, Outlook and their Domino/Notes ID file. We had to go through manually for each user and set them up, however we didn’t get that far.

We next tested to see if the DM extensions were going to play nicely with everything. We found that the DM extensions worked well but DAMO ended up not working at all. We tried this in both our Citrix test environment and then within a Windows XP machine. Simply put, it didn’t want to fly.

So we went for the next best option, which was setting up Scalix profiles. We had the same MAPI profile set up for each user and configuration but it wasn’t as bad as the process we had to go through with DAMO (that is one nasty piece of work). We were running with a trial of Scalix and put it into our training environment to get an idea of the way it would behave when you threw some real load at it. Then we discovered that we couldn’t only have a limited number of premium clients and ended up swapping users around in training to try and get a realistic picture of things. We also did some numbers on Scalix versus Exchange, because that is what our last options were looking like and it started look like in the long term Scalix was going to cost more over Exchange. Plus we found this really nice looking tool that will make integrating the two possible which could provide us even more features over the Scalix solution (this might solve integrated calendars that Scalix wasn’t going to give us, but DAMO would).

So now, after a few weeks of trying DAMO and Scalix we’ve gone for an Exchange solution that might be able to get us out of the water and those who don’t want to learn anything new (or understand for that matter) with Outlook…and mostly everyone is happy.