Dear Bob ...Here is one for your book:This company has been using sendmail on Linux for over 15 years, I have been administering it for over 5. Part of my job is to keep up to date on the software applications involved with email and groupware. Using various opensource applications, I have cut down email virii reaching end users to nill and spam 99% with a false positive about once a quarter. Have I mentioned th Dear Bob …Here is one for your book:This company has been using sendmail on Linux for over 15 years, I have been administering it for over 5. Part of my job is to keep up to date on the software applications involved with email and groupware. Using various opensource applications, I have cut down email virii reaching end users to nill and spam 99% with a false positive about once a quarter. Have I mentioned that this running under RedHat9 on a pc that is a PIII 650mhz with 386Meg and a 4G harddrive? The owner/boss is extremely frugal (our file servers and PDC are running NT4 and the hardware is not much younger). The spam has been cut down to almost nill for all users except the owner/boss and one of the managers who both insisted when I was setting up the filters and traps that they wanted to see all the email. I offered to capture all the spam to a folder they could check but they said no.Last week I asked the owner/boss for @1500 to update the OS to RHEL3 and to upgrade the pc to something 2 generations old instead of 5 and so that I could setup a functional group discussion system (ie: Zimbra). The response: He is considering going to MSExchange and maybe even outsourcing the email! Why? Because he and the manager who wanted all the email are dissatisfied with the performance and want more group features. Keep in mind that part of my job is to keep up on all these things and do evaluations of the various products out there. I had absolutely no clue that the O/B had his own skunk project going, though since he doesn’t understand opensource he did not even consider any of that type solutions.So instead of spending $1500 he is willing to spend over $20G upfront and lord-only-knows how much in upkeep for msExchange, which is really just a vanity on his part.– Boggled Dear Boggled …Go figure. But if I were you I’d be exploring my options. Underneath his apparent distrust or ignorance of open source is another possible message: He doesn’t want to be dependent on your expertise.Look at the business from his perspective. If you decide to leave he has to find someone else who can assemble a dirt-cheap open-source environment out of obsolete parts. If he migrates to Exchange, he has to find an experienced Exchange administrator. I’d take one other lesson away from this: Somehow, you got seriously out of sync with the owner/boss. According to the leadership book, that’s his failing. But according to the career management book, it’s yours.It’s time to figure out how it happened, and whether you can repair the damage. Assuming the two of you have a basically productive working relationship, I’d advise you to sit down with him, apologize for having missed his interest in investing more heavily in IT, and offer to be part of the solution. If the conversation goes in the right direction and you think some of the more advanced open-source groupware solutions might be a good fit, give him the option of a demo of some of the more interesting alternatives.Is he making the right choice for the business? Beats me. “Right” depends on the values you apply to a variety of intangibles. Or else it is defined as, “What the owner/boss wants to do.”– Bob Technology Industry