Now it can be told

I am finally done with the first chapter of the sad tale of my interactions with Oracle Collaboration Server. I come from a long family tradition of forthrightness, which has only been enhanced by working closely with Microsoft for a couple of years. Microsoft hired us to evaluate OCS and give them an unbiased account of how it compares with Exchange.
Dear reader, I would love to spend the next day or two– for that’s how long it would take– ranting about what a crappy, poorly-implemented, brittle, slow product OCS is. However, there are more pleasant things to talk about (like, oh, almost anything except Election 2004), and I can’t bear to revisit the horror at this point. (Of course, there is the minor concern that Oracle is apparently planning to drop the Earth into a giant barrel of toxic waste, but hey! who’s counting?)

So, without going into the boring details, I finally got OCS to do some of what I want it to. Along the way, I spent a great deal of time with Oracle support folks on three continents; I got to stay up past midnight several times, and I learned that just because product documentation says something doesn’t make it true. Actually, I knew that part already, but it was reinforced during this whole episode.
I think the thing that bothered me the most was that I pride myself on being able to figure stuff out. Granted, I’m not a database administrator (as no doubt some of my readers will be quick to point out). However, it’s doggone hard to figure out a product that a) has as many bugs and b) has as much wrong or missing documentation as this one does.
Once I’ve recovered my equilbrium a bit, maybe I’ll post more details of how I installed and tested OCS. In the meantime, I lift a glass to the folks who built VMware, since it saved my butt several times. Then I’m going to eagerly await the next call from Oracle support, which should hopefully come tomorrow.