As this week's twin terror--Fizzer and Palyh--crippled computer networks and overflowed mailboxes, IT managers were once again reminded of the age-old dilemma: can life go on without Microsoft Outlook? "Absolutely," says one ZDNet Australia reader.
When he started as IT manager at his company, the firm was undergoing massive computer virus problems. Less than 50 PCs were running on Windows and the servers were either Linux or Unix based.
"The very first thing we did was remove Outlook and Outlook Express from all the Windows workstations," he told ZDNet Australia.
"I am frankly amazed that so many companies continue to use these products, even though experience has shown us over and over again that a large number of Windows viruses are written to use the Outlook and Outlook Express address book to propagate their payload," he added.
He said his company took a single day to install Eudora Lite on all workstations.
Is migrating from Outlook the answer to a non-infected computing environment? Judging by the fact that most malicious software rides on Outlook or Outlook Express, the answer should be simple. However, one antivirus firm says the issue isn't so straightforward.
"Overhauling your e-mail system is not a panacea," said Denis Zenkin of Russia-based Kaspersky Labs. "For instance, Palyh used a direct connection to SMTP servers, bypassing e-mail clients."
Have you ever considered ditching Outlook/Outlook Express? Share your thoughts and experiences by writing to edit@zdnet.com.au.
Why? We have over 1700 installations of Outlook. It does what we want, our users are trained in how to use it and our support staff can support it. To replace it all of these other things will need to be addressed as well not just replacing the software. We also have very few virus attacks. I would like to say it is because of well trained users but it isn't. They are their own, and our, worst enemy. We stop the virus attacks by installing anti virus software on our PC's and our mail server. Users cannot change the settings on the software on the PC's and it automatically updates itself without users having to do anything. We see the virus reports in the Anti Virus manager and we have very few problems.
The moral of the story... Any software can be attacked, not just Outlook, just keep your Anti Virus software up to date. After all isn't that part of I.T.'s job?