Today was quite interesting. A notebook that belonged to one of the researchers suddenly refused to start Outlook whilst giving very obscure (of course!) error messages. Yes, the people I work for prefer using Micro$oft products. I wish they wouldn't.
However, the damage was done and I had to fix it. Having given the problem some minutes of thought, I tracked everything down to a certain plugin we are using: OLfolders, which should allow us (in theory) to share Outlook data for team-work purposes. At least this is what our previous sysadmin was told. The plugin was easily disabled, but surprise, surprise, the *.pst file was corrupted and I had to run scanpst.exe, which (of course!) considered most of the user's data corrupted, thus deleting it. Fortunately, we have backups. More fortunately, I had taken them manually before attempting to "repair" anything.
But thanks to <insert omnipotent entity of your choice here>, everything works again. In retrospective, it turned out that Olfolders corrupted data because the LAN connection to our server was not up at that time. I do not consider this an appropriate behaviour for commercial software, but those wo do use Windows deserve no better. Anyway, it is very odd that e-mail data is corrupted (from the user's own profile), whereas contact data (which is why OLfolders is actually used by my colleagues) remains intact. I guess this is not a bug, but a feature.
The second part of my work day was much better. I needed to install Horde for one of the researchers...and I must admit that I like it. Horde is clearly divided into modules that can be installed without much hassle - and they actually do the job they are supposed to do! At the moment, the installation contains Gollem, Kronolith, Mnemo, Nag and Turba. The platform is meant to act as a - attention, bad buzzword coming up - groupware application used by scientists that are scattered all over the world. Well, to make a long story short: It works and Horde literally saved my day from being rather dull.
In several months, the users probably want IMP support for our Horde installation as well, but our server should handle that quite easily. For now, I am off playing with my Soekris and its firewall rules.