Yeah… I get this one a lot from folks in our training classes.
Actually, if you had an old copy of Unity 1.x you’d see all kinds of stuff along these lines. You used to be able to delete Exchange and NT accounts via our SA, change your PW policy and edit a number of Exchange properties among other things. We had to back pretty far off that, however, as we moved ahead.
One of the things we had to take into consideration was our target audience… going after existing Exchange and Lotus installations. One of the things you don’t want to do is introduce a security hole or generally stress out the IS department of a company you’re pitching a new sale to. It’s less an issue of popping up confirmation dialogs and the like, it was an issue of control we had to be sensitive to.
The idea behind the Unity administration strategy was to allow non Exchange/Lotus type folks to add, remove and edit existing Unity subscribers without presenting an issue for the IS type folks where inexperienced Unity administrators might be “damaging” their Exchange/Lotus/NT data. Even with the COS security in place to provide levels of administration, we still got a lot of (rather strong) feedback early on indicating that was a pretty big issue for sites, particularly bigger shops that stated flat out that if we had a web based interface that might introduce an hole in their system, they simply wouldn’t deploy. Not good. We decided to error on the side of caution.
Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg
