Overthinking things

When we rolled out zimbra, we had to think of what address we were going to give for people to access it. We have a shortcut on people's desktop so they don't really ever have to type the URL unless they're away from the office.

We considered http://zimbra.domain.com but thought "Who is going to be able to remember that? They'll get all confused and start doing things like zebra or zippo or something like that". So we finally went with Webmail thinking that was nice, simple, generic and easy to remember because it's name is it's purpose.

Well since we launched, we get numerous calls from people at home who want to access the web client. And wouldn't you know it, they call up and say "Hey, I can't remember the url to access Zimbra?". Maybe it's because for better or for worse the word zimbra is well known around here lately. I think I'll alias zimbra.domain.com now :o

Let this be a lesson maybe

Of course, if you'd gone with "Zimbra" to start with, they'd have probably had trouble remembering that too. :)

But such is the life of the sysadmin...the easier you try to make it, the more complicated the user makes it.

We went simply with mail.domain.com - I've gotten several calls (out of ~75 ppl) asking why they couldn't get to www.mail.domain.com

At one point there was the thought to create that FQDN and direct them to something that would ridicule them... but we like our jobs.

Same here, I set the hostname to 'mail' which gives that standard FQDN for the domain, but people still question how to access it. It's par for the course I guess.