So I've been working for a regional company here for about a month. Prior to this I was an IT Specialist for 6 years with the U.S. Army, and have always been kind of a computer nerd. So today I went to clock in and had a note on my time card telling me to go see someone, and he says, "I hear you're a computer guy." Apparently they'd seen my resume and I spent about half my day resolving issues people were having when migrating to a new e-mail service. Apparently they don't really have any kind of IT dept. or help desk to speak of, and people were having problems of all sorts.

They also don't really have any specific rules or policies regarding software. Some of them were using Outlook 2003, some of them were using Outlook 2010, some of them were using Windows Live Mail, some had Windows 7, some had XP, etc. I was able to discover however that Windows Live Mail blows, and really did not like connecting to their IMAP server, so what I started doing was migrating everybody who had issues to Mozilla Thunderbird. With every installation of Thunderbird the end-users were happier than they were with their previous e-mail client and it worked flawlessly for them out of the box, and from the conversations I had with the higher-ups of the company they are considering putting me in charge of a company IT dept.

Just thought I'd share this little victory for open source software.