Exchange Alternatives Round-up 365
richi writes "eWEEK has a review of Linux-based alternatives to MS Exchange: Group Where? Almost Anywhere. Focusing on how well they integrate with Outlook, it looks at Bynari Insight 4.2, CommuniGate Pro 4.2, Gordano 11 and Scalix Server 9.2.1."
They forgot about ExchangeIt (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I used to work there (but not on that product), and I still think that company is really cool.
None of them are solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
My *real* alternative to an expensive Exchange server in house is: hosted Exchange [hp.com]. It's *much* cheaper for small businesses, and there's no need to sacrifice any functionality.
MAPI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt (Score:5, Insightful)
Exchange is rarely the right solution (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that Exchange is bad (though any program that has an entire cottage industry dedicated to backing it up can't be great), it's that it does TOO MUCH. Very few companies have any chance of getting all their employees to actually use all the features of Exchange. And, really, it might not be worth their time to train them on it in the first place. MOST businesses just need good email. All the *collaborative* features simply require too much of a change in the way people think about their job to really get used.
For the vast majority of small-to-medium-sized businesses, they'd be better served with a good Postfix/Courier-IMAP/SquirrelMail setup, with greylisting and SpamAssassin and anti-virus scanning. All of which is free. And MUCH more stable than any Exchange setup I've ever seen.
The only thing that Exchange has over everything else is that it can use domain usernames/passwords. Big fucking deal.
Re:Active Directory integration? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe it's not the best solution for your 30 person company but for larger companies it's cheap and scales well.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exchange Server, the Microsoft messaging and collaboration server, is software that runs on servers that enables you to send and receive electronic mail and other forms of interactive communication through computer networks. Designed to interoperate with a software client application such as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Server also interoperates with Outlook Express and other e-mail client applications.
From wikipedia:
Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice. Exchange is now to be simply email and calendaring.
MS prefers its clients to have to license separate software for these tasks, this allows both greater specialization and multiple revenue streams.
Re:None of them are solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
We migrated the stafflist to LDAP, so the argument about the staff list not showing up when composing emails has been vanquished as well.
I think what people need to realize is that contact and scheduling systems are an amalgam of several networking protocols. With a pretty front end. I keep forgetting the pretty front end. In any case, and fool with enough time on his hands and a DB backend could build his own.
The reverse? (Score:3, Insightful)
As such, what works for the reverse - people who don't (or can't) run Outlook in a company that runs Exchange?
Here's my situation: We run Exchange Server 5.5, *without* IMAP support. Believe me, I've begged for it, it's not happening.
I've tried Ximian/Novell's Exchange Connector, but it only works for Exchange 2000/2003. Our server is too old, and they don't plan to upgrade yet.
Anyone know of anything else that'll work? Right now I'm going in through the Java-riffic Outlook Web Access. I'd almost rather eat glass.
Re:None of them are solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
I think its funny that you do not know what features the alternatives lack, but you see those features as manatory for a viable alternative .
Microsoft takes, the communication protocol of the day and dumps it in Exchange, and writes the client side support into Outlook.
IM, VOIP, CRM, ERP, you-name-it, MS as Exchange/Outlook support for it.
The vast majority of small firms won't need those features. Many just what to send/recieve email and share calendars internally.
Communigate Pro (Score:2, Insightful)
The web mail is slick. IMAP works beautifully. The API for customer-added functionality is extensive. The system is rock solid reliable, and FAST FAST FAST.
If you have too many accounts, they support clustering on multiple servers. Here's a quote from their manual:
When your site serves more than 150,000-200,000 accounts, or when you expect really heavy IMAP/WebMail/MAPI traffic, you should consider using a Cluster configuration.
Huh. So if you have less than 150,000 accounts you can do it with just one server. I'd like to see an open source mail package that can live up to that particular boast.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:None of them are solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IBM fails once again (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at the number of people taking part of the kernel development and then decide if they stand behind the OSS Community.
You can find it in MAINTAINERS file in the kernel sources. Search for ibm and you'll see all those with registered e-mail addresses with ibm.com
Not to say that their Power+ server lines are living on Linux atm either.
Where exactly is that "ad campaign" you see?
Re:Is Outlook really the killer app? (Score:4, Insightful)
Name me one Windows based groupware app that you could replace Outlook with. Evolution doesn't count since it doesn't run on Windows, and is a BLATANT copy of Outlook.
How about Kolab? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Active Directory integration? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How about Kolab? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If you want to get off the MS crack (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently. You have to burrow through a few layers of mostly empty Web pages to get to the OpenChange site. This project does not appear to be anywhere near something functional compared to the proprietary items discussed in the article. It also seems to be focused more on extracting Exchange data than replacing its functionality.
Re:Don't worry about this jackass (Score:3, Insightful)
overkill before the need for spam filtering.
We could always tell the customers who ran exchange. Their mailserver would go down at least once per week. You can blame poor administration, etc, but it was consistent from site to site....
Re:No-nonsense e-mail for the large corporation (Score:3, Insightful)
"With the right planning and deployment, maintaining an Exchange system can be a very easy thing to do."
What's wrong with this picture?
MOD PARENT UP (Score:1, Insightful)
Also annoying is the way exchange rewrites mail headers so you can't tell which client the sender used.
And the way it replaces non-delivery-reports with actual content (550 mailbox full) with its own non-descriptive error: (Failed to deliver message.)
Re:All too big - Hula is a better way to move (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't worry about this jackass (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually it is, with a competent administrator. I've managed a medium-sized company's IT deptartment, including Exchange server for years, from 5.5 to 2000 to 2003. All in all it's worked solidly for a huge majority of the time, increasingly so with each new version.
Not what I've seen on Google.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 5,200,000 for Microsoft Exchange problem"
Wow. Talk about a good source of information about a product's stability, the number of Google query results. "Let's see how many pages show up for a vague term like 'Microsoft Exchange Problem'. I'm sure there were no pages with something like: "I switched to Microsoft Exchange because of my problems with Linux".
If that's the case then I'm glad I'm not a Linux webserver admin:
Results 1 - 30 of about 15,700,000 for linux email server problem
Security? Let's ask the Stat-O-Matic!
Results 1 - 30 of about 12,200,000 for microsoft exchange security
Results 1 - 30 of about 28,200,000 for linux email server security
Typical Microsoft product as far as I can tell.
Why? It's popular, has amazing integration, and works very well? I see.
Give me a break and get off the typical Slashdot "Microsoft all bad! Bad, bad, bad!" bandwagon.
Re:Don't worry about this jackass (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know man. Exchange works great, but I guess if you have bad admins, shitty hardware, and an IT department that's heavily mis-managed, you'll have a lot of down time. As would be the case of anything else.
As far as your claim of a normal Exchange system being as much of a mish-mash as an OSS self-built system, you're dreaming.
A/V for exchnage Just Works. Scanmail for Exchange (trend) and Symantec for Exchange are two products that are simply set it and forget it. And they provide excellent server based virus scanning with Exchange's AVAPI.
As far as Spam filtering, there's several good spam filters you can install right on an Exchange server natively. Brightmail, for instance, integrates nicely with Exchnage's SMTP service. No need for Sendmail. Or, if you're a big enough company - you might go with an appliance like Ironmail or Ironport.
As far as having an MCSE - I'd have thought you would have figured out by now that it doesn't mean much. I don't have one. Yet I manage to run Exchange and AD systems just fine.
If you can't see past the hazy glass of 'I hate Microsoft' that you're looking though, I don't know what to tell you. Microsoft has some shitty software, and some buggy software, and IE sucks. But Exchange doesn't.