Exchange Alternatives Round-up

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

[SailorFrag]

ExchangeIt [nitix.com] is another option.

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

[DogDude]

How can any of these be considered a viablealternative if "None of the products provides full Outlook-to-Exchange feature fidelity in Outlook"?

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do any of these substitute email servers support MS's proprietary MAPI protocol as a fully-implemented workalike? Of course not! Well then, they will never substitute for a real MS Exchange server. MS has seen to that, in that using Outlook as a POP/IMAP client is only a half-assed solution. You might as well just save your money and deploy Thunderbird for free and run it against a free Linux IMAP/POP open source server.

Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell the sales dept that some people (like me) are turned off by the lack of pricing information. "Contact us for pricing" is really anoying, as I can't quickly and easilt compare price/features. It also usually indicates (IME) something that is way over priced. I usually won't even bother contacting them, as there are too may other places willing to tell me what it costs.

Exchange is rarely the right solution

[realmolo]

I do a lot of networking/computer repair for a lot of businesses, and many of them use Exchange. But you know what they use it FOR? E-mail. Nothing else. Yeah, they at one time may have used the calendar/scheduling features, but they eventually realized that secretaries could do a better job doing the "old" way.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

A 486 running a mail server and fully integrated web-based calendaring? Get real. Th functionality of a non-integrated calendaring system is a far comparison to the ease of use of Exchange.

Maybe it's not the best solution for your 30 person company but for larger companies it's cheap and scales well.

Re:So...

[Red Flayer]

From MS website:

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

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Our organization has been running for several years with a web-based calendar and contact list system. One thing we have going for us is that nobody in upper management has ever worked with Outlook, and the few that have not been able to name a capability in Outlook that doesn't work with our system. (They complain because they have to do it in a browser instead of having it all come up through the Email client.)

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?

[Mr. Underbridge]

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would use Outlook unless their company runs Exchange, it's a completely useless atrocity in my opinion.

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

[Kunta Kinte]

How can any of these be considered a viablealternative if "None of the products provides full Outlook-to-Exchange feature fidelity in Outlook"?

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

[Spazmania]

I ran an earlier version Communigate Pro at a previous job. Simply put, it is the only closed-source software package I actively recommend. Its just that good.

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...

[AKAImBatman]

Gotcha. So the answer is, "[Companies] use it because it's Microsoft(TM)." :-)

Re:None of them are solutions

[bogie]

I'm sorry but that's just a retarded thing to say. Or more precisely that's an unrealistic look at how people compare products. You see that's not the way the world works. You see what your firm ACTUALLY needs and then buy based on that. You don't say well since it doesn't have EVERY SINGLE feature the other product has its not viable. You say, well we need X features and can spend X amount. If a competing product has the features you use that it IS a viable alternative.

Re:IBM fails once again

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't looked on how the kernel comes along...
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?

[ckaminski]

Every office I've been in could replace Word, Excel and Access with any other 3rd party application, Lotus, Corel, Borland, etc.

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?

[sskang]

Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Kolab Server [kolab.org], considering it's now stable and usable software based on well-proven components. The server is free software, and there's the third party Toltec connector [toltec.co.za] for Outlook users. This project really doesn't get enough attention...

Re:Active Directory integration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Supports a very small footprint. Not terribly useful for other than a Very small business.

Re:How about Kolab?

[Anonymous Coward]

From all I've seen Kolab works very well (AFAIK all the KDE developers have an account on a server running Kolab)

Re:If you want to get off the MS crack

[Master of Transhuman]

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

[zaphod123]

A couple of comments... My previous job was at an ISP. Your configuration is big iron compared to the boxes we were running sendmail on. Two sun servers with dual 300 procs servicing 10000 users. This was
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

[Master of Transhuman]

"Exchange is very easy to use, but if you don't know how it works you can dig yourself pretty deep."

"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

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at an ISP and my experience exactly mirrors this person's. When a new virus hits, all customer exchange servers go down (or become unresponsive).

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

[Malc]

Yes, Exchange+Outlook provide an awful lot of functionality. If you're only using part of it, then it's not so worthwhile. As our company has both grown and become more geographically diverse, we've started using more and more of the features provided. The thing is indispensible. The only other equivalent that I've experienced on this scale is Lotus Notes, which I found abysmal in comparison (a few years back).

Re:Don't worry about this jackass

[nmb3000]

"It's very stable."

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

[cbreaker]

Well, I don't know what's going on at that place you worked at, but my previous contract had me and a Junior admin providing Exchange support for the company of 10,000 users. No sweat. And during the entire 12 month contract, we were down three times - on Sunday mornings for patches. Since we had cluster failovers, total down time was in the realm of two and a half minutes per down-time.

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.