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."

Active Directory integration?

[charnov]

Without full AD integration it's still kind of pointless. Not to mention the hundreds (thousands?) of programs that need Exchange. The closest I have worked with administratively is Domino and that was an admins nightmare. I run Exchange 2000 servers (again) and I tell ya, other than the dollar cost, these things are great.

So...

[utopianfiat]

What exactly does MS Exchange *do*? I have that issue with a lot of Microsoft products. "So, what exactly does Dr. Watson *do*?" "So, what exactly does MS Publisher *do*?" "So, what exactly does MS Access *do*?" (And I programmed for it!)

Is Outlook really the killer app?

[Noaccess0]

I'm still surprised that no-one has come out with a more popular groupware client than Outlook. This is an area that is starving for new innovation. The features built into exchange really haven't changed much in the last ten years - why can't someone make something better?

IBM fails once again

[dsginter]

You'd think that with IBM being the biggest OSS cheerleader that they'd port Lotus Notes. One might think that their support is just a big ad campaign.

Re:Active Directory integration?

[Noaccess0]

That depends on your environment. There are still some companies who run 5.5 (I work at one) because the AD structure is so large and encumbered that duct taping a messaging environment to it would be really bad. Granted some of the new features of E2K3 SP1 are pretty nice (cross admin group movement, etc), it's still an ugly migration path for legacy clients. Let's face it, if your sites and subnets are not designed along MS whitepaper specs, you are going to have issues with routing in E2kX.

Re:Active Directory integration?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Without full AD integration it's still kind of pointless.

It's called LDAP. And we were using it for years before Active Directory...

Oh wait, Active Directory uses LDAP too.

Replaces the meeting room

[charnov]

If you don't have a decent amount of corporate experience, a lot of what Exchange is for may seem alien or useless, but I would have to say along with our document management system it is the core of IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company). Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc.

What makes it so special is that it is tightly integrated with MS Office (stuff like round robin document collaboration needs Exchange to work well...it's nifty) and Active Directory integration for management, contacts, policies, etc.

There are a lot of things to get on Microsoft about, but Exchange (at least from version 2000 on) is mostly a thing of beauty. I wish my users only needed straight email, but they need to be able to things like schedule a meeting on the fly from their cell which notifys all the attending, their secretaries, etc. wo can all weigh in and do conflict resolution and get a meeting time set all while the principle in the field is talking to a client in seconds. I haven't mentioned how it all plugs into our document management system and the archiving necessary for NASD, SEC, and IRS compliance that I haven't seen from any other vendor.

If all you need is mail, you'd be insane to go the Exchange route, but if you are already building a Windows infrastructure, you'd be just as insane NOT to have Exchange.

Re:Active Directory integration?

[fodder69]

Huh? What exactly do you mean by "Full" integration?

Besides the fact that the article states that " All the products support Active Directory", what part of AD do you need to support email?

AD can be accessed using LDAP so all the information is there, and CommuniGate for one, can be externally scripted to do anything you want. I set that sucker up to externally route emails to different office servers based on an AD attribute.

And yes, Exchange could do the same thing only a lot more expensively and if anything goes wrong, have fun troubleshooting.

No mention of Ipswitch?

[Atticka]

Their Collaboration Suit offers Calandering with Outlook, not sure how well it works though.

check this out:
http://www.ipswitch.com/products/collaboration/ind ex.asp [ipswitch.com]

From their site
Save time with shared calendars and contacts

For many teams, working together productively depends on the ability to easily schedule meetings and share calendars, contacts, and other information. ICS includes powerful collaboration tools that allow Microsoft Outlook users to share their own up-to-date contact lists, calendars, task lists and Outlook notes securely within your organization. You can - with permission - view and edit your colleagues' calendars and contact lists.

Anyone have experiance with Ipswitch?
(I dont work for Ipswitch)

Re:Active Directory integration?

[Shakrai]

A 486 running a mail server and fully integrated web-based calendaring?

Did I say fully integrated? I don't recall saying that.

My only point (besides venting steam caused by having to administrator Exchange) was that a simple little web-based program could replace all of the calendaring functionality of Exchange. If you got a little bit more fancy you could build it on an SQL backend (mySQL anyone?) and share the appointments/schedules within the entire company.

How does any company besides Microsoft turn a simple a e-mail server and scheduling software into several hundred megabytes of bloat that requires a dedicated machine for a lousy 30 user environment?

How about alternatives to Outlook?

[helicologic]

I'd be more interested in a discussion of alternatives to Outlook. At my company I have no control over the use of the Exchange server, but I can use whatever I want on my desktop. I use Evolution, but frankly it's pretty sucky and gets worse with each release. Anybody out there in my boat, stuck trying to talk to the corporate Exchange server from a Linux desktop? What do you use?

Re:Replaces the meeting room

[Red Flayer]

"...along with our document management system it is the core of IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company). Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc."

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."

I hope you're forecasting the increase in licensing costs for all the functionality you are currently experiencing under Exchange Server.

Re:Active Directory integration?

[b0bby]

Hmmm, for a 30 user network you could use SBS, which can ONLY have the Exchange server running as the AD master, so you shouldn't need different boxes. A few years back I went that route, we rely on shared calendars in Outlook heavily and when we were forced to move from MS Mail & POP I looked at all the options. At that time, SBS really was the only decent option, much as I wanted to use something Linux based. It's worked out well, though the 16gb limit is a pain. If you've only got 30 or so users you should check into it, though these days there are more/better options.

Re:How about alternatives to Outlook?

[HrothgarReborn]

Switch to a Mac and use Microsoft Entourage. Its a great client. Like Evolution it ties through OWA because even Microsoft cannot figure out how to make anything work with that damn MAPI protocol. But unlike Evolution is has great features and is far better than Outlook. Only drawback is a bit of delay in message delivery (just like Evolution) as opposed to the instant alert Outlook gives through MAPI. If you are a laptop user like I was then it does so much better than Outlook which seems to crash everytime it leaves the network, can never pull up messages and never figure out when you are plugged back in. Entourage keeps you mail local and sincs with Exchange like an email client should, so it handles all this gracefully. You can get it as part of Office 2004.

Funny how the best software MS writes is for Mac :)

Re:Replaces the meeting room

[George Beech]

If you don't have a decent amount of corporate experience, a lot of what Exchange is for may seem alien or useless
That's stupid just because you don't experience in a big enviroment doesn't mean you don't understand what the product does. But Exchange is WAAAAY overpriced for what it does.
[...]IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company)
Why do you feel the need to say something like this either come out and say the company or just say "a big company" you just make yourself sound like an arrogent ass when you agrandize the company like that without saying what the company is. Not there is any way anyone can verify the claim either... sorry off track just a pet peeve of mine.
Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc.
And your point is? any good Groupware program does any and all of these things. and some do it better and have been doing it longer i.e. GroupWise. Basically what you are saying here is that it is an MTA with some calendaring features built in. And how does Exchange check documents? are you sure you're not talking about sharepoint or Office?
I wish my users only needed straight email, but they need to be able to things like schedule a meeting on the fly from their cell which notifys all the attending, their secretaries, etc. wo can all weigh in and do conflict resolution and get a meeting time set all while the principle in the field is talking to a client in seconds. I bet you can get any of the major ... err commercial groupware products to do this.
I haven't mentioned how it all plugs into our document management system and the archiving necessary for NASD, SEC, and IRS compliance that I haven't seen from any other vendor. The point here is that you need Seperate Document management and Archiving solutions ... why not go with a product that has the proven ability to work well. But if your blinded by the MS only system well there is no sense in even aurguing about it.
[...]but if you are already building a Windows infrastructure
your already insane

Oracle Collaboration Suite

[ataX]

I don't know why always when there is a discussion about "enterprise messaging systems" OCS is never mentioned. OCS is a US$60/usr messaging system that has Email, Calendar, a WebDAV/NFS/SMB/FTP File Server (Oracle Files), Webconference, UltraSearch (Lets you search inside documents in your Oracle Files installation, in your email, in the intranet or internet etc), it also has Wireless access (via Voice/PDA/Phone/etc), and in the new version it will have Instant messaging, all inside an Oracle Database. and you don't have to pay for the database, you just pay per user and all the Oracle stack is included.

Groupware never got anybody laid...

[defile]

Groupware Bad [jwz.org]
And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

Re:All too big - Hula is a better way to move

[bad_outlook]

Oh, I completely agree, on my home web/mail server I've used Horde/IMP, squirrelmail, openExchange, and a host of other PHP/IMAP/MYSQL based email solutions; Hula is none of these. It includes it's own web server, mail server, and can even do it's own virus and spam scanning via Spamassasin and Clamav - but all of the Hula backend is written in C (not PHP) and uses it's own database backend, so it's tons faster than any of the PHP based solutions and scales accordingly. In the works are LDAP too, so again, this is a different way of handling an old problem.

I really like Exchange4Linux

[tzanger]

Exchange4Linux is an open-protocol, open-source Exchange Server replacement. It's written in Python, and the Outlook connector, while also written in Python, is not for free, but reasonably priced (small quantity price is $50 IIRC). Everything, and I mean everything is stored in a PostgreSQL database. There is something very, very cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries on your todos, calendars, contacts and even emails. It brings a level of data integration together that sometimes makes me want to weep. Perfect example: Our customer service department has a rotating "on-call" person. They have a calendar in which they organize who's turn it is. I query the DB once a day to let my Asterisk server know who to redirect the call to. Totally seamless, and that's just a small small example.

Neuberger-Hughes [n-h.com], the company responsible for Exchange4Linux also does the whole turnkey solution for those who want someone to yell at but still want the peace of mind that having your data in open software can only provide.

I don't work for them, I am just a happy user of their software.

Re:IBM fails once again

[Pxtl]

Have you looked at the posts? Everyone just says "email, a really, really good calendar, and a bunch of acronyms that I wont care to explain".

You did even less. Wikipedia does less. It sounds like Active Directory is good for providing a company phonebook, but that doesn't sound like that big a deal.

So can someone actually explain - besides calendar, address book, and email - what does it do? Yes, I realise that it allows some nice conflict-resolution and organisation on those fronts, but still... what the hell are these other "features" that people ambiguously describe with buzzwords and acronyms - don't say "collaboration", "groupware", or "XPQF" or "messaging". What do you _use_ it for?

Re:Active Directory integration?

[not-real-sure]

I agree I run 3 Exchange 2003 servers and they get on average 200+ days of uptime. The last reboot I had was due to a power loss. These things run like a champ if they are setup on proper hardware.

what about kolab?

[RelliK]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. It has outlook integration and it's open source, so there is no vendor lock-in. http://kolab.org/ [kolab.org]

Re:GroupWise?

[Dr.Zong]

I'll agree with the parent.

I just migrated my servers from 5.5EP to 6.5, and it is by far the best solution IMHO. Now, we are a Novell Shop mind you.

We've seen every iteration since the WordPerfect Messaging Server 4.x days. I am debating going to 7.x as the latest version is so solid from the server end and client end (you have to make sure you admin your servers right and not take shortcuts or cheap out, then it's solid). It's decreased my support time dramatically - the users love it, expecially compared to 5.x - the jump we just did was like foing from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000, oh much more fun now. ;)

Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt

[Trigun]

I do not want a hardware appliance. I want a piece of software that I can implement on the platform of my choice. Why should I have to buy their hardware, run their version of linux, just to use their software? Sorry, but that's not for me. I spend a great deal of time making certain that everything works on my network, I standardize my operating systems, audit them constantly, and I'm not going to go through and put another flavour of linux on my machines and have to create a new policy just to use their server software that I don't know, on their hardware that I don't know, rather than my audited software that I have integrated into my network, on hardware that I spec and purchase?

If that makes me a zealot, then I guess that I'm a zealot. But I'm a zealot that can sleep at night because his network works.

Re:Kerio Mailserver 6.1

[Carcass666]

We are running Kerio 6.0 as an Exchange replacement (we were on Exchange 5.5). Most of our users are on Microsoft Outlook 2K or 2K3. Our main reason for selecting Kerio was its marketting as an Exchange replacement. Here are some of our experiences:

• As a POP3/SMTP server, it works adequately.
• Antiviral capability works adequately
• Anti-spam (based on SpamBayes) is mediocre - it allows only level of Spam filtering (i.e. no "suspected spam" vs. "spam")
• Their "Outlook Connector" - which allows Outlook to manage email from the server without downloading it to the client, is junk. Among other things, it's extremely slow, you can't search body text, and in 6.1 people have been getting crashes with it.
• In 6.1, you can only do backups 3 times per week (although there is apparently a kludge around this)
• Importing our email from Exchange 5.5 was painful - their import utility crashed constantly and it took days to migrate < 100 mailboxes
• After misleading customers about the capabilities of its Outlook Connector, and subsequent flames on their message boards, Kerio has instituted a "no comment" policy about development - they will make no commitments to when bugs will get fixed or promised functionality will be implemented
• Kerio is marketting an offline caching capability for its product. However, only contacts and calendar information are cached, email does not get cached!

In short, my bosses are forcing us back to "how things were". We are going to bite the bullet and go back to Exchange. I'm bummed, because there is a lot to like about Kerio (the web interface, integrated antivirus and spam and management are all nice, and it's a lot easier to manage than Exchange) - but the Outlook Connector's poor functionality make it an inadequate replacement for Exchange

Unlike my predecessor, take a look at the Kerio forums [kerio.com] before you buy this product.

Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt

[glesga_kiss]

Tell the sales dept that some people (like me) are turned off by the lack of pricing information.

Yup, I evaluate expensive software suites now and then, and if you have a "contact us" on the pricing page, it's a negative mark. If I am looking at e.g. 20 different packages, I'll only trial 3 maybe 4 of them. If you have too many negative marks, then you get binned early.

Go ask your HR department how they deal with CV's and job openings. Same process; you have to get the list to a managable size.

What's not intuitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or at least, what in the above collection of apps is less intuitive than the Windows counterparts? I find it hard to believe that anyone who uses MS Office, Outlook, and Internet Explorer would have much trouble with OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Mozilla FireFox.

Replacing Exchange isn't the real problem

[Jim Conley]

I just finished an article for Redmond magazine on this subject that was published in July - considering it came out very pro OSS groupware, I was fairly surprised it made print. Admitted, it did get listed as 'opinion'... I'm also a longtime MAPI programmer and have a pretty solid understanding of how Outlook and Exchange work and don't work. Being polite, ever since MS added 'security features' in Outlook that gorked thousands of custom groupware solutions (some with very large corporations)I've been looking for anything OSS that can replicate the functionality of Outlook and Exchange. Guess what - it still doesn't exist and probably never will. The problem isn't finding an Exchange replacement - it's finding a client that can speak to your Exchange replacement. A client, not a web interface, but a full-featured PIM client. I know, web interfaces are a lot more robust than they used to be but it's still not the same as a native app. 95% of the work in an Outlook/Exchange environment is being done client side. Google MAPI and TNEF and you should get a sense of situation. You'll find many OSS groupware vendors give the server away for next to nothing but charge for the Outlook connector because a) it takes a hell of a lot of work to spoof Exchange to a level that Outlook will believe and b) it's a great revenue source. One of the biggest problems is there are now at least a dozen OSS Exchange replacements of widely varying quality. IMHO, there is still not a single product that will adequately replace a power-user combo of Outlook and Exchange, yet. Unfortunately, by the time OSS groupware gets it together, Exchange as we know it probably won't really exist anymore. The next version is sounding very modular and will be moving away from the traditional monolithic structure. OSS Exchange replacements are, in general, slavish half-ass replicas of Exchange rather than innovative products because that's what the market wants. The problem with hanging off the tiger's tail is that when the bastard changes direction you really get sent flying. As some other posters have mentioned, Hula is very exciting and not just because of jwz's essay 'Groupware Bad' (which really belongs next to esr's 'the cathedral and the bazaar' in some future anthology). Nat Friedman (of evolution fame and now working for Novell) is one of the people behind Hula and I suspect Evolution may be back burner while effort goes into improving the Hula web interface. Final speculation - Novell has an OSS client and an OSS groupware server. They also have Groupwise, perennial #3 in the groupware wars which runs quite comfy on Linux and Windows and has the same mail server under the hood as Hula. Wouldn't it be interesting if Groupwise made the transition to open source as well?

Re:If you want to get off the MS crack

[soundvessel]

Relativity strikes again. Microsoft, at least, attempts to try some new things, even if they stole them. New ways of manipulating your documents, preparing them. OpenOffice seems to just try to play catch up and implement the necessary barebones. Which is great for tech people (and good for some less-than-tech people who just need to get some stuff done).

Re:If only Evolution has a Windows port...

[Anonymous Coward]

The server side (equiv of exchange server) has been largely done. Several are, in fact, better than exchange server in many or even most situations.

The client side (equiv of outlook) has been done for 1) web clients and 2) *nix.

Missing: client for windows, client for mac. Which is only, like, 90% of the client population (and 2/3 of my client population)

Granted, the web client is good for 90% of the client situations.

Re:GroupWise?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

And with Groupwise, your boss can still keep his Blackberry working just like it did with Exchange!

Re:Is Outlook really the killer app?

[4of12]

Evolution doesn't count since it doesn't run on Windows, and is a BLATANT copy of Outlook.

• Evidently, the developers have built Evolution for Windows [zdnet.com.au], though they warn off would be beta-testers.
• To entice Outlook users to make a switch to Evolution, wouldn't BLATANCY in resembling Outlook be a Good Thing? I despise MS business practices as much as anyone, but much of Outlook's design is good, just as piling together admittedly existing technologies (SQL, SMTP, etc) to create Exchange made a product that is actually useful.

P.S. My SO can figure out how to use Oo.o better than I can on our home Linux box because her 8 years of experience with MS Word trumps my two decades of UNIX command line wizardry.

Re:GroupWise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let me tell you that, from an Administrators perspective, your IT department probably doesn't have it set up very well because almost nobody here has those problems consistently.

The real downside is the way it's managed. Consoleone is a terrible memory hog. It was fine when managed with Netware Administrator, and would probably be better managed with iManager.

Re:GroupWise?

[G Money]

We've been using Groupwise for a long time now and it's been a solid platform for us. Version 7 also natively supports pretty much all the functionality of the native Windows client with Evolution [novell.com] as well which is a big draw for us since we don't use Windows for our desktops. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet but I've been waiting for native calendar access for some time from Evolution to Groupwise.

HAH

[GoClick]

Apparently you've never tried a large scale migration of non-technical staff to OopenOffice.org. Not only are they afraid of change and they can't put two and two together to get four and figure out if one part of a program works one way the rest should to. But it lacks TONs of features that Office has, good ones too not stupid ones and working with outside data in OopenOffice.org is crap too, no where as easy as Office 2003

Even with a roseta stone people can't figure out how to get by, too many advanced things in OopenOffice.org take too many steps the net betas are better but still not even close to Microsoft Office.

And I still hate Microsoft...

Oooo I'm praising Office I must be a troll!