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i love linux as much as everyone else but in reality there isn't a product yet out side of exchange that gives the amount of seemless intgration that exchange gives.

So what's wrong with the following products?
http://www.egroupware.org/
http://www.group-office.com/
http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/
http://www.scalix.com/
http://www.kolab.org/
http://www.opengroupware.org/
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.openconnector.org/
Non-free alternatives:
http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/
http://bynari.net/index.php?id=7
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/
http://www.officecalendar.com/
http://www.samsungcontact.com/
http://www.zarafa.com/
http://www.postpath.com/

I look forward to reading your reply.

PostPath is the only thing close to Exchange right now that runs in Linux: http://www.postpath.com/

"Moving off Exchange was a little more choppy but we got it done. There was one Gmail gotcha that delayed our roll out for a week but we got past that. Another surprise was after people uploaded their old messages to Gmail was how fast they dumped Outlook. We had planned on supporting Outlook but most everyone switched over to the Gmail interface on their own, a few had already been using Gmail anyway."

Too bad you guys hadn't found out about the PostPath Email Server. According to their site, it's a drop-in replacement for Exchange, integrates with AD and has native support for Outlook. Note: Cisco has recently signed an agreement to acquire PostPath.

Another viable alternative would Zimbra. You can try a demo of their standard or AJAX-based web client without the need to register. While not a drop-in replacement for Exchange, it seems like an interesting solution if you want to keep email servers in-house and get away from Outlook.

Like other posters mentioned, I don't agree with moving your email servers to a third-party; at least in terms of security policies. If you wanted to move the servers off-site for whatever reason, server colocation would be a safer option; IMHO of course. To each their own.

Oblig. Disclaimer: I'm not associated in any way with either PostPath or Zimbra.

Postpath, check it out. Not open source, but utilizes open source software and runs on Linucks.

http://www.postpath.com/

Some comments on running Zimbra.

The Zimbra server seems to work well and is very nice to setup and admin. Much nicer then Exchange if you know linux at least. The mail admin, is extremely easy and mostly done via a web interface, although a few things require some command line LDAP settings. Not sure how the server scales to large numbers of users yet as I have not used it with a large installed base.

It works very well if you are using it with Outlook and the Outlook connector (only available with the commercial version of Zimbra). It is almost exactly as if you are connected to an Exchange server except with a few features missing. The functionality of the web based interface is very good, but the perfomance can be a bit lacking at times. This will apparently be improved when the next generation of browsers add in better Web2.0 support. zdesktop also seems to help the performance of the web interface, but it really is very alpha right now and crashes.

They are adding in quite good support for Mac via Mac Mail, iSync and iCalendar, although some of this is still new and being worked on.

The mail functionality works very well on any linux client via IMAP, but for Linux Calendar use you pretty much have to use the web client. At least i know of no way to integrate it with any linux calendar client.

The mobile support is excellent if you are using a windows mobile device. Seemlessly acts just like Exchange. This also only works with the commercial version of zimbra.

The mobile support for a blackberry devices is done via tacking on extra software to the blackberry and quite frankly it integrates in a very unacceptable manner. They claim to be working on this. This one is a bit of a show stopper for some enterprise class customers. I suspect this is more RIMs fault then Zimbra's, they would love to fix this, I gather from talking to them.

Very good and works now for many environments. Shows promise for the future in the areas it is lacking.

Another one to look at is http://postpath.com/

Shame your prediction is already wrong as PostPath is already a drop in on the wire binary compatible Exchange server replacement.

• Scalix
• PostPath

zimbra

and/or

postpath

are worth looking at.