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What does the current health of Mandriva mean for Scalix? Scalix is possibly the best alternative to Microsoft Echange right now, for organizations who have grown to expect Exchange groupware functionality but want to get away from Microsoft's convoluted, nickle-and dime licensing schemes.

E.G. does Zarafa work as an exchange clone on the server for Snow Leopard clients? Or Scalix?

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.

Have you heard about Scalix? http://www.scalix.com/

They better start hiring support personnel, because there will likely be profits to be had with service contracts. Maybe even a Redhat buyout/partnership

Doubt it. They're entering a crowded marketplace:

SuSE Linux OpenExchange
Open-xchange
Scalix (formerly known as HP OpenMail)

All of these implementations share one problem, which I believe this server also shares: they require an MAPI Connector module to be present in order to use them with Outlook, and that module is not free software. In fact, it is typically rather expensive.

That's a nice long explanatory answer... for the first question! ;). Do you have an answer for the 2nd?

I might even add... do you have suggestions?

I have already checked out a few of 'em (not necessarily OSS):

• Zimbra
• Scalix
• eGroupware
• PHP Groupware
• Communigate Pro
• Citadel
• Kolab
• Open Groupware
• Open xChange

...of which many of them have a great potential, but I always end up having some trouble somewhere or find 'em not user-friendly/admin-friendly enough.

What about Scalix? It has a very good web client, but also works with Evolution if needed. It has good calendar support and various other goodies. We're thinking of switching from Domino/Notes to save costs.

Scalix http://www.scalix.com/

are the two closest, but honestly, neither is a perfect replacement.

Companies can go out and install Scalix to replace Exchange. However, if they want all the cool features such as an Outlook connector they need to pay beyond 25 users (afaik, the connector is closed source). I've been considering moving to Scalix for our company but, right now, the pain of migration doesn't seem worth it. We have less than 25 actual human users, but their Exchange migration only works for the premium users (that's the 25 max) and we have many hundreds of accounts, groups, etc. One of these days I'll take a harder look but at the moment if it ain't broke, don't fix it. :)

I believe Scalix was designed to do just that.

Brian

http://www.scalix.com/ does the same thing as outlook/exchange,at least as far as I can tell without rolling it out on a network.

Um, there are hundreds of options available besides Exchange.

But, if you want to have something that actually embodies the few good features of Exchange without having to accept the fundamentally bad design and poor scalability, you should probably look at scalix.

Products like Zimbra and Scalix are mostly open source, but their MAPI/Outlook components aren't. OSER was a grass-roots project aimed at developing open source MAPI-support, but has recently been put on hold by the developers.

It might be fair to say that if you have clients using Outlook you shouldn't complain about coughing up cash to have them connect to your exchange-replacement, but after all these years there (to my knowledge) isn't a fully-compatible server-side open source Exchange replacement.

Mozilla and Google? Yeah right. Tell that to a manager with 500 Outlook-using drones.

http://www.scalix.com/

Is on the right track, not free, but not everything can be.

And it is a good start in the direction of a replacement for Exchange.

It would be great if it was free like Apache, but for now it beats the MS cash cow route.

Scalix...

http://www.scalix.com/

1. Zenoss
2. Qumranet
3. rPath
4. Simula Lab
5. MontaVista Software
6. SugarCRM
7. OpenAir
8. Themis Computer
9. Scalix
10. Incumbents and Dealmakers (non-entry)

Albanach wrote:
What really astonishes me is that open source has made such great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent replacement for Outlook & Exchange.

Um...

1. Outlook -> EVOLUTION. I use Evolution all day, every day at work to read email and calendars from our Exchange server.
2. Exchange -> SCALIX and ZIMBRA are the two front runners. We're about to evaluate Zimbra to replace our Exchange server (150 employees). Other possible candidates include: Bynari Insight Server, KerioMailServer, @Mail, and the venerable OpenXchange.

Those seem fairly apparent to me.

Check out Scalix: http://www.scalix.com/

Exchange Replacement

What really astonishes me is that open source has made such great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent replacement for Outlook & Exchange.

Linky Linky
http://www.scalix.com/

You mean the fact Novell is a partner with the Hula-alternative Scalix?

People have already mentioned Notes, so I wont bother with any more on that one.

I have to admit that exchange is probably one of the best email servers out there, it is hard to believe that this is a microsoft product. That said it is full of the usual short sighted design limits that are finally going away. The biggest problem is its complexity. I know that it will never be the easiest product to configure, but there are so many options that can be set in multiple locations that it is not clear which one has precidence and without checking all of the locations you cannot be sure you have all of the settings correct. Once configured and running, exchange is pretty robust and predictable.

As for alternatives, Scalix (http://www.scalix.com/) is very good. Then it should be it has HP OpenMail as a background. The scalix web interface is excellent and whilst it is not the easiest product to configure for smaller environments it is not a big problem and it has great performance and reliability. I am sure that Scalix will continue to grow as a serious contender to Exchange. Its a shame that Samsung never made the same go of it as Scalix are doing as the samsung name would probably have helped open doors.

• Scalix
• PostPath

We had a similar issue. We are a small organization, 15 workstations plus a few Mac and Linux machines. There is one Windows server, but its hardly used for anything. We use Scalix as an exchange replacement, and it works really well for us (especially since we can use the community edition because of the number of users). I would suggest you atleast give it a look, it has calendaring, shared folders, free busy, delegation, etc -- plus, its based on many open source tools that you might be familiar with (sendmail) and integrates with many others (spamassasin, clamav). I was skeptical at first about it, but after giving it a test run, it really surprised me. It isn't without its bugs, but they have a great community and feedback process. FWIW :)

Spoken like someone that has no idea of how the corporate world works. Obviously you've never spent time pushing and fighting for open source solutions to be added to your environment only to be shut out because the END USERS that you SUPPORT demanded a functional application based groupware solution. Outlook & Exchange fit that bill. Opengroupware is a nice try, but it's still mostly web based crap, which the users don't want. Your comment is fucking ridiculous. Calendaring *IS* where it's at. Why the hell do you think people actually migrate to Exchange and Outlook? For the superior IMAP features? NO! It's the goddamn CALENDAR. Outlook Calendar type functionality is a *HUGE* user request. Evolution, Sunbird, opengroupware - they all lack the features that users actually want. Scalix comes pretty damn close, but once you look at the pricing, the pointy haired turkeys start saying shit like "Well, we can get a discount on Exchange, so let's just use that. This Linux solution isn't free." And it's all downhill from there. The open source community is a failure when it comes to taking down Outlook. So far, Apple is poised to actually make headway against Outlook & Exchange.

The way SenderID basically works is that if you have a CallerID record, Exchange will use it, if not and you have a classic SPF record, it will use that. The last time I checked, incidentally, the MS SenderID wizard generated totally broken records that do not conform to any spec (not even Microsoft's). Probably that's been fixed by now?

"Classic" SPF was (also last time I checked, about a year ago) the most widely deployed anti-forgery system in the world. DomainKeys is technically better but much harder to implement. I'm told that when Microsoft's Exchange group says SenderID is "widely adopted" they are counting all SPF records as SenderID records, because SenderID uses SPF as I mentioned above. Non-SPF SenderID has vanishingly small penetration among the dozens of MS Exchange admins I regularly communicate with - nobody actually turns it on, the most they do is use it in a point-scoring system. Perhaps that's just my circle of associates, though.

I'm not normally a "Microsoft basher" (I like Windows on the desktop, although I prefer more cost-effective solutions in the server room) but in this case they really engaged in some incredibly self-destructive stupidity. Meng Wong, the inventor of SPF, bent over backwards to try to help them and was willing to re-engineer the entire spec to suit their needs, but the whole effort was sabotaged by Microsoft's greed and duplicity.

Anyway, an interesting thing about anti-spoofing technology is that the spammers are very aware of it - probably because AOL honors it on their incoming.

As I'm sure you know, spammers use fake return addresses that they steal from web pages or people's Outlook address books. Since their "business model" (if you can call it that) works off small percentages of success, it makes sense for them to avoid spoofing domains that have SPF records published. Why use a fake address that is guaranteed to be rejected by AOL, after all?

Since you're publishing an SPF record for your outgoing mail, you probably have fewer problems from spammers faking email addresses from your domain than you would otherwise. I recently advised a small research lab that was getting hundreds of "bounce" messages every day (from spam that was spoofing their users) to publish SPF. They did so, and within two weeks the problem completely went away. They don't check incoming SPF at all, they just put up the one DNS TXT RR!

Obviously, that's purely anecdotal; I'm not a confidant of spammers. But it's widely reported to work, and it worked for me on two separate occasions.

I recommend "Classic" SPF for now, and DKIM for the future... mostly because that's what Eric Allman was pushing at Linuxworld. :)

Oh, and BTW, if you are looking for an Exchange replacement check out Scalix - they are based off HP's deceased OpenMail source base and they can provide Exchange- and Outlook-compatible calendaring.

Please go here instead:

Scalix Comparison

Please take a look at www.scalix.com. It can fully replace exchange, it comes with a outlook connector, an evolution connector, and a pretty decent ajax web interface. The community edition supports unlimited email only users, and 25 full groupware users. The small business edition is under $1000. I have been playing with it for a week or two and it seems pretty nice. The small business edition can integrate with AD, so it seems like it is an answer to keeping Exchange out of the work place. Anyone else have any opinions about scalix?

Although we haven't implemented it (we may still though), I was very impressed when we were using it in a testing environment. We set it up on a Fedora Core 4 system and it ran great. There is a community version for free so I recommend you give it a shot. http://www.scalix.com/ http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.htm l

Although we haven't implemented it (we may still though), I was very impressed when we were using it in a testing environment. We set it up on a Fedora Core 4 system and it ran great. There is a community version for free so I recommend you give it a shot. http://www.scalix.com/ http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.htm l

We are moving over to Scalix at least on some of our servers. I don't dislike Exchange for its features, just its screwed up backend.

First off you mentioned you were running in an Office environment, which would imply you have some sort of server running. I remarked that if you find Windows to be problem-free and maintenance-free then you're obviously not running Exchange.

And as far as nothing being out there to do what Exchange does? Check out Scalix. Check out groupwise. Additionally, check out any number of web-based alternatives (Open-Xchange for example, although I hate web clients it IS an alternative).

Email + Notes + group calendaring (meeting server) + journal? Scalix, as I mentioned. Check it out.

I mean would you rather just buy an email system, or an email system, AND 2200 copies of windows?

http://www.scalix.com/index.html

                                          --Michael

Groupwise on Linux is superb to everything I've used before. I've also suggested to others Scalix, but I do not think it has a current client side application. (web only for Linux at this point, me thinks). Just now I checked their site for an update... appears they have a community edition now.

http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.htm l

Might be suitable for a small business. Secondly, it can integrate with eDirectory (another excellent application fron Novell).

Offtopic, but did anyone else notice that Fedora Directory Server 1.0 was released today?

It appears Scalix offers all of this. Anybody have any experience with it?

To be honest, I don't believe there is an opensource drop in replacement for Exchange yet.

Have you taken a look at Scalix yet? The server only runs on Linux and their community version is free (though I don't know if its open source per-se). It has native support for MS Outlook, and it has a very impressive AJAX enabled web interface. Their product demo shows it off pretty well.

They don't list Ubuntu as one of their supported platforms. Perhaps because they only package in rpm, dunno.

To be honest, I don't believe there is an opensource drop in replacement for Exchange yet.

Have you taken a look at Scalix yet? The server only runs on Linux and their community version is free (though I don't know if its open source per-se). It has native support for MS Outlook, and it has a very impressive AJAX enabled web interface. Their product demo shows it off pretty well.

They don't list Ubuntu as one of their supported platforms. Perhaps because they only package in rpm, dunno.

Assume you posted these all at 2 am at night, at 8 the next morning all 30 people get to work and check their emails all at about the same time. Ouch

It's a question of minimizing the disk I/O -- or more importantly minimizing the amount that the disk heads need to move.

For a commercial product (with commercial support) that runs as an Exchange replacement, look at Scalix. scalix.com>

The document model just doesn't work for sophisticated applications

Not so, as Scalix has shown. Not at all dog slow, and very very interactive.

OpenMail is no more. It was licensed to Scalix some time back. Scalix has taken it, given it a rather nice AJAX web client as well as other good things, and is giving it away (see the "Community Edition" on their site).

Just an FYI for all of you intrested:

Oddpost.com had this webmail interface first. Then they were purchased by Yahoo. During that transition time they improved it quite a bit (stablity, cross-browser support, ui looks). Yahoo's Beta is the latest version of Oddpost. Oddpost users will later be transitioned to Yahoo (From what I gather). It suprises me that Oddpost remained so unnoticed for so long.

For anyone who is interested in having their own Oddpost/Yahoo web client. Scalix offers it for free in their community edition. I'm not sure if you can use the web client alone without the rest though. I'm actually going to be installing it Monday, so I'm talking out of my ass until then. The only hurdle is that it requires Tomcat 5.0 to work. If you're on Debian stable that might be a hassle.

We use Scalix which authenticates against OpenLDAP. They are a commercial solution, but their software is very opensource friendly and their support is very good (including pulic forums). We also have Tomcat, Apache, PAM, PPP/CHAP (for Remote Access with L2TP/PPTP), OpenSWAN (ipsec), Samba and custom applications authenticating against LDAP. Our centralized directory system is all home-brew, but this also gives us a lot of flexibility (we have 5 different password hashes for various systems!). It's not the easiest route in the short term, but it pays off in the long term. We have bindings for pretty much any language (including shell script via ldapsearch, etc) which offers tremendous flexibility. OpenLDAP is synchronized with a hot-backup, so we have redundancy built-in.

The Oddpost webmail is available for sale AND it runs on linux. Actually the Scalix backend is a tomcat (java) webapp, the frontend is an AJAX javascript engine.

Having now seen screenshots of Yahoo's new webmail, it looks alot like a re-skinned Oddpost. Oddpost webmail can be purchased here http://www.scalix.com/

OpenMail (on which Scalix was based) scaled to insane levels compared with Exchange, Scalix should be the same. If we're talking consumer ISP-style workloads, you should be able to approach 100K users on a smallish Intel server. The key is to have a decent SAN, as previous posters have pointed out.

Scalix can support just about every Outlook feature that Exchange can (forms being the notable exception). Any mailbox can be used with POP, IMAP, Outlook/MAPI, or the Scalix web client (SWA). SWA is an AJAX client, with a look'n'feel close to Outlook.

Scalix quotes 99.99% uptime, and I saw even better in OpenMail days. Again, a good SAN is a must.

I recently listened to in intersting IT Converation about Scalix a linux based e-mail solution that can handle large volumes. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail654.htm l/ http://www.scalix.com/products/index.html/ Bryan

The CEO, Julia Hanna Farris has 20 years of experience working on messenging systems for Bell then for Lotus Notes and then in a few other start ups, and she is a babe as well. There is an interview with her over at It Conversations that you might want to listen to.

With the paid for edition you get all the features of exchange without the cost and without the security risks of running Windows servers.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Where is the OSS answer to Exchange??

http://www.scalix.com/

http://www.scalix.com/