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they just need to replace MS office with something web-based

They could use something like rollApp, but there's the pesky problem of Outlook, which still lacks an open-source equivalent that duplicates most of its functionality. I would say Outlook is the very last strangle-hold Microsoft has on the corporate market. Every other one of its platforms (the rest of Office, SCCM, Server/Active Directory) contains more than adequate FOSS replacements.

I'll just leave the link to this SOGo application here. But, please don't go look at it. Please don't look at their Lightning calendaring extension for Thunderbird, or their compatibility with ActiveSync or MS Outlook. Definitely do not try their ZEG backend testing appliance. Corporate contracts are available for companies that like to give back to Open Source (or because contracts are mandated by the Board)

But if you have used it, and liked it, DON'T tell anyone else about it. It's a secret. I think there's another secret project out there called Zimbra, but I never got to it.

It's not just Microsoft, the architecture is called Groupware and promotes collaborative software integration. SoGo is a good OpenSource example of combined CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV etc. If you don't like it, well OK..but it's practially a given architecture when designing an IT infrastructure for a company. If you walk into a 20,000 user company and promote separate and non-integrated applications for email, calendar and address book you will get laughed out of the interview.

Not only is Outlook a manifestly superior email client, the quite useful group calendar functions are infinitely better since... T-bird doesn't have group calendar functions.

What exactly do you call Lightning? Looks a lot like a calendar to me.

Lightning even supports a few network calendar formats natively. Need to sync with CalDAV? There's a plugin for that.

Oh, I see...they're not automatically included. That's a positive since not everyone needs those extra features. Some people just want email. That's what makes it nice. That's why people used to flock to Firefox before it became a giant, bloated piece of garbage.

There are a lot of things that can be said that are negative about Thunderbird (it's slow, freezes often, prone to mailbox corruption) but lacking a group calendar is not one of those negatives. It works just fine for keeping my entire family connected and aware of what's going on in the coming weeks.

Check out Sogo
http://www.sogo.nu/

Highly recommended

why the hell any member of the EU Parliament would think that using anything from Microsoft isn't a stupid idea is beyond me.

Well, because they want the feature set. The EU should start dumping truckloads of money on Inverse and Samba until the open source solution is superior.

Sogo is close to being done (the hard bits like single instance modifications of repeating events aren't) and Samba4 is teetering on stilts; though it works in ideal circumstances, lots of problems aren't handled and there is missing functionality.

SoGo. We run postfix/dovecot for our mail server and SoGo will be the next piece we install.

And postfix/dovecot is so much better at dealing with large mailboxes then MSExchange ever was. The sieve scripting language is just icing on the cake. And being proper IMAP, add-in software just works without having to worry about some Microsoft incompatibility with their custom flavor of IMAP.

Client side, we just run Thunderbird + Lightning (calendar/tasks). Which also deals well with mailboxes measured in gigabytes and hundreds of thousands of messages.

Yet another calendarware: SOGo. It may be too oriented toward user personal agenda.

SOGo is a groupware server which recently added Exchange protocol compatibility using Samba4 - just sayin...

I've committed to developing an open source Gmail alternative I can host locally

Why not contribute to improving something like SOGo instead of starting from scratch?

What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not? SOGo:

Don't know about features, but it looks pretty interesting, thanks for the link! As for your question "What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not?", the answer seems to be in the release notes. For the past year every release notes that it is focused on "improved stability".

Despite having a history of being mind-numbingly stupidly designed - particularly in the versions that used the Jet engine for the data store - Exchange has been quite stable in recent years, at least in my experience. And if there's one thing you want in a "scalable groupware" it would be stability. There are very few cases where "thousands of users" and "stability issues" are acceptable bedfellows.

I would recommend checking out Sogo. This would provide a good groupware solution. In their upcoming version, 2.0, it will have some goodies like Exchange Server emulation so it will integrate well with those using Outlook. For collaboration, you can check out Alfresco. As for a common identity management solution therein lies the trick. If you are brave, you can check out using Samba4 and configure all of your clients to authenticate against their version of Active Directory. The Samba wiki has some good instructions on that. I know that there is an open source software package that helps integrate Linux with Active Directory but I cannot remember its name. It does get packaged with Ubuntu, however. Hope this helps some .....

What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not? SOGo:

• Scales to thousands of users on a single server.
• Integrates contacts, calendar, and mail.
• Provides web interfaces to all of these features.
• Provides fat-client integration, including Mozilla Thunderbird / Lightning, MS Outlook (native in 2.0, via a plugin in 1.x), Apple Mail / iCal.
• Supports mobile clients, including iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and Android.

So what does MS Exchange do that it doesn't but that you need? This is a serious question - I'd be happy to forward any feature requests to Inverse...

1. An Echange replacement. Not 8 things I can lash up to work but a single system that is easy to install that offers all the features of Exchange with none of the pain. Oh and it must work with Outlook and should have a good client that does everything Outlook does plus a good web interface.

Fully open source Exchange replacement is finally available, thanks to SOGo and Openchange people: http://www.sogo.nu/english.html

It's also awesome that it can use your existing IMAP server for mail storage rather than reimplementing its own. Also if you don't want to lash up 8 things together, they have all-in-one package you can install.

It does, kind of. You can even get the Lightning plugin and get come calender functionality. But it still has no where near the abilities of Outlook when it comes to interfacing with the exchange server, seeing other people's public calendars, dealing with the various types of meeting invites exchange sends,

Try it with SOGo - http://www.sogo.nu/

Invites, calendars, all work fine, integrated tightly with thunderbird. I dunno what you're doing with your 2GB of email (POP?) but my muli-gigs have always worked fine over IMAP.