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Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?

Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.

Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.

• Kolab — http://www.kolab.org/
• Citadel — http://www.citadel.org/
• Dingo Calendar Server — http://andrew.triumf.ca/dingo/
• Darwin CalendarServer — http://trac.calendarserver.org/
• Bedework — http://www.bedework.org/
• Zimbra — http://www.zimbra.com/
• OpenGroupware — http://www.opengroupware.org/

If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.

• simta — http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/simta/
• Dovecot — http://www.dovecot.org/
• Postfix — http://www.postfix.org/
• Exim — http://www.exim.org/
• Sendmail — http://www.sendmail.org/
• qmail — http://www.qmail.org/

However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...

Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?

Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.

Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.

• Kolab — http://www.kolab.org/
• Citadel — http://www.citadel.org/
• Dingo Calendar Server — http://andrew.triumf.ca/dingo/
• Darwin CalendarServer — http://trac.calendarserver.org/
• Bedework — http://www.bedework.org/
• Zimbra — http://www.zimbra.com/
• OpenGroupware — http://www.opengroupware.org/

If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.

• simta — http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/simta/
• Dovecot — http://www.dovecot.org/
• Postfix — http://www.postfix.org/
• Exim — http://www.exim.org/
• Sendmail — http://www.sendmail.org/
• qmail — http://www.qmail.org/

However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...

Take a look at Zimbra:

http://www.zimbra.com/

Its open source. You can extend it it's functionality with zimlets and it's already quite popular with universities.

http://www.zimbra.com/

Reading through the license, it doesn't seem as bad as you imply. Section 3.2 seems the salient part:

3.2 - In any copy of the Software or in any Modification you create, You must retain and reproduce, any and all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are included in the Software in the same form as they appear in the Software. This includes the preservation of attribution notices in the form of trademarks or logos that exist within a user interface of the Software.

So as long as you maintain the trademarks and logos as required, you're otherwise free to use the software as you choose. Should Yahoo! stop publishing Zimbra, there's nothing saying you couldn't keep using it and even keep developing it, as long as you don't change the name or trademarks associated with it. Yes, that means you can't fork it to become Ximbra (for example), but it's not nearly as heavy handed as closed source programs.

And for the purposes of the original list, it's still a handy suite and should be considered by anyone looking to replace Exchange.

Zimbra is great, even though they're owned by Yahoo now. For a little bit of money you can even buy a license for an Outlook connector and the people who use Exchange now won't even know the difference.

I do believe they have a revenue stream and an "Exchange Killer" (at least a competitor) and they are definitely one of the top five search engines. I think search engine ranks right now must be... 1) Google, 2) Google, 3) Google, 4) Yahoo, and 5) Google. So a second MS acquisition attempt is very plausible.

"At the time of the writing Yahoo! security has been notified."

I do wonder what route he chose to notify them? Maybe an email to postmaster@... ?

I don't see anything on Zimbra's bugzilla which I'd have thought would be the proper place to make such a report.

Maybe that was too difficult to find, and wouldn't be immediately obvious to other zimbra users. But then there's nothing immediately obvious on the official zimbra forums either.

"At the time of the writing Yahoo! security has been notified."

I do wonder what route he chose to notify them? Maybe an email to postmaster@... ?

I don't see anything on Zimbra's bugzilla which I'd have thought would be the proper place to make such a report.

Maybe that was too difficult to find, and wouldn't be immediately obvious to other zimbra users. But then there's nothing immediately obvious on the official zimbra forums either.

It can replace your Exchange server for email, has an XMLPP IM server built-in, and is much more cost effective and easier to administer than Exchange.

http://www.zimbra.com/

Look at the Open Source Edition to get started for $0.00 for unlimited users (pending hardware capabilities).

Enjoy.

They already do. I've done support for W.A. schools that were having problems with their internal Exchange server. They were shocked when we discussed the 'real' price for Exchange. They paid less than $1000 for it including CALs and hardware. MS has some serious sweetheart deals for schools and I bet if it came down to providing even cheaper Windows and Office for schools they will do it.

That's not the real price, though. The real price also includes all the down time, extra re-builds, malware tools, etc. Add to that also the cost of missing incoming messages, missing outgoing messages and delayed messages -- these last add up to more work for the users, which can number in the 100's, rather than just the maintenance staff which can usually be counted on one hand.

Before MS Exchange was hammered through the back door, e-mail was both so fast and reliable that many used it in ways resembling instant messaging.

Worth a look:
Roundcube: http://roundcube.net/
Kolab: http://www.kolab.org/
Citadel: http://www.citadel.org/
Zimbra: http://www.zimbra.com/

If you need a plain vanilla mail transfer agent instead of all the non-essentials, then postfix, exim, qmail, the new sendmail, and simta each have their niche. They're used pretty much everywhere, even if you don't always see the evidence of them outside the message headers.

According to a post by a Zimbra employee over at their forums. This will be corrected in the next version of Zimbra Desktop.

Yes, Zimbra.

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.

"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.

"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.

You mean like Yahoo Zimbra, Yahoo Shine, or even Yahoo Widgets?

Or even Yahoo OpenID

My company is using Zimbra, the Network Professional edition. I've got OTA sync of mail/calendar/address book. Syncs to Outlook if you want that. On the desktop I use the web interface, and it seems to work pretty well with Evolution.

No, it's not free, but costs a lot less than the MS stack.

No, I don't work for Zimbra.

Recently announced:

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/announcements/17100-zimbra-starter-edition.html

Check it out, sounds like it's what you've been looking for.

Instead of blowing smoke up Microsoft's ass, this guy should have looked around. Zimbra is just one of LookOut's many competitors. It even inter-operates with the MS product (ewww).

I hope that some day an initiative will move forward to provide a Linux equivalent of Active Directory and Exchange. Something to integrate LDAP authentication, SELinux policy configuration, LDAP directory, IMAP-esque email that's far more secure, and ties into the LDAP directory providing centralized scheduling abilities, and so on. And an email client that doesn't flake out all over the place (I tried Evolution years ago; it flaked out all over the place). I think that most of this stuff is out there, but it's strewn about in various places.

Take a look at Zimbra. It has most of what you're asking for.

It's more than a case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Gatesists made clear that they would not take "no" for an answer and would continue their plans against Yahoo one way or another. These so-called pension funds are likely part of that approach and just softening up Yahoo, while setting the media against the board in prep for its ousting. One point which is unlikely to ever make many mainstream news sites or forums, even open source ones like Slashdot, is that Microsoftologians are likely to try to replace Yahoo's board. Poisoning the press against the board is a first step.

Later, preventing the Yahoo employees from jumping off with golden parachutes might be a repeat of what MS did to Borland, except against key open source projects. Yahoo contributes in a big way to many open source projects, PHP and BSD being two Very Important (tm) ones. Getting Yahoo would crush a competitor to the spectacularly failed MSN. So without the 'chutes many would have to stay and MS could simply have them sweeping floors or making coffee.

There is also the question of Zimbra, which was recently purchased by Yahoo. MS Exchange is about the only thing that ties Windows into either/both the desktop and the server room. Zimbra is one of the few competitors to MS Exchange, besides Kolab and Citadel, none of which get much press. Quite a few shops would stop or drastically decrease use of MS products without MS Exchange. Zimbra is currently not GPL. Buying Yahoo would allow Zimbra to be put on ice as MS did with FoxPro

Advertising, aka tracking users, is another problem. MS execs want into advertising. Controlling the adservers allows a chance, finally, at income. It also allows access to be tweaked. Ads get served up first before content and delay, especially at the beginning, drastically reduces viewing time and thus mindshare. The first moments are crucial and studies show that the cap is set at 20s. A delay, on purpose or by accident, of even a fifth of a second x one million page views is hundreds of lost viewing hours. So the potential for severe abuse is there in addition to the technical problems MS services and servers are known for.

At the bottom is also a question of money. Many articles somehow neglect that much of the initial offer was funny-money, aka MSFT stock, which MS prints on demand. The noise and smoke about the attempted take over does well at drawing attention away from what must be some rather 'creative' book keeping there in Redmond.

There are plenty more possible reasons to go after Yahoo's board. Having sockpuppets poison the press makes sense for many of them.

Yeah, administrators of Zimbra based E-mail servers (like me) are starting to panic I think a Google bailout/business alliance could be, as one Zimbra developer described it, "manna from heaven".

Read: http://www.zimbra.com/license/. It is distributed under the Yahoo Public Licence, which is described as:

YPL requires that any modifications to the ZCS source code files that you redistribute outside of your organization be published for all in source code form. YPL also requires the preservation of all copyright and attribution notices within modified versions of the ZCS Open Source Edition.

Read: http://www.zimbra.com/license/. It is distributed under the Yahoo Public Licence, which is described as:

YPL requires that any modifications to the ZCS source code files that you redistribute outside of your organization be published for all in source code form. YPL also requires the preservation of all copyright and attribution notices within modified versions of the ZCS Open Source Edition.

I guess if the Zimbra people jump ship they could rewrite webgui and webadmin from the 4.x version however it seems as if the 5.0 is fully under the YPL and the YPL states that if you use the logo in an "unapproved" way the license can be revoked. Ouch. more here

The Zimbra faux open source license (ZPL) now the (YPL) a perversion of the Apache license prohibits the removal of their logo from the source in the form of an "Attribution Clause" This logo is trademarked. Yahoo now owns the trademarks and now perhaps Microsoft will on a successful purchase of Yahoo. This begs the question. Can Zimbra be forked? I think the answer is no. Because you cannot remove the logo as the license states and MS will presumably now own the trademarks and all rights to that code. If this is the case then it would seem as if the Zimbra people are out on their ears. without their code or trademarks.

True open source aka free software preserves the right to fork. With badgeware you are prohibited from removing the trademarks and logos from the source. Hence you cannot fork it. This is BAD. If they remove the logo requirement from their license and leave the attribution requirement then that would be no problem because customers could still fork and maintain attribution to the originators which is what the GPL allows anyway. Zimbra chose to screw the customer by using an true open source license (Apache License) and corrupting it by forcing you not to remove the trademarked logo. So as to prevent forking and therefore prevent free market competition that open source fosters. This is why true OPEN source software like Debian and Linux and any GPL sw cannot be bought away from freedom and the free market.

Alas, poor Zimbra, we hardly knew you. We will miss you dearly...

So where is this mythical replacement I just read about? Would someone like to point it out for me?

So where is this mythical replacement I just read about? Would someone like to point it out for me?

OK, I'm not saying Google Docs is right for everyone, but you seem to be completely dismissing the advantages of having your documentsnline and ignoring the disadvantages of having your documents offline.

Agreed, and thank you for pointing out the online functionality/aspect.

As a cake-n-eat-it-too suggestion, maybe one might use OpenOffice for offline use, and the open-source community-edition of Zimbra for hosting your own files online. I have yet to test this model, but I plan to soon. Sounds like a good 2008 resolution to me.

Pretty much everything you have described except for the picking one out of many options is easily done in the Zimbra collaborative suite (Open Source or Network Edition). Here is the site if you are interested in checking it out.

Zimbra and Alfresco both look nice. Check out the Alfresco demo.

Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/

Zimbra is, arguably, not Open Source.

It comes under an 'attribution license' and hence cannot be forked. Its 'badgeware'.

Ie: you cannot take the source code of Zimbra and produce your own version *without* the Zimbra logos.

http://www.zimbra.com/

We are replacing all of our Exchange users and dumping exchange by the end of the year.

It is an open source free replacement for Exchange.

Very nice and integrates well with Sunbird (Thunderbird Calander).

-hack

Scalix http://www.scalix.com/

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

Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it true. I run a Zimbra server.

http://www.zimbra.com/

I am in the middle of buying a house, and it has been invaluable (since I rely on a calendar at the office to keep track of all my work especially) to have the convenience of not really needing to remember when I set things up (inspections, walkthroughs, meetings w/my mortgage company). Perhaps you haven't been busy before. Or perhaps you're just not scatterbrained (as I am).

The point is, the toolset in linux allows me to do these things (like running these servers) without having to spend the hours (that I've spent in the past for others) setting up windows apps to do the same thing. Tools like dpkg, dselect, diff, patch, grep, awk, shell scripting, etc. Research them and you'll see the types of things you can do with it.

Also, you can take a look at Zimbra, which supports lots of mobile devices

Also, you can take a look at Zimbra, which supports lots of mobile devices

how about: http://www.zimbra.com/ http://www.citadel.org/

Zimbra is a pretty good alternative to Exchange, we have actually migrated *off* Exchange to Zimbra. With Zimbra you have groupware solution completely independent of Windows on the client and server side.

http://www.zimbra.com/

Ballmer's job is to serve FUD to those who read Forbes Magazine for the articles, and he's done it again. He plants seeds of doubt in the minds of people who probably have their emails printed out for them, and can't tell the difference between Gmail, Hotmail or the corporate Lotus Notes system that's rapidly coming to the end of its life. The sysadmins will shortly recommend dumping Notes for a system based on Zimbra, but as the CEO goes to sign it off at a tenth of the price of an equivalent MS Exchange system, he notices in the high level description that it supports Gmail... wait, isn't that a bad thing? The proposal is rejected and the CEO's doubt sets in motion the installation of a shiny new Exchange system, and Microsoft take another scalp thanks to Speaks To CEOs' ramblings.

I have been using the Open Source Zimbra Collaboration Suite for my small company for a while now. It is very stable and my clueless users have found it simple to use. The specs they recommend are much more than you need for a small company. It runs well for 25 people on 2GHZ with 2GB of RAM.

There are many, two of which just mentioned on /. today:

http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.bongo-project.org/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/desknow/
http://www.google.com/a

The list goes on and on.

You mean like this or this or even this?

Zimbra is under MPL (Mozilla Public License.)
They also sell proprietary versions with added functionality such as MAPI/iSynch, clustering/high availability support and similar stuff.

Feature matrix at: http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.html

From the Zimbra press release:

Will the Zimbra server and Web client remain open source?

* Access to the Zimbra source code will remain available and free.

Will new Zimbra projects and additions to the current Zimbra suite be open source?

* Zimbra will continue its practice of offering both an open and certified, network editions of the software.