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Exchange offers a lot of organizational-level management tools (e.g. revoking email privileges for a fired employee while retaining their emails for reference by their replacement) which are sorely lacking in open source mail servers.

Linux mail is not just Postfix + dovecot. You need to use a real email package like Zimbra or Sun mail. It will give you all those Outlook "enterprise" things, XMPP chat, and more importantly a collaborative calendar.

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.

also try http://www.zimbra.com/ , it have several good features

you can always use Thunderbird+Lightning addon for the client and calendarserver for the server: https://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/...

you can replace exchange with http://www.zentyal.org/ or replace outlook and keep exchange with http://davmail.sourceforge.net... as a proxy for other clients

on windows you can also replace outlook with http://www.emclient.com/ and on mac, use their own clients, most mac users prefer then

you can try other apps/servers in this list:
https://alternativeto.net/soft...
https://alternativeto.net/soft...

since there really is only one product in the Enterprise email/calendar/collaboration space worth a damn

Come on. There are many products that handle email/calendar/collaboration which are better than Outlook. Outlook is a very good standard and rather feature rich for an email client. It is designed to work well with a popular enterprise email solution. But it is far from the richest solution and further still from the only solution. There is even a fairly good solution which is rather close to Outlook feature wise which is open source from VMWare: http://www.zimbra.com/

Zimbra ... doesn't even have a desktop client.

Yeah totally doesn't have one.

None of which will run on a desktop and so are completely beside the point.

Why do they have to run on a desktop? The mobile clients are perfectly usable and much more useful given that you aren't tied to your desk.

WTF? So, was I dreaming when I setup Zimbra Open Source Edition and used the email client of choice (except for the shitty Gmail app) on any platform of choice? I don't remember an X11 console or clunky email clients anywhere in that dream.

I've tried Zimbra Open Source Edition. It lacks any kind of Android client (you did say OPEN SOURCE edition, right?). It also lacks keyboard shortcuts for deleting and archiving mail, as far as I'm aware. I'm not certain, but I don't recall that it supported tag-based email sorting either.

I'd really prefer using FOSS and encrypting everything, but it is a real pain unless you're almost exclusively reading your email via an X11 console. Even then the keyboard shortcuts often aren't as good as gmail, but at least you have drag-and-drop.

WTF? So, was I dreaming when I setup Zimbra Open Source Edition and used the email client of choice (except for the shitty Gmail app) on any platform of choice? I don't remember an X11 console or clunky email clients anywhere in that dream.

We switched to Zimbra around a year ago, and haven't looked back. It doesn't offer as much of the integration that Exchange / OWA does, but it's capable enough for email, calendaring, contact management etc. If there's some specific functionality that you require, check that it's supported.

Sadly, we have Windows-only MIS, and I'm not in a position to decide on an alternative, so we have to stick with Windows servers with all the licensing headaches that entails. Still, at least I'm not paying to license Exchange too.

If you're not tryign them, you're not really looking.

OpenGroupware is a nonstarter.

"2009-05-17 18:02: OGo Website The OGo website is outdated, we are working on a fix. It will take a while :-) Please join us in one of the mailing lists to discuss OGo and ask any questions you might have."

Zimbra is pay-for-premium features, with prices similar to hosted Exchange. http://www.zimbra.com/products/pricing.html. Zafara has a similar model. http://www.zarafa.com/zarafa-calculator/en

I don't mind paying, but I don't want to pay the same for a work-alike drop in replacement from a small company when Microsoft's *hosted* solution is price-competitive.

Citadel is okay. But IMHO, not comperable to Exchange.

Kolab is on my list of things to try out, but I'm not optimistic. It seems that stable Outlook connectors are proprietary and cost $13.95/seat or $60/year depending on who you buy them from. Otherwise lots of alpha and beta clients http://www.kolab.org/clients

Dollar for dollar, none of these have any advantages over Exchange. Kolab has promise, it doesn't pretend to be an Exchange drop-in replacement, but a FOSS stack alternative. Are you using it in production?

Here's two: Citadel and Kolab

Among other things, Kolab is a product of a series of contracts for the federal office for Security in the Information Technology in the German Government, though both are quite secure.

Then there are two more: OpenGroupware and Zimbra. Module options are out there. If you're not finding them, then it's because you are not looking.

If you don't mind paying for a product (and don't want to use Google Apps), take a look at Zimbra:

http://www.zimbra.com/products/index.html

It has an Outlook plugin so your Windows users will be happy, and it speaks Activesync, so any smartphone should be able to sync email contacts and calendar with it.

I haven't used Zimbra for a few years, but last time I used it it worked quite well -- much easier to set up and administer than Exchange, and cheaper too.

Google Mail? It might be good, but companies better check their contracts. Since the small companies usually don't have public stock, Sarbanes-Oxley may not be an issue, but with clients is may be. To boot, not all mail providers be able to furnish documentation of SOX compliance. Come audit time, you really want that stuff ready to go when the auditor is present and requesting documentation.

You would think that a company like Genentech with 11,000 employees would know a thing or two about whether or not their Google Apps email solution meets all of the regulatory requirements they are subject to.

Finally, who is the customer with Google Apps, the people using it... or the advertisers? Google might have a conflict of interest in that department. I'd rather stick with a mail provider paid for completely by the end user.

You seem to be confusing the free version of Google mail with the paid Google Apps for Business which defaults to not serving ads.

Zimbra may be good enough for a college student to get their latest Facebook confirmation E-mail, but in a professional environment, it is not up to the task. This isn't to say OWA is perfect, but there are a lot of business functions that are Exchange-only:

Zimbra has Outlook and mobile device integration, all secured by TLS/SSL

Connectors. Yes, these are nothing more than just TLS connections with known certificates, but a lot of companies feel better when their clients are able to have a dedicated, encrypted connection.

I don't even know what that means in the context of an email server? Are you talking about a persistant connection between Outlook and the email backend or a VPN?

In any case, Zimbra can do more than deliver Facebook status messages, they have a pretty broad customer list

Policies. Almost all devices work with Exchange, and fewer and fewer lie to it about capabilities. If a device went missing, triggering a remote erase will work regardless of which maker or OS is on the device. No other E-mail system has this in place.

Data at rest encryption. Exchange can pretty much guarantee that any device touching it either lies convincingly about encryption (like earlier Android versions), or actually implements it.

Zimbra has had remote wipe for years. Even Google Apps has remote wipe capability. And they can also enforce encryption and other ActiveSync security policies.

If one wants to play GSA contracts, this might be a major factor for state or Federal business.

Maybe Google doesn't know anything about the government sector.

Believe it or not, there is competition in the email server market, but most companies don't bother because once they buy the CALs and build a server infrastructure to run their other Microsoft applications, Exchange doesn't add much more to their Microsoft cost. But some companies are still finding it cost effective.

Google Mail? It might be good, but companies better check their contracts. Since the small companies usually don't have public stock, Sarbanes-Oxley may not be an issue, but with clients is may be. To boot, not all mail providers be able to furnish documentation of SOX compliance. Come audit time, you really want that stuff ready to go when the auditor is present and requesting documentation.

You would think that a company like Genentech with 11,000 employees would know a thing or two about whether or not their Google Apps email solution meets all of the regulatory requirements they are subject to.

Finally, who is the customer with Google Apps, the people using it... or the advertisers? Google might have a conflict of interest in that department. I'd rather stick with a mail provider paid for completely by the end user.

You seem to be confusing the free version of Google mail with the paid Google Apps for Business which defaults to not serving ads.

Zimbra may be good enough for a college student to get their latest Facebook confirmation E-mail, but in a professional environment, it is not up to the task. This isn't to say OWA is perfect, but there are a lot of business functions that are Exchange-only:

Zimbra has Outlook and mobile device integration, all secured by TLS/SSL

Connectors. Yes, these are nothing more than just TLS connections with known certificates, but a lot of companies feel better when their clients are able to have a dedicated, encrypted connection.

I don't even know what that means in the context of an email server? Are you talking about a persistant connection between Outlook and the email backend or a VPN?

In any case, Zimbra can do more than deliver Facebook status messages, they have a pretty broad customer list

Policies. Almost all devices work with Exchange, and fewer and fewer lie to it about capabilities. If a device went missing, triggering a remote erase will work regardless of which maker or OS is on the device. No other E-mail system has this in place.

Data at rest encryption. Exchange can pretty much guarantee that any device touching it either lies convincingly about encryption (like earlier Android versions), or actually implements it.

Zimbra has had remote wipe for years. Even Google Apps has remote wipe capability. And they can also enforce encryption and other ActiveSync security policies.

If one wants to play GSA contracts, this might be a major factor for state or Federal business.

Maybe Google doesn't know anything about the government sector.

Believe it or not, there is competition in the email server market, but most companies don't bother because once they buy the CALs and build a server infrastructure to run their other Microsoft applications, Exchange doesn't add much more to their Microsoft cost. But some companies are still finding it cost effective.

Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.

Isn't this the one of the key premises of online social networking? Why join a social networking site if nobody else is using it? It's great if something else works for you, but berating others who make a different choice isn't going to solve anything.

Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.

I'm still going to argue that a layman will have extreme difficulty in setting up and maintaining a mail server, even if he/she had several free weeks to do nothing else but figure it out. More power to you for running your own mail server, but if you hadn't chosen a technical profession or hobby, I doubt you would even know where to start or that it was even possible. If you know what you're doing, it's always easy.

My point was that the statement "nobody uses IRC" is provably false, and if you're using IRC you can always invite others to do the same. It's not difficult, and the primary point here is that nobody is forced to use things like Facebook. Yes, things like Facebook are vastly more common, but they are by no means the only options available. Using something purely because "everybody else already does" and then claiming that as a strong supporting reason for using it, as opposed to just showing some folks other options and maybe letting them decide if they want to give it a shot, strikes me as disingenuous.

Speaking of mail servers, of course there's a minimum time investment required to learn some basics first. The same applies to virtually anything we do in life, whether it's driving a car, learning to cook a steak, getting through high school, getting a college degree, tying your shoes, etc. With the amazing amount of step by step documentation available for virtually any kind of mail server config you want, that time investment is not substantial. To get a basic setup working does not require weeks worth of cramming. It requires maybe an evening or two of reading some docs and following simple instructions. If you don't want to do that, there are options like Zimbra that essentially boil down to "run this installer, log into the web interface, add whatever accounts you want, and you're done." Either way, it's pretty painless, thanks to the work of countless others who have taken the time to build nice things and write nice docs for them.

That's very, very strange.
However, http://blog.zimbra.com/ has stuff from november 2011 and they are obiously hiring : http://jobs.vmware.com/search?q=zimbra.com%2Fcareers
But still, it is owned by VMWare, I mean they must be aware of the impression a 2 year old "latest news" item gives to a visitor.

So I go over to the website which URL you pasted above and the first thing I see is "Zimbra collaboration suite & Microsoft Exchange: How to choose".

Dude, that presentation is over 4 years old. That doesn't make them look very good you know; a lot has changed in those 4 years, especially with regards to Office.

Then I went over to the Zimbra website to be greeted with a recent news update from... 08/10/2010.

That is never going to work out. A software product which hasn't updated their news for over 2 years now? If they care so little about the news then what about security updates and the likes?

Truth be told; many people will judge a product by its presentation. And in that aspect Zimbra fails horribly.

I bought a server from Hetzner and run Zimbra Collaboration Server Open Source Edition on it.

I have managed mail-systems for several ISPs. Each with 7 digit numbers of users. Exchange isn't even on their radar, while Postfix/Exim with Horde/Dovecot most definetly is. Please don't delude yourself in thinking that an Exchange server will scale even remotely as well.
As for Zimbra, we currently serve several thousand concurrent users using a virtualized server. A similar Exchange installation in our experience consumes far more resources. Other independent actors also seems to think that Zimbra is a better choice.

Zimbra does most of what you're looking for - if not everything.

Don't be fooled by the "open source" label though, it's still mostly a proprietary system. At work we use it mostly to serve outlook clients, though, which I believe is a mistake, the product is designed to be used mostly as a webmail/calendar/contact system.

Even so, even with the "community edition" which is basically just the basic system where they've stripped out everything priorietary (ActiveSync, Outlook Connector, backup system, and lots of other useful stuff):

- host-able - check
- calendar that integrates with LDAP - check
- allows "bot" type accounts - check
- has an easy to use web interface - check
- allows users to have multiple calendars - check
- manage sharing on a calendar and an event basis - calendar basis check, event basis... well... check it out and see if it does what you want to do
- delegate to other users with it - kind of. the VP can share the calendar with their secretary, and their secretary can then use their calendar to accept events...

We run it at work, serving mostly Outlook clients, and it works well for basic use cases, although we've had one client wanting to migrate back to Exchange because of lacking support for delegation of tasks.

It's virtually impossible to replicate the functionality and ease-of-use of gmail. However, I've recently looked into this, and here are my comments (note: I haven't yet implemented any of this, so take this with a large boulder of salt):

* For obvious reasons, you need an IMAP server. Dovecot is among the most compliant and best (my ISP happens to use it :-). Should you want to choose something else, make sure you check out the IMAP server compliancy page.

* For push email on the iPhone, z-push seems to work, and people have gotten it to work with dovecot (note: this is a bit old, and so these instructions might need some tweaking).

* You do, of course need an MTA like postfix or exim, but choosing one may be a matter of personal preference.

* You're unlikely to find a spam filtering solution as good as gmail's (it's crowd-sourced, after all).

* Finding a replacement for gmail filtering rules is a big problem. You'll probably have to go with procmail.

(However, as a programmer, I happen to prefer something with a bit more power and flexibilty, and so I'd probably port over the ancient-but-likely-still-usable "deliver" mail handling program. Deliver takes mail received from postfix, exim, or sendmail and feeds it to a program that you write (a shell script, ruby script, C++ program, or whatever you like). Your program then tells deliver what to do with the message (deliver it normally, refile it, delete it, etc., etc.). Also, since it's a program, you can do behind-the-scenes stuff like saving of attachments, vacation autoreplies, mail archiving, etc., etc.. It's the ultimate in power in flexibility, if you can program.)

However, this still doesn't address the issues of contacts and calendars. Unfortunately, there's no good solution for these:

* You might want to check out Zarafa. The free community version seems decent, as long as you're happy with access via the web or iPhone. Mail filtering capabilities are limited, and you'll have to use Outlook if you want to use a desktop client for contacts or calendars (the free version limits you to three Outlook users). However, Thunderbird might be usable via CalDAV for calendars and z-sync for contacts.

* As others have mentioned, Zimbra is a possibility. However, if you need iPhone support, it appears to be horribly expensive for home use -- as in multiple hundreds of dollars expensive. From that I understand, the Zimbra network edition, starter version is the cheapest iPhone-supporting deal, at ~$400/year or $840 for a perpetual license.

My company uses Zimbra. It works pretty well for us.

Now for new companies a new, low cost, easy to maintain nicely integrated email system is what they need. Something that is easy to setup, very stable, and a set it and forget it.

For our company, Zimbra fit the bill nicely.

The three largest ISPs in the UK (90% of all internet users) all hijack your DNS NXDOMAIN responses by default, eg you are opted in without asking

see.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Virgin+media+DNS+hijack
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Talk+Talk+DNS+hijack
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=BT+DNS+hijack

none of it by explicit consent (like "yes i pay you to sell my privacy and out of the deal i get nothing of any value")

its not the politicians you want to be afraid of, its these so called "entrepreneurs" who are desperate enough to think selling your own customers data to anyone who pays them is perfectly acceptable business and secure practice, and wont cost businesses time and money (he still doesnt know why his DNS is screwed, he had to work around it).

get root or even DOS 62.6.40.178 & 92.242.132.15 (the middleman marketing companies servers) and their neighbours and you have 10million+ BT users DNS settings, its such a dumb idea that one of those sociopaths on "the apprentice" could of invented it

jerks

Cant be more than $10,000? I have single switches worth 6x that.

When I said $10,000 that was clearly tongue in cheek. As in the PHB saying, "Do whatever it takes to get this up and running! Hear me? Whatever it takes. As long as you can do it for free."

You'd be surprised how often some people actually get this as a demand from their boss, myself included. It's amazing how one can build an entire infrastructure for free nowadays with open-source solutions like Zimbra*, Resara*, and Bacula*, along with a few little TurnKey appliances here or there. The only real cost is hardware which, thankfully, is getting cheaper all the time...

* why do all of these things end with "uh"?

Why should I move to Firefox?

My overall reasons for choosing Firefox over Chrome is the lower memory usage (I don't use stuff like adblock which chews a ton of memory), and sites generally are more likely to work for me in Firefox.

Examples of sites that don't work with Chrome but do in Firefox (either by some functions being broken or not working at all) in my experience: Zimbra's administration panel, Citibank poland, HSBC UK, Monster, Desert Sun Classifieds and others that I can't recall off the top of my head.

Zimbra Desktop ?

You mean like zimbra?

I'm in a similar position at an NGO, except that we have offices in 4 other countries with 20 or more people each.

Here's what worked for us, your results may vary:

New desktops: should it be laptops (with dockingstations), regular desktop machines or thin clients?

Laptops. We are frequently traveling, often to areas with little to no internet access, and being able to bring your data with you is a good thing. Mostly Macbooks, as they are reliable, easy to use, and integrate well with the rest of our systems.

Servers: We need a server for authentication and user management.

We use Zimbra for authentication and user management. It also serves our email - IMAP and SMTP, shared calendars and task lists - synchronized over calDAV, and a web-based interface to all of the above.

We also need an internal media server

Each office has an internal Linux server running Samba, authenticating over LDAP to Zimbra. Works equally well with Mac and Windows clients.

Finally we would like to have our web server in house.

Are you sure about that? Do you have the bandwidth and a reliable enough connection? We went with a dedicated server hosted somewhere with multiple redundant connections.

feel free to comment on anything important not on the list.

Email and collaboration software?
Again we use Zimbra, and it integrates remarkably well with iCal on Mail on the Macs. Windows users can use Thunderbird + Lightning or the Zimbra desktop client.

Printing?
We run CUPS on the Linux server, so the Macs pick up the shared printers automatically. Windows users can print over Samba with click to install drivers.

I have looked at it and it does look interesting. The problem is that Zimbra doesn't really replace exchange unless you pay for the enterprise version.

http://www.zimbra.com/products/compare_products.html
The Community version is not feature complete.
While close not really a FOSS solution for an Exchange replacement.

For a long time Palm has worked incredibly well over the wire with Linux and Linux sync tools. I cannot speak about the latest and greatest of this. but if they use the same backend protocol then it should be the same. In a newer sense there have been no tools to do a over the wire sync with android yet. which is ironic as it is a Linux smartphone OS. However there are a number of over the air solutions that exist. one of which is actually provided by Ubuntu in the Ubuntu one service. this is based off of funambol's technology which works very much like RIM's technology. However some things allready exist. If you have a mailserver that is compatible with activesync then you can connect that way directly to your mailserver (i do not know off the top of my head about this) but in a simpler way you can get email and connect it via IMAP directly so email synchronization with email on the server is easy. contacts and appointments are now the harder issue. however if your company is willing to go that direction zimbra appears to work with windows mobile active sync, and may be an option for you. this it would seem is your best option to keep it all in house. http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Mobile_Device_Setup the only other option is to find out how much data is on their servers with funambol

While it's totally overkill for the job, I highly recommend you run a Zimbra Open Source instance for yourself. Although you don't need much of what it provides (Calendaring, contact sync, Jabber IM, etc), it will let you store your messages in a stable, searchable and accessible form. Zimbra can directly import from PST or via IMAP (with your mail client or imapsync) and once it has your messages it full text indexes them with Lucene and so you can search them via the web or IMAP clients. You can easily get your messages out via one of the supported export formats or just use your IMAP mail client to dump the messages into mbox/maildir/pst/whatever. While you could certainly roll your own, why not let someone else take care of all the hard work for you?

While it's totally overkill for the job, I highly recommend you run a Zimbra Open Source instance for yourself. Although you don't need much of what it provides (Calendaring, contact sync, Jabber IM, etc), it will let you store your messages in a stable, searchable and accessible form. Zimbra can directly import from PST or via IMAP (with your mail client or imapsync) and once it has your messages it full text indexes them with Lucene and so you can search them via the web or IMAP clients. You can easily get your messages out via one of the supported export formats or just use your IMAP mail client to dump the messages into mbox/maildir/pst/whatever. While you could certainly roll your own, why not let someone else take care of all the hard work for you?

My human-to-human interaction is greatly facilitated by Facebook. I can keep track of more friends at a time, easily organize events, and I know that most likely they'll have an email notification for all these things.

I do the same thing with my account on a server running Zimbra opensource edition. I don't need Facebook to do that.

Zafara and Zimbra come pretty close, interface wise, but they are more like web-based MS Outlook-replacements than simple E-mail clients. They are also not simple free hosted webmail, you (or your admin) will have to maintain your own server or pay for them to host it.

For me it is the other way around. The people who know or use MySQL are in the minority. Everybody I know uses mainly PostgreSQL (unless one shitty OSS project requires MySQL).

I'm quite fond of Zimbra, however it uses MySQL. Any ideas about a better solution that replaces Zimbra which is not in the "minority"?

You mean something like Zimbra, care of Yahoo, Inc.?

Squirrelmail is pretty good if you want to go the php route.. Zimbra has a very nice web client. And there's always Outlook Web Access or whatever they are calling it nowadays. Exchange has it's own problems but Gmail is just not enterprise class. I could see it as a student-only email service however.

What about Zimbra? Blows Gmail out of the water and you can host it yourself, meaning compliance with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.

I just trust Google less and less as time goes on. I'm not sure why, I just get a bad feeling about them. I think they mean well but they are sort of out of control and their philosophies and that of the world are not keeping up with the advances in technology. Google Apps seems to just package up a bunch of crap that other people already do, taking advantage of the fact that they have a captive audience for search.

I've used Google Apps and they are fine for very simple things but I hate how it's disolving the IT department's role in managing information and giving it to people who don't know anything about it becasuse they are saving a few bucks. Who are you going to call when your file goes missing? Google? Oh wait, they don't have a help desk.

Too late.
http://labs.mozilla.com/prism/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx
http://www.screenlets.org/index.php/Screenshots

You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, ...

They say that the internal project to make zimbra the internal email plataform at yahoo (like gmail is at google, under the Mona name) was handed over to a bunch of people that actually had Exchange Engineer as their work title. So, the Sr. exchange Engineer veredict was that exchange was better. What a surprise. Zimbra will probably get sacked.

You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, including my WinMo phone.

It's a god-send, it works nicely with basically no fuss or hassle, and it's owned by Yahoo.

Hey, if Yahoo goes belly up, I just hope they sell Zimbra to somebody who can take the good thing handed to them and DO SOMETHING with it!?!?

Yeah, you have to buy it. And it is expensive!! But, when my org looked at TCO (on of Microsoft's favorite topics), Zimbra came out MUCH cheaper for the same feature set (Including MAPI based Outlook support). They support blackberries, and have full-on Mac sync, too. Plus, their web-client is quite nice/usable (as opposed to OWA), and support is responsive. So, there is the answer to the original question: where is the full-feature-set competetion: it is at Zimbra. (Note - I am not affiliated in Zimbra in any way, except for being a happy customer!)

I've looked at this before. Let's run through the numbers:

Exchange 2007 pricing boils down to $699/server for Standard with $67/CAL, which gives you five storage groups and five databases per Mailbox server role. In my experience, one database on a reasonably well equipped server can handle 100 mailboxes without any serious effort; it would take each user pulling in a 500 MB mailbox before you run into the artificial 50 GB database limit, which is easily circumvented with a well-documented registry change. Obviously, this being Microsoft, you get an "Outlook connector" for free, as well as mobile support. With a single tweak to the registry, a single server should be able to handle hundreds of large mailboxes.

Looking at Zimbra's feature matrix, meanwhile, the only version that comes with the Outlook connector is the Professional Edition, which "starts" at $28/user/year.

Let's do the math.

Assume that, whether you get Exchange or Zimbra, you'll be able to run it for about three years before you have to upgrade to the latest and greatest version. This is probably a bit fast for most corporations, but it'll give us an idea of what we can do. Assuming this is the case, we're looking at an equation that resembles:

699+67x = 3(28x)

Solving for x, we find that, for x > 42, Exchange is actually cheaper if we amortize the up-front licensing costs for Exchange over a three year period. This gets even worse for Zimbra if we push it farther than that. Now, that said, this is only true if we ignore Windows 2008 licensing, which does push things into Zimbra's favor, provided we're installing Zimbra on a free-as-in-beer OS of some sort. On the other hand, we didn't even include Zimbra mobile pricing, which isn't even included with Zimbra Professional.

In short, if you install Zimbra on a free-as-in-beer system, yes, it will come in slightly cheaper than Exchange. If you don't, though, Exchange pricing is actually comparably affordable.

I've looked at this before. Let's run through the numbers:

Exchange 2007 pricing boils down to $699/server for Standard with $67/CAL, which gives you five storage groups and five databases per Mailbox server role. In my experience, one database on a reasonably well equipped server can handle 100 mailboxes without any serious effort; it would take each user pulling in a 500 MB mailbox before you run into the artificial 50 GB database limit, which is easily circumvented with a well-documented registry change. Obviously, this being Microsoft, you get an "Outlook connector" for free, as well as mobile support. With a single tweak to the registry, a single server should be able to handle hundreds of large mailboxes.

Looking at Zimbra's feature matrix, meanwhile, the only version that comes with the Outlook connector is the Professional Edition, which "starts" at $28/user/year.

Let's do the math.

Assume that, whether you get Exchange or Zimbra, you'll be able to run it for about three years before you have to upgrade to the latest and greatest version. This is probably a bit fast for most corporations, but it'll give us an idea of what we can do. Assuming this is the case, we're looking at an equation that resembles:

699+67x = 3(28x)

Solving for x, we find that, for x > 42, Exchange is actually cheaper if we amortize the up-front licensing costs for Exchange over a three year period. This gets even worse for Zimbra if we push it farther than that. Now, that said, this is only true if we ignore Windows 2008 licensing, which does push things into Zimbra's favor, provided we're installing Zimbra on a free-as-in-beer OS of some sort. On the other hand, we didn't even include Zimbra mobile pricing, which isn't even included with Zimbra Professional.

In short, if you install Zimbra on a free-as-in-beer system, yes, it will come in slightly cheaper than Exchange. If you don't, though, Exchange pricing is actually comparably affordable.

Hello,

Zimbra is a good platform that we use for a company with just over 3000 users. The open source edition may do what you need. We currently use the fully loaded version with paid for support because it has "active-sync" support etc. however you maybe able to get the most from the FOSS edition.

The open source does-it-all collaborative suite programs like Exchange certainly need to be more competitive, but so far they are promising. So, maybe your Exchange-using organization should switch. Two "larger" looking ones I've found are:

Zarafa

Zimbra

Both were just a simple google search away. :P

As for an Exchange client solution, well...difficult, since Microsoft controls the communication interface for that and I doubt at this stage they are interested in freely playing nice with non-Microsoft clients. In that case, your best bet is to change the server.

I take that back, they may be getting enough pressure for playing nice with clients due to the whole .NET + Evolution thing, seems like they might be pushing for it a bit, since Evolution is somewhat working with Exchange. I can at least get email as well as see calendar events and get warnings about them, but sending emails I haven't tried very hard to figure out how to do. Hopefully the push for that isn't some sort of patent backstabbing deal though. Regardless, I'd rather not deal with that patent troll if I can help it and would instead ask for something that at least used standards so that you could use what client you wanted to. Microsoft doesn't know the meaning of the term "standard", plus, you know, there's the whole hatred for Linux and just trying to pull everyone onto their platforms thing so they can "collect at a later date" - Bill Gates.

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.

Okay:

MediaWiki
WordPress
Jabber
Zimbra ...

Get it?

This is about using open source software for internal, noncommercial, nonprofit purposes.

Also, it needs pointing out that MS probably wants to acquire Yahoo not only for its search-related business. After acquiring Zimbra, the most viable open source alternative to MS Exchange, Yahoo becomes a prime target for MS acquisition and extinguishment of that threat to one of the most lucrative and monopolious MS products.