Open Source Software in a Windows Environment?

brennan73 asks: "Like many people, I work in a Windows NT/2000 shop that has absolutely resisted bringing *nixes into our environment. Everyone has their reasons - my boss has resisted because it would be more difficult and expensive to find a replacement admin if I leave, since said replacement would need to be able to administer both Windows and *nix boxes, which I can understand. But I'm still curious...has anyone out there replaced major pieces of Microsoft software with open source equivalents in a medium-to-large business environment, while still running on the Windows platform?"

"Like many people in such shops, I've just about had it with IIS's security problems. I'm also highly unimpressed with Microsoft's new licensing schemes. In other words, between security and money concerns, I can see good reasons for businesses to look for alternatives to Microsoft's standard offerings, for apps and utilities if OSes are ruled out by management.

So, I'm thinking of replacing IIS and Office with Apache and StarOffice for Windows, and I'm open to other examples on both servers and the desktop. Why did you switch? How painful was it for both you and the users? Any experiences that anyone could relate, even failed experiments, would be great."

Comments

Can anyone recommend an Exchange replacement?

[st. augustine]

The suits at my (relatively small) company insist on using Outlook (yeah, yeah, I know) and aren't likely to change that in the foreseeable future, particularly as it's what all the new suits coming in as the company grows are used to. They're now insisting on installing Exchange, because it's the only -- or appears to be the only -- server solution that gives them a calendaring system that's integrated with their email address books.

Does anyone know of a good open-source / free software equivalent? I haven't been able to find anything. For that matter, I haven't been able to find an open-source calendaring client that works with Exchange -- Ximian Evolution and some of the KDE software can apparently handle peer-to-peer vCalendar messages, but they can't do the conflict checking and whatnot you get with the centralized system.

I'm dreading the day when they come around and say "okay, we're tired of not being able to schedule developers for meetings; you all need to switch over to Windows and Outlook." Anyone have any useful ideas?