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HP's OpenMail: I'm Not Dead Yet
Jon Hill writes "It looks as if HP's OpenMail system is not dead yet and development of the project has been assumed by Samsung's software division. This is great news considering OpenMail was the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange. Now if only it was strongly marketed and made well known, enterprise administrators such as myself could embrace it." For those of not familiar, essentially OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise, despite that people should know better.
Exchange is actually one of Microsoft's best products. Unlike the NT registry and SAM database it's based on LDAP and a dumbed down SQL database engine. In addition to the workgroup features like calendars, team folders, public folders it has a ton of other great features.
One is called Deleted Item Retention Time. You set the number of days and when a user deletes an email it's not really deleted for the specified days. If he realizes he made a mistake restoration is from the Outlook client and takes seconds saving the admin time from going to the back up tapes. For businesses like law firms it's a life saver since they are required to keep records and emails for five years or so. They simply buy a lot of storage and set a deleted item retention item of 1600 days or so and it's a secondary back up.
A second feature is single instance storage. You send a file out to 50 people it gets stored once in the database saving you storage space.
Then third party back up programs have a feature called brick level back up's where you can back up individual mailboxes. If you delete on by accident restoration is simple. Exchange 2000 has this feature out of the box.
Exchange is scalable. It's overkill for small offices and I've supported it for a government agency with 35,000 employees and 300 Exchange servers. It scales very well.
A good Exchange anti-virus program like Trend Micro Scanmail 3.7 has file blocking features and greatly eases the management of your anti-virus strategy.
Since email is in a database searching for messages is easy.
And the global address book is great. Users don't have to keep their own huge address book and greatly minimizes the calls to the admin of I sent out this email but it came back returned and asking you to track down an email address.
Sure you can cobble together a few products for most of the functionality and perform some of the usability features manually, but you'll spend more time while the CEO is asking you to restore an email from a year ago.
One word: Calendaring.
As much crap as LookOut/Exchange does, there is no other piece of software that seamlessly integrates the groupware automated scheduling functionality that Exchange does. From a New Event window, I can create the event, add users from the Exchange domain, verify their schedules, move the event, confirm it, have a mail sent that shows up to each person with the information and 3 buttons (Accept, Decline, and Accept Conditionally). After I send the Email, I can then track who has opened the Email, who has replied, who is coming, and who isn't.
Evolution is a nice client, but it's a client. All of that work is on the serverside.
Notes is OK, but I need a bigger machien to run it on than I run my data warehouses on. And when it crashes (when, not if), it's gonna be seriously borked.
This is why companies use Exchange/LookOut. Not because it's a great mail client, but because it integrates all of the possible messageing functions a business needs, and talks to additional software like Project to plot out Project Management information.
OpenMail is the only other server-side enterprise messaging system out there that fulfills these needs. It's a decent program, it's not MS, it's significantly cheaper (if for no other reason then you only need 10% of the servers to run it on), and it runs on a more stable OS.
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