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Can We Finally Ditch Exchange?
"With new releases on the way, like Mandrake 9.0 and the new Lycoris can we who try to use Free Software in business environments hope for any change? Do the commercial Linux distros have any plans to implement a free replacement for Exchange, including a Win32 client-side bridge? If not, why not? Do you feel it is too cost prohibitive to imitate Bynari in this case, or is it a decision more along the lines of 'we'd rather you used Evolution and Mandrake/Lycoris/Whatever, rather than OutLook and Win32'? If it's the latter I'd be severely disappointed, and I don't think I'm alone. Any discussion on this topic would be appreciated; but what I'd really love is a community push to get this done. Perhaps a running Web-A-Thon to raise the money to simply purchase the technology from Bynari? I personally think it would be a great move towards grabbing market share from some of the other distributions, some of which have the technology but choose to keep it closed, as well as from the Great Dragon. What do you think?"
Untill there is a standard calendar protocol, and that protocol is supported by exchange, you won't be able to get rid of it.
second society
1.) Companies are having difficulty implementing the calendar system that Exchange uses properly. 2.) Microsoft professional support, big business likes the idea of having someone to blame when things don't work. They sign contacts that make people have it fixed within a specific time period or they recieve massive compensation.
At the place I work at, we have both an exchange server and a POP3/IMAP server. We catch so much flak from our users over the exchange server than the POP3 server, Then again 90% of our users use OutLook even though we have a site license for Eudora,and offer Netscape and an IMAP web client. They get lost even though we have an excellent web-directory and one of the best calendar projects around. Everyone has a public folder that they can put stuff into to share with the rest of the network byt they still insist on using Exchange. Personally I can't find any feature that justifies all of the garbage we have to put up with to get it running. Outlook sucks!(there goes my karma) Outlook crashes more often then IE, Outlook is targeted my more virii then ever. If these people would change their mail client, they wouldn't have this problem. The exchange server is jacked up as well. We have to call and have it re-set every three days and I'd bet that the network "gurus"(/sarcasm) don't know how to admin it either!!!... argh!
First, most non-tech corporate types have heard of Exchange. Next, they like to have someone to sue. Even those projects with companies behind them don't have much to go after. Even though Microsoft has a EULA that supposedly frees them from any liability if the software screws up, it makes the corporate types feel better. Also, they can hire any MCSE off the streets to run the Exchange server. There aren't many standard certs that they can rely on when they need to hire your replacement after you've bundled together all this unfamiliar software on their servers. When you consider the hiring difficulties, lack of certifications, and lack of accountability of the authors of the software, the open source projects may, in fact, cost a good bit more than the $10,000 worth of Microsoft software. The entry costs of this software look enormous to individuals, but to corporations, it often doesn't appear to be much money. Corporations care much less about software politics than most of us do. The open source solution has the benefit of getting out of proprietary formats, but I don't think that's very high up on the list of priorities of the people making the decisions.
At work, we've been trying to switch over from using exchange but a lot of people have implemented some very neat features, like for instance. If I have an appointment to do a stress test on a patient, the nurses send an email so that it is loaded onto my palm pilot when i sync and a letter is automatically printed out letting the patient know when the test is scheduled.
The IT guys think they may have found an exchange server replacemetn with SUSE but for now exhcnage is very useful and would be very hard to replace.
Thanks for reading
Sigs are dangerous coy things
There has been plenty of call for an open source groupware application like Exchange and as yet there are still none. My appologies to the folks at PHP-Groupware but, even though this is often cited as a solution, it simply isn't an adequate solution especially for a medium or large enterprise.
Frankly, I had always thought that the Sendmail folks would be the one to deliver. They have certainly nailed down the mail side and I feel that they could do a great job integrating calendaring and other groupware features, most importantly a programming interface to make it an extensible solution like Exchange or Notes. Unfortunately, as of yet, they have not indicated that they are pursuing this.
OSS is still out in the cold when it comes to an OSS Groupware application that scales.
The problem with evolutions is that is doesn't run on windows, so it is fairly usless to mixed shops. Also, it only supports exchange AFAIK when it comes to calendar/scheduling. In theory it supports LDAP for the address book, but the gloss factor in the manual on that point is very high. (see for yourself: here)
I know that the small software company I work for would love to have Evolution on every desktop (windows and linux) using LDAP for a shared address book and calendar, but it just can't happen today. Oh well, here is hoping that the Kompany can get Aethera right sometime this decade...
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
The whole concept of Exchange, in my opinion, is flawed. Each Exchange server recreates a mini-internet within a lan, that connects to other mini-internets within other lans, tied together by wans (or mans--as the case may be) and also tied together by the real internet [a nebulous definition goes here].
Here, we have one Exchange server for 150 people. But then there are 9 locations, from San Francisco to san Diego. They all hit the same server through the wan.
Remote users (15+) also use outlook web access (i't really Exchange web access if you think about it) to access their mail. We have to allow that traffic through the firewall.
And every single one of our people have one or more other email addresses (AOL, Earthlink, RR, whatever).
I would say: have better addressing handling.
Email was first created by geeks for geeks (at univs. and gov.) and served its purpose well. When the move was made to the company, the whole transition was just done wrong.
I say the Exchange servers should be totally eliminiated in favor of a non-lan/wan centric solution (watch your step, marketing words all around), namely a true internet application, shared, replicable, and reliable.
As far as calendaring is concerned, we don't use it much. Our corporate values promote face-time and intelligent conversation more than lines on a spreadsheet, so meetings are more dynamic, more fluid, and less apt tp be "scheduled". Usually it's a phone call.
Anyway, I digress.
But this may be the reason no open-sourcer wants to tackle that issue. It may subconsciously feel flawed to recreate the Exchange architecture.
"Piter, too, is dead."
It has calendar features, imap, maildir support
LDAP-auth support etc.
Not having dealt w/ Exchange I can't say how it competes on buzzword
bullet points but from a distance it looks like it would
tackle most of the core functionality.
Hmmmm.. Looks like I got a bit carried away there, but you get my meaning.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Is that most engineers like me don't like outlook, or any other integrated calendaring tools. We still use pine, or mutt or something.
There is no personal motivation to build such a product. The people who really have a motiviation are companies like RedHat who would benefit from the support contracts they could sell as a result of having this software in their suite.
Big Companies like support, and RedHat is selling. It doesn't help however if the product physicaly isn't out there.
Someone complained about there being no 'Standard' for a calendaring protocol. Why don't you draw up and RFC? It's not that hard (Sure beats the guy who wrote up a joke RFC for TCP/IP over XML or TCP/IP over carrier pigeon). If someone would pay my salary, I would start work on an exchange replacement tomorrow, open protocol or not. It's sad that Open Source or any UNIX software on the desktop falls at the last hurdle: Microsoft Office and affiliated products. Open Office is pretty good, but it still looks like crap on the standard RedHat distro, and like it or not, most corporates are buying RedHat.
I purchased Applixware years ago, and it was great! I did bunches of stuff in it. But it's not a Visio/Outlook replacement.
My Top Three reasons it's not happening:
No Integrated Calendaring/Email
No Fonts
No Visio
I can get by with open office for Excel replacement, and Word replacement, but I'm not a power user of those products to start with. I'd rather write a perl script to process data than a Word Macro or VB Script.
Perhaps someone (RedHat/Madrake/SuSe) should get out there and find out what people really want.
Of course this is assuming that they are targeting the windows market (which RedHat for one isn't).
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I was approached by Bruce Perens at LWE and he stated that Debian needed better support for Open Office. I looked at him and told him as soon as one of us had a reason to care we would.
This is the fundamental problem with Open Source in business land -- you need a coder who has the time to code and actually cares about making it work. I see lots of sysadmin types complain about Exchange but no one seems to hate it enough to sit down and work on something better. Most of the businesses approaching Mandrake, RH, etc are looking to dump the Microsoft solutions entirely so Exchange is not a big deal there. Or they are only looking for server -> server solutions and not desktops.
Last but not least you have the problem that Exchange is 100% proprietary. Look at all of the "fun" Samba has had trying to get smb interoperability right. I also bet Microsoft would be VERY apt to sue a company that did this into the ground. Might as well paint a target on your head.
As with every other itch you just need to find someone to scratch it. You mentioned "clients", why not funnel some of that contracting cash to coders willing to work on the project.
I used to contract with them back in 01, they were a sweatshop of Indian H1B's even then. There was no innovention in anything they created. I was given the position of guiding 4 developers on a side project they did for the gov. I gave the guys the usual pep talk and had gave them a flow of what to do, but sadly I was rather innocent with the techniques used in Bynari. A week after my implementation plan was laid out, a finished product was rushed to me as a presentation, I WAS STUNNED. I remember stammering and saying, this is not possbile (since my estimates said that it would take the 4 developers 3 full months to work it out into implmentation ) and what I saw in front was a full launch product. I asked them various questions as to how they came up with a product that fast, but the answers never came... Thus, I did a little bit of sleuting (Right after I left that consutling job (one good thing about consulting btw)), and here is what I found.
The guy I put in charge of programming (Krishna) what he was basically doing was going onto Soureforce and similar opensource sites and looking for projects that he can strun up and assemble into our product (sicne our product had generic thing that can be done like that -- it was multimedia traffic controlling unit). Krishna over a few beers (and after being laid off aftr the fall of etc etc.. ) told me that this is how everthing is done there, he went onto say that 90% of everthing in the product that I supposidly helped produce came from the net and opensource projects, one guy in the team was good in obsfucating code, the other was good in putting the different modules to work together.. I didnt know what to say, later I looked at the opensource projects in question and two of them have died off over time... This is sad, the guys at Bynari got over 1.5 million dollars for what we made. BTW, if your a journalist or some opensource person interested in this story, I could be reached at krugerfi@NOSPAM.GRIconsulting.com
OEone and Mozilla are working on an Open Source calendar server. Support it!
An open source, open-standard solution to Exchange would be welcomed by everybody including Microsofts competition.
I can't count the number of software projects out there stifled by Exchange server, or free email services like Hotmail and Yahoo. Microsoft makes it very hard to develop for these services by keeping their protocols and methods under wraps.
Try getting into the corporate market with an email filter that doesn't support exchange ; or an email client that chokes on hotmail. Sad but true - even though free email services are a joke, especially to businesses with an IT department that can configure infinite email addresses for free, on the fly -- free email services are used in *every* business model. It's rediculous!
Open source needs to open the floor for innovation.
--Doug
I know that mentioning Lotus Notes violates the Code of Slashdot Posting, but take a look at Notes sometime. The people who designed that system spent a long time thinking very hard about how to build a mobile, distributed, secure groupware system (note: you do not need to agree with the solution they built to acknowledge that they thought very deeply about the problem). Then - they spent a lot of time and money building what they had designed.
(Exchange is basically an imitation of the 45% of Notes' features that are most commonly used, without the thought, design, or security).
Who in the Free Software/Open Source world is going to spend that kind of time and effort? Particularly given that most Linuxians fall into the "don't like groupware" camp?
sPh
I've implemented several Exchange servers in a few large organizations in my day and to replicate what it does would be not be easy.
I think this is part of the problem with any existing attempts or lack thereof to replicate it...Exchange very elegantly handles messaging, calendaring and basic groupware with elegance.
For instance Exchange uses databases with transactional capability to provide extreme scaleability and reliability on the back-end. It has backup APIs that support amazing throughput for on-line hot backups. The database reclaims pages and defragments itself essentially in real time. Exchange supports every protocol in the book...but most customers implement it with their proprieatary MAPI protocol because it actually works a lot better than things like POP3, & IMAP.
Single instance storage allows Sally from marketing to send out her corporate spam to all internal unsuspecting users and the message will only be stored once in the database, there are semaphore links that track who has read the message or deleted it from their mailbox, disk consumption and server I/O load is dramatically reduced, especially when the message is 5 megabytes across 15,000 users!
I could easily come with a design document for a system that would essentially clone Exchange, the problem is around actually programming the system.
You would need a robust database back-end with excellent management support for things like hot backup and real-time database page reclamation, powerful & scaleable MTAs, an arm's length list of supported protocols and APIs, a user friendly cross platform client...
The ability to get all the developpers to agree on how to solve all of the above would be the biggest challenge.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I know of three people who did get fired for buying Microsoft.
A friend of mine is now providing consulting to the companies in question. Two are running Twig on Linux servers, the other has their old non-ms, non-unix server back up and working (again) while they slowly transition to Linux.
Despite all the "I'll sound wise and neutral if I make out to be 'admitting' free software's flaws and giving Microsoft its due" commentary one sees here on slashdot as either an effort at karma whoring, or an effort at pro-Microsoft propoganda and astroturfing, the fact remains that there are really very few shops that cannot do without Microsoft, and many that actually benefit from running other platforms.
What is very interesting is the number of non-technical people who are coming to realize that, and while they don't necessarilly embrace free software in general, or GNU/Linux in particular, they are beginning to recognize just what a financial, technical, and time drain Microsoft and their products have become to their enterprises, and they are looking for ways out.
Even to the point where, now, people are starting to get fired for blindly purchasing Microsoft, and treating MS propoganda as a substitute for technical research and savvy.
Its a rather refreshing change, actually.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Eww, sourceforge! Actually, there's not even a webpage- waste of time until there's something I'm willing to put up. ;)
But there are about seventy-five pages of analysis of Domino and Notes in real-world settings, some design documents and a few prototypes of critical components (probably about 200-300h of work so far). I like doing things the right way, which takes time.
Things like Domino and Exchange can be pretty effective if used well, but frankley they're not very smart. My personal research interest is managing the complexity of business and research processes, and I've found that Domino and Exchange don't really help the problems much: they don't help manage the complexities, they simply space-shift them. There's a lot of really interesting and hard problems when you start trying to solve the failings of these two systems. :)
Not really. Most of us just hide, afraid of the slashflames. Exchange is quite simply the best collaboration system out right now. I run exchange 2000 at several locations. It doesn't crash. I have never had a virus go through exchange or outlook. I had to reboot my exchange server three and a half months ago, but that's because it was moving across town, and that's the one I use for client hosting.
Even with all that, I don't like it. Why not? Because, while she treats me very very well, exchange is not very interoperable. That's not really exchange's fault though. As far as I know, there is no standard for calendar and scheduling. If there were, and usable software supported it, I would pick the standards-compliant solution. That's the biggest gripe I have about the open source genre, that there just isn't enough quality software out there. Yes, I realize that this is my fault, at least in part. It might be yours too. Will you help me change?
funny munging
I think you have really hit the nail on the head Jason. We need something that can take over exchanges calendering functionality. Maybe some non profit consortium needs to get a grant to write this code full time. If you ask me, this and a fully functional replacement for MSOffice are the real MS killers in the business world. A general question: Wouldn't it be easier to port Evolution to win32 than to try this Trick from Scratch? John
Check out the Citadel project. This started as a BBS server, but it's gradually being built up into a groupware system. We've spent the last couple of years building up a solid messaging architecture and a fast, efficient server architecture. Right now it does IMAP, POP3, and SMTP natively (no tedious mucking about with Sendmail or Cyrus), and it's got a web interface, too. It has a single-instance, transactional data store. It has a pluggable, extensible architecture. And one of our design tenets is that it must be easy to install.
No calendaring yet, I'm afraid. We're still finishing up the server foundation. As soon as there are some decent calendar clients out there to test CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) with, we'll start building the calendar server.
I am absolutely serious about this project. This is not vaporware.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's made by Fujitsu, and runs on Linux, Solaris and NT. It has a really good web client, and fat (desktop resident) clients for WinX.
It does calendering, email, forums, file sharing and syncs across multiple sites. Directory services use X400/LDAP.
It's really cheap compared to Exchange and you can talk to it via IMAP, NNTP and, in version 6.0, webdav.
Check it out at www.teamware.com.
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
This has been an intensive issue in my firm (law firm, 120 users, two locations).
We avoided Exchange (there are all kinds of plusses and minuses there).
For email we use iPlanet's messaging server but are in the middle of switching over to Cyrus+postfix.
Our email clients are mostly netscape with some mozilla/outlook/outlook express/eudora. We plan wholesale conversion to Mozilla.
Many users prefer to use a web interface for email. Inital feedback on IMP has been good.
For a global addressbook we use Rolodap http://rolodap.sourceforge.net which is LDAP based. Rolodap has a web interface for searching, word processor use, data entry, etc. and also provides integrated autocompletion services to all the emailers we use. We also can extend its searches to include the local University (also LDAP) and Bigfoot if the sought address is not in our own database.
We use a central employee LDAP server (not the same one we use for Rolodap--rolodap has 35000 contacts in it) to manage email/mailboxes,web access, etc from a single interface. Though we are a touch "broken" now because of the conversion to Cyrus we will shortly be back to the goal of adding, changing, delting users, forwarding email, etc. through a single central interface. LDAP is our vehicle for that.
We like LDAP. A good open standard has all kinds of collateral benefits.
We use Steltor as our calendar -- calendaring is an important app for us and we are worried about its purchase by Oracle. LDAP controls Steltor as well.
Our documents are organized by client so the client network directories are what we use for shared files. We are about to add a means to email documents to the client file using Postfix and a little home grown app. Sharing files outside the client directories would cause us some concerns about whether we would meet our professional needs of maintaining a coherent client file.
A few observations:
First, we do not necessarily want a "one server does it all" solution. In our experience that compromises security, reliability, and redundancy. It kills flexibility, if for instance, to chnage your calendar you have to change your email server and addressbook. We much prefer to keep functions separate so long as we can have a rational presentation to the user.
Second, our users largely prefer web based interfaces if they have high performance. They find them simpler to use and more understandable. We find it simple to do "cheap" superficial integration by just giving them a master web page. Web based also provides an easy way for us to do remote access.
So for us, the key to replacing Steltor, if the Oracle acquisition doesn't work out, is a shared calendar that offers the same features, has good performance, integrates via LDAP. I do not know of an OSS app that does this.
I think both we and the original enquirer are looking for the same thing. A shared OSS calendaring server. We have email, contacts/addressbook, shared files, covered. We don't, outside of Steltor, have calendaring covered.
The original enquirer wanted calendaring that worked in Outlook. Browser based would be OK with us.
yes, I have looked at phpGroupware and its ilk and at SUSE Mail Server. All of them however provide me with too much integrated together or have deficiencies in the features/performance side of things.
- I use IMAP and POP3 through GWIA for 700+ users, off one box. It's been up 60 days, and that's because we moved offices two months ago.
;p
/etc/shadow, among other back-ends... What I haven't yet found is a good iCal server, other than that, I've found everything else I need to replace GroupWise with a stable cross-platform backend...
.tiff, .jpeg, .mp3 attachments there are, reports like this are things I can easily get out of other messaging systems...
Well, good for you. Novell discontinued support for GW 5.5 on the 1st of this month. Clearly you are able to run discontinued software, and clearly I'm not... I didn't have these problems when I ran GW5.5, in-fact IMAP and POP3 support was stable. Well I'm on GW6sp2/NW51sp5, and it's not stable - plain and simple... Neither in my production nor development environments.
- Maybe not, but I manage them using the same utility. Nobody has anything better, really. And because of the way the post office works, you have to communicate with a specific server agent, not just any server in the tree, so integrating passwords wouldn't really help any, unless you have no tape backups.
What a bullshit answer. With GW's separate username/password database, that makes for two authentication databases that I must maintain (top-down rebuilds of the entire fscking database, etc...) . For Novell to sell their eDirectory product as the be-all to end-all, their failure to integrate their two flagship products just shows where Novell is headed... If MS can integrate Exchange with ActiveDirectory, why cant Novell integrate GW with NDS - Novell's only been trying for, what, about 5 years now...
And, yes there is something better out there. I've tested multiple S/POP3 and S/IMAP daemons on the Linux platform that can authenticate to LDAP databases just as easily as
- What complete bullshit. In NWAdmin, I can control every option of the GroupWise client, I can set it remotely, and I can grey out the option so the user can't change it. What the can't you do? You want to add rules or specific proxy access, just go in to their box with the client, and do it.
NWAdmin, I see you haven't been cursed with ConsoleONE yet (ConsoleONE is Novell's replacement for its aging NWAdmin structure). You lucky sap! Wait until you see the cruft ConsoleONE has to offer - I ended up having to dedicate one PC to Console One, and another to NWAdmin and everything else I run...
Back to controlling the mailbox though; No you cant control every aspect of the mailbox with NWAdmin or ConsoleONE (you've never been able to). You get control over some parts, but then not others... It's inconsistent, and quick frankly, I've resorted to tweaking the Win32 registry to get to the options I need to change...
- Not based on my experience with Backup Exec 9.0. Even if you don't use the GWTSA's, you just make everyone access the post office over IP, instead of file access, and backup the directory. The files locked by the agent can be rebuilt from the files that will never be locked.
You're trying to backup a live mailbox! You'll love what GW6 has in store for you (no it's not yet fixed in GW6sp2). I have a 60 user PO, with aprox 100MB in each users mailbox, and the PO currently takes about 32GB (yes, that's 32GB) of disk space - you do that math (hint: it should only consume about 6GB...)... No, we don't use document libraries, and no none of the GWChecks fix it - no the ones run by me, Novell, or the consultant we brought in to try to fix it... Of-course I inherited this problem from a previous administrator, which means I stopped backing up a live system, and started shutting down the entire mail system to reliably back it up...
- Hmmmm... I've never cared about getting a report, really. Besides, GWCheck is for repairing the system, not reporting. But since I don't know what kind of reports you'd like, I'll leave this one alone.
No, GWCheck is also for reporting on the system as well. It's the only window into what's in the encrypted GroupWise message store - short of changing my users passwords and logging in as them... For example; I need to know things such as how many
- Groupwise is *great*. No, I don't work for Novell. Yes, I do administer a 2000 user enterprise system that runs Groupwise 5.5. We don't even need a dedicated e-mail guy, even for all 2000 users. And it doesn't even take up a big chunk of my time. I have 15 domains, 22 post offices, two internet gateway agents, and WebAccess set up. No issues, anywhere.
Well, that's your opinion, and I'll respect that, but I'll also consider the opinions of my peers that I regularly meet with regarding computer and networking issues. Most of the members in my groups are Novell and Unix fans (zealots in some cases), and nobody seems to be a fan of GroupWise 6...
- I think you're doing something wrong.
That's a pretty bold statement, considering I've had Novell techs and knowledgeable consultants working on the issues as well, and considering they they never got any further than I did (digging through the Support Forums, the online knowledgbase, and the best practices documents - while also pulling from my 7 years of prior experience and training with GW systems)...
GW is a dead-end solution, within no growth potential, and a messaging solution I wouldn't recommend to even my worst enemy... In-fact, my experiences with Exchange pale in comparison to the issues I've had with administering and building GroupWise systems..
What timing... Gotta run, one of my dedicated GroupWise servers just abended again (no, I'm not kidding).
If Lotus spent so much time thinking about Notes' design, why did they get it so horribly, horribly wrong?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I now longer have the book, but about ten years ago I read a Royal Academy of Engineering study that referred to hunters/gatherers of IT. I used that line a lot with my clients, it helped them figure what I did for them :)
Anyone else read it/have it/rememeber it?
Well, I think this not too hard....
Server Side:
1. The replacement must support Outlook as a client, people actually like Outlook as an integrated client.
No problem - Outlook supports IMAP.
2. The Replacement must work with the Sendto functions of Microsoft Office
Well, this is a client-side function, handled by Outlook, so doesn't belong in your server list. If you will be using Outlook (or a 100% clone), this will not be an issue.
3. The Replacement must be able to scale to 10's of thousands of users, in geographically diverse locations.
Most serious open source IMAP servers (Courier is nice, as is Cyrus) have no issue with this. Combined with Postfix, MySQL and OpenLDAP, you have a killer core.
4. Must Support Multipule languages
What? A server? Support languages? Pass the crackpipe!! A mail server should *always* be language neutral.
5. Must be easily scannable for Virus protection, and must be able to deny delivery of messages that fit certain criteria.
The core can do this.
6. Easy rules based scripting of mail events stored on the server as part of the user's mail box.
Requires some messing around (and some laxing of security principles - that is how MSExchange pulls it off) but can be done.
7. Must support enterprise calendaring/scheduling.
This is the tricky bit. Do we support standards? Not? Also, if Outlook must be the client, you need to wire-trace the protocol. Not too hard, since Outlook message events are basically specially formatted SMTP messages. (Ximian pulled it off)
8. Must inter-operate with Exchange during migration
No problem - MSX speaks LDAP, IMAP and SMTP. Can even run in parallel for a good amount of time (a requirement often overlooked).
9. Must support server and OS of choice at the company(You know what that means)
No, I don't know what this means. As most Open Source software is, in good engineering fashion, not too hard to port, this shouldn't be an issue.
10. Must offer web mail capabilities equal too or better than OWA(this includes the ability to secure the web mail client via SecureID)
Yeah - I'm using one of the many webmail clients that leave OWA eating dust right now. It's called IMP, and it rocks. Is the requirement for SecureID all you need, cuz this baby can do lots more. http://www.horde.org
11. Must support massive data stores, on the order of 500GB-1TB(yes exchange can do this)
Yes - Exchange can theoretically do this - finally, after trying for almost 5 years. The core mentioned above places no limits on the size of the underlying datastore. It is irrelevant.
12. Must Integrate with our directory services, like exchange 2000 integrates with AD.
Yup - see under OpenLDAP
13 In short it has to do all the things that exchange can do, and more, and better.
You forgot cheaper - this is cheaper, as well as better, more robust, easier to manage, and requires less nursing. The most requested feature from MSExchange admins to MS is faster reboots of the servers. Reboots? I just smile.
Client Side:
1. Must have a client which supports all the functions of the server side. In short its gotta work like Outlook.
Well, you wanted Outlook, no?
2. Must Support OS, and hardware of choice.
Well, you wanted Outlook, no?
3. Easy Rules based scripting interface to server and client side rules(Think Outlook rules wizard)
Well, you wanted Outlook, no?
4. Must be dead simple for users to use, users don't learn they want everything to work just like it always has, even if you give them a new application to do it.
Well, you wanted Outlook, no?
Even so - there are alternatives to Outlook that work nicely. If you are willing to spend the time on the change management (I know - it requires soft skills and all, and you have to deal with users, but once you try it, you find it is not too hard.) you will see that users are not too hard to persuade to change. You do spend time on change management, no?
Cheers.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.