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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.
Translation: "Me and a bunch of people got drunk, thought we could code, submitted the idea and produced a fancy web page. It's now two years later and the project has no files to download and is STILL on Stage 1, Planning."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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!
Alot of companies/admins are waiting for an Exchange replacement. I for one have considered dropping exchange for a flat out mail server that runs in a *nix environment but it always comes back to the scheduling of exchange. With all of the people out there writing code, it still amazes me that nothing has surfaced. Why not take time off f the useless mp3 player/id3 reader/all of the other crap and contribute to a worthwhile project?
My sig of choice is Marlboro
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.
This is not trying to be a troll, but it seems there is always one more "clincher" in the movement away from MS products. IE / Office / Outlook / Photoshop you name it, but now it is Exchange. OSS always makes a replacement, but it is only 98% there in terms of functionality in most cases. As soon as we get Exchange out of the way, there will still be something else left to take its place to prevent adoption.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Formerly HP's Openmail is another Exchange replacement, but exactly like Bynari's product it still requires some licensing.
I've been surprised that there hasn't been more effort on the Linux side of things to create a replacement. I would have thought that Redhat would have come up with something. Since as the poster notes, Exchange functionality tends to be a big killer whenever you flirt with replacing in house systems. If you can't provide the integrated and shared calendaring it usually won't fly.
Check out Samsung Contact. It used to be HP OpenMail. HP discontinued it, and Samsung bought it, because they were using it heavily internally. I think it does everything that Exchange does. There are a few nits with Outlook that make it look a little different than an Exchange server, but even those seem to be getting worked out. They're also fully standards-based.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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
I agree.
However creating something , even Opensource that does what Notes and Domino do is quite a task. Do they do it well ? not hardly.. but its effective and a great many places are as entrenched with domino as others are with exchange..
you need to make your solution protocol compatible.. you need to make your solution make the transition as painless as possible.. and then provide all the functionality that was had before.. but in new and better ways.. its the only way to get it accepted. Many many great software packages go unused because they came along after inferior products were entrenched and didnt provide a solution for seamless painless cross over.
If you want to kill Domino (and god knows i do too).. then dont only create a replacement.. create a bridging application to get the corporation from the ugly wasteland that is Domino to your utopia... that my friend is where the true battle lies.
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.
But Microsoft's proprietary mailbox format, MAPI, which nothing but the Outlook clients appear to be able to read. Sources have it on my side that Exchange XP, I think, moves toward IMAP for its mailbox.
Someone else may have more information on this to acknowledge or debunk. I do sit by an Exchange tech who can give me an answer to this later, but not today.
I hope this happens--using the Outlook client in Mac OS 9/Classic while running OS X is a pain, and I noted a nasty bug for users who aren't in DST time zones that make the calendar worthless for half a year.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
>
As bad as exchange is, the entire FAA has been in the process of switching over their email system to Lotus Notes from CCMail. You folks using Exchange have no idea how good you have it.
Casca
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."
- An OSS backend that replaces Exchange for calendaring at least. We can use IMAP and LDAP and such for the other functionality because at least there exist standard protocols, but there is no competetive backend for calendaring applications. It would be really nice to have an OSS all-in-one that does IMAP/LDAP/calendaring, but first things first.
- An OSS front-end like Evolution, but one that works on Windows as well as Unixes.
At our organization (a small university), we are desperately looking for a comprehensive calendaring solution -- one that supports teams, conflict resolutions, notifications, palm synching, and can be used either at home or at the office. I am the OSS advocate in our IT department, but I just can't find a suitable OSS solution. In fact, the only solution I can think of that even remotely fits the bill is Outlook and Exchange.The unfortunate part is that we're using Netscape 4.x here, mainly because of its mail client. (We're using IMAP and LDAP on our backend and NS 4.x Messenger is still pretty good, even though the browser sucks.) Netscape 7.x / Mozilla 1.x is nearly there, but not quite. If there was a calendar solution that worked with Mozilla/NS7 that had those features and had a OSS server, it would be like a dream come true. As it stands, I may have to roll out a small deployment of Outlook and Exchange just to solve this problem (which has come down from the president BTW, so it can't just be ignored until a suitable OSS solution comes along). Now suddenly we're mix-mashing between NS 4.x over IMAP with Outlook and Exchange. You can see what is going to happen with that nice IMAP/LDAP solution in a year.
I think what we really need is a standard protocol, de facto or otherwise, for network calendaring. There is iCal, but from what little I know about it, it's just not comprehensive enough. (Does it deal with network transport?)
Jason.
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.
If we truely want to provide an alterative to Exchange as someone who works in an entirely exchange based environment, here is my analysis of what my PHB's would have to see.
Server Side:
1. The replacement must support Outlook as a client, people actually like Outlook as an integrated client.
2. The Replacement must work with the Sendto functions of Microsoft Office
3. The Replacement must be able to scale to 10's of thousands of users, in geographically diverse locations.
4. Must Support Multipule languages
5. Must be easily scannable for Virus protection, and must be able to deny delivery of messages that fit certain criteria
6. Easy rules based scripting of mail events stored on the server as part of the user's mail box.
7. Must support enterprise calendaring/scheduling.
8. Must inter-operate with Exchange during migration
9. Must support server and OS of choice at the company(You know what that means)
10. Must offer web mail capabilities equal too or better than OWA(this includes the ability to secure the web mail client via SecureID)
11. Must support massive data stores, on the order of 500GB-1TB(yes exchange can do this)
12. Must Integrate with our directory services, like exchange 2000 integrates with AD.
13 In short it has to do all the things that exchange can do, and more, and better.
Client Side:
1. Must have a client which supports all the functions of the server side. In short its gotta work like Outlook.
2. Must Support OS, and hardware of choice.
3. Easy Rules based scripting interface to server and client side rules(Think Outlook rules wizard)
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. When we moved from Banyan Beyond Mail to Outlook when we went from a banyan network to an NT one it was a nightmare for all of the administrative assistants as their workflow was massively changed.
So there you have it....rebuild exchange as an OSS roject and get back to us...this is not meant as Troll, this is a real world example of how a corporation is going to look at such a thing.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
What about RFC 2447? The iCalendar protocol looks to have been developed jointly by Netscape, MS and Lotus. Exchange may support this, and even if it doesn't, this would be a good place to start.
As for the client-side, I think that I fully-featured web mail system can easily replace Outlook on the corporate desktop. They may all have Office, but they've got browsers too!
When it comes to selling to clients such as these, the product must provide much more than the client "absolutely needs". That is one of Exchange's selling points. It is "so extensible" that it can do anything. It doesn't matter that most places don't use half the features that it has. They perceive it to be important to have the features in case they need them in the future.
Sure, Exchange can be used as a voicemail server where you can listen to your voicemail from Outlook and there are even a few places that do this but, most never will. But, they all like the idea and hope to implement it one day therefore, their groupware server must be capable of doing it and, Exchange is.
I would guess that 98% of Exchange shops use it only for email and scheduling. Most probably don't even use the public folders. But they all bought it with some pipedream of using it as an all encompassing enterprise level meail server, voicemail server, document management system, coffee warmer and back massager.
In the end, if your product can't do all that, they'll buy Exchange.
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
We need a nice calendar protocol.
If we had some sort of calendar protocol that could authenticate using some other standards and allow groups to login to their system with different access rights from windows/linux/java/everywhere I think that would put a huge dent in the side of exchange.
The Mozilla calendar is pretty sharp. It would be cool to see it evolve in this direction.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Check out OpenOffice.org's groupware project. In the early development stages right now, it just got promoted to an "incubator" project. In addition, they just announced a deal with OEone to work together on improving the Mozilla Calendar project (as part of the overall OOo groupware effort).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
From an admin's point of view, yes, there are lots of problems with Exchange.
However from a user's point of view, Outlook runs circles around the crappy Notes client interface.
I'd much rather look at a ground-up mail server/mail client implementation than want anything to do with a Linux port of Notes.
...because the problem isn't interesting enough.
Open source shows a strong prediliction for solving interesting problems well ahead of boring ones. For instance, we had useful, powerful distributed databases, cryptography, new languages and C compilers long before we had a functional word processor and spreadsheet combo. Quite simply, we have already solved mail distribution and address-book sharing on their own, and have relatively little interest in peeling apart a proprietary MS standard for same which is liable to change next week. This is also the reason why OpenOffice is great for everything except reading and writing Word documents.
This flows into my new theory about how Microsoft intends to go about attacking Linux: A deluge of boring, repetitious, pointless APIs and interfaces for problems that were long ago solved but now must be addressed using these new, uselessly variant interfaces simply because that's what everyone else has to do. (Think dotnet.) A hacker's familiarity with extant interfaces is his or her number-one resource, and is therefore that which he or she will part with least readily --- even at the expense of the compatibility or useability of the code they're writing.
Microsoft's strategy is reminiscent, in some ways, of an ancient Incan technique for pacifying politically difficult villages and towns. By forcibly migrating the entire settlement to some distant part of the empire, the usefulness of the skill-sets of these hunter-gatherers was greatly reduced, making them dependent on the (massively centralized) government for handouts, and therefore suddenly rather polite in their relations with the regime.
In the same way that a hunter-gatherer depends on his knowledge of the land, a geek depends on knowledge of the problem and solution spaces. Furthermore, most OSS projects are extremely long-term endeavours; think GCC, think Emacs, think the Linux kernel(*). OSS developers work by building things slowly and correctly with a minimal expenditure of precious manpower; Microsoft works by using more coders, more money, insane work hours and a blase attitude toward standards (even difficult, complicated, important standards) so that they may get to market early , recoup such expenditures, and get to work on the next total (and totally incompatible) revision of their product, which people will use simply because of the upgrade path that MS will kludge together with exactly the same bloodyminded application of superior capital.
Simply put, we need stability more than they do, because they have more time and money. We write things right the first time, whereas they have the luxury of making as many mistakes as they need to in order to grab market share. But more importantly, we need the projects of the past to have been written right the first time; we need a working libc, kernel, and so forth, otherwise OSS simply doesn't happen. Microsoft has no such prerequisites to its growth, as, in a pinch, *it can simply replace its foundations by fiat*. Their hunter-gatherers can, metaphorically speaking, simply create (with a certain expenditure of time and effort) the landscape best suited to their requirements. Thus they can march along beside us, setting the pace, forcing a speedup, replacing good APIs with new because every step into new territory costs them less than it costs us, dissociates us from our well-known and powerful (if somewhat lacking) APIs and encourages our work to depend on their own work, which will then be changed, etc, rendering ours much less useful.
Ultimately, the strategy is designed to encourage hackers to go take up billiards or chess or something with a potential of being useful to remember or think about or use five minutes hence. The ultimate goal of cycling APIs is to induce *indifference*, as we face a choice between working harder on minutia or walking away, hands in the air.
(*)Note that, of these projects, two are sufficiently low-level to be immune to all but the most radical shifts in design; this is again indicative of what OSS excels at.
- undoware.ca
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
I've got non-computer savvy users who blow me away with how far they push the functionality of Exchange and the calendar/meeting functions. It's been an incredible boon for us to have this system in place.
On the flip side it's horribly complicated, unreliable, resource intensive, and when it breaks it breaks BAD. But even with all those negative things going against it, there's NOTHING else we can use to replace it. There is no competition for our dollar in this area, commercial or free.
And as far as Microsoft support... try getting them to help you fix your broken Exchange 5.5 installation sometime. We don't call Microsoft for anything--we don't believe they could be of any real help. As with any software that the user has to modify after installation, there's not much a phone tech guy can do to help.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
The reason that there is not an open source alternative to Exchange is because the features provided by exchange are really not that valuable. In fact, for many, it is just one more piece of annoying collaboration software foisted off on them by management as a panacea for all of their project woes. It rarely does anything to improve the project's success and frequently turns into a gigantic time sink -- just like the equivalent features in Lotus Notes do.
You're right on the money. But, there are other features that your shop might not use that others will require, so this is not a comprehensive list.
Frankly, a good deal of your list can be done easily or has already been done in various different OSS apps. But there is no single app that has them all and none with good scheduling capabilities or APIs to allow for further expansion of the systems capabilities.
Regardless, the list you have provided clearly demonstrates part of the reason why there is as yet no such OSS app. Simply, it's a really big job. Furthermore, it's not something that most programmers might want or need, it's what corporations need. And that's the kicker.
Most OSS programmers do it to scratch their particular itch or enjoy providing a solution for the masses, the fame or whatever. It's what interests them so they do it. On the other hand, building a huge beast of an app that doesn't really interest them and will only be used by corporations doesn't really draw a crowd of developers willing to work for free.
Sendmail? Are you thinking of the same Sendmail that I am? The group of science rocketists who've given us *this*:
R$* $: $(dequote "" $&{client_addr} $)
R$-.$-.$-.$- $: $[ $4.$3.$2.$1.rbl.maps.vix.com $]
R$-.$-.$-.$-.rbl.maps.vix.com. $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: 550 no access from [$4.$3.$2.$1], see http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/
?
I can't think of a anyone, anywhere, less competent to write a complex, featureful, information interchange mechanism. They've had their chance, and that's as good as they could come up with? Egad!
And then, in a brilliantly ironic twist, I can't post those sendmail.cf snippets as text, because of Slashdot's indescribable "lameness" filter. It's the irresistible force versus immovable Taco, and we all end up losing. Figures.
'j
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
person try and pitch yahoo calendar over exchange.
Groupwise sucks. The server side sucks, the client side sucks even worse than Lotus Notes. Groupwise 6 has a nice feature list, but is kludged together, a bear to work with, and as unstable as MS Windows ME...and the client still sucks. The Groupwise plugin for MS Outlook makes Outlook suck. Novell seems to be digging its own grave, and it's questionable how long they will be around in their current incarnation...Netware and Groupwise both show signs of being on the way out. AFAIK, Groupwise is not OSS either...
Goldmine has one of the worst UI's to ever hit the market (second only maybe to Act!). Nobody likes Goldmine, and their design quirks are too numerous to mention. Oh, and the integrated email client is horrendous...nowhere near even Netscape mail.
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. :)
Thier new iCal is step one towards an Exchange replacement. It supports vCal, can share calendars online and hopefully in the near future, Exchange calendars. Apple's new system wide Address Book (w/ LDAP) and nice Mail application along with iCal can replicate majority of the Exchange functionality.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
800 people on this campus alone.
And I keep my Visor and Nokia sync'd up.
(I like the silent vibration of the phone to remind me) and the Visor and Nokia talk to each other.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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
- They dont have STABLE standards support (IMAP, POP3, iCal, etc...)
;p
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.
- They still havent integrated GW's user/password database into Novell's famed eDirectory/NDS database.
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 intergrating passwords wouldn't really help any, unless you have no tape backups.
- Very little administrative control over the mailboxes.
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.
- Poor backup solution (you MUST shutdown the email system to get a reliable backup). No, the GWTSA's dont cut it (based on my personal experiences, and statements from senior techs at Novell)...
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.
- Novell has POOR support for automated administration and report generation out of GroupWise - GWCheck just does not cut it...
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.
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.
*ever*
I think you're doing something wrong.
I work as sysadmin on an Air Force base. We have a commercial support contract with Sun that specifies they get replacement parts to us in 4 hours. The other day a hard drive died, and I had the amusement of writing in the support request, "I know where Sun's headquarters are; get me a new hard drive in 4 hours or I call in an airstrike."
(Then I thought some more about it and erased that sentence. Damn humorless paper-pushers. (So of course it took six hours for the drive to get to me.) Oh well.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You're just pissy because the server side agent doesn't have a GUI. ;p
Seriously, I don't have *any* of these problems. If you really have such huge problems, have you tried asking anyone for help? Ever?
The Outlook/Exchange user experience, especially in large corporations, is the best email, calendar, and collaboration experience available today by orders of magnitude over anything other product combination out there.
The Exchange store is practically bulletproof (when it goes down, it goes down HARD, but it hardly ever goes down), and the integrated Active Directory user administration makes account administration relatively easy.
The only real administration headache I have heard about (and this is a biggie) is that backups are extremely difficult. Also, when you're running Exchange, you are completely locked into Microsoft and it's practically impossible to get off that treadmill.
I haven't tried Oracle's solution, but I haven't heard anything (good or bad) about it from anyone else either.
I WISH someone would come up with an alternative, because I have to run an Exchange server in my home office (yes, I have RedHat Linux here, too) to get the user experience and functionality that I need. I get a real kick out of using Evolution to access my Exchange email, though. Excellent work, guys!
But it doesn't exist today, and that's not going to change anytime soon. I don't even see anyone taking on this problem, or I would jump in and help them.
But beware! If Microsoft puts a Home version of Exchange on their Home Media Server with, say, 5 email accounts on it, everyone will be running Outlook and Exchange at home, too, and sharing their calendars with each other like Apple's new iCal!
Cool...that's optimistic.
But it essentially seems to follow that support for IMAP must be activated...or is that part of the feature defaults?
Oh well...no need to educate me on it. My Exchange coworker is bound to give it to me with both barrels for my lack of understanding.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I've been trying to do this for a couple of years. I wrote the Exchange Server Replacement HOWTO back in '99 when it looked like this might be possible very soon.
Essentially I talked about how to get IMAP/POP3/SMTP with a global Address Book and authentication and user accounts via LDAP. I've been watching this space with a lot of interest since then. The lack of updates to the HOWTO should give you some idea of what's changed, not much.
As far as calendaring goes, here's the skinny: CAP is the current IETF draft, and has been for some time, although when it will be finalized is anybody's guess. Why aren't there any shared calendaring servers? Cause there's no shared calendaring standard. You can get asynchronous calendaring in IMAP by having a decent IMAP client and using a Calendar folder, but that's hardly as feature rich as Outlook/Exchange. libical has kept up with the draft but has no server process. It's used in Evolution and the Mozilla Calendar client. So we have calendaring on the client side, but nothing on the server side. From what I've been able to discern, nobody wants to write a CAP based server till CAP is finalized, since it's gone through too many changes during the drafting process already.
The other problem is the outlook clients. The way Bynari and OpenMail (Contact) have gotten around the proprietary Exchange RPC call stuff, is to write a MAPI driver for Outlook that intercepts the client calls and sends them to the server in whatever proprietary method they might have. Integrating Outlook clients will either require a server side project on the level of Samba or a client side MAPI replacement that uses CAP, unless M$ has a change of heart and decides to support it.
In order to replace the functionality of Exchange you would need, a Calendar Server (none exists in the Open Source world), a searchable document share (WebDav on Apache can't index M$Office documents AFAIK), searchable email w/ public folders and mailing lists (Cyrus + majordomo or Sympa could feasibly work), a global address book (OpenLDAP).
Now,the real kicker, it has to all be integrated, single point of management and have a web interface for users to boot. There are a million and one PHP/Perl based web interfaces to one piece of this or another. However, trying to integrate all of this is impossible. Why?
For starters, everyone seems to want to do LAMP, as if these apps all live alone and users want to log into a seperate web interface for each function then cut and paste data between web pages and not be able to search everything as one data repository, if they can search at all.
LDAP has been available for years, and the guys at OpenLDAP have been there to solve a lot of these problems for years. Quit using an RDBMS for everything, for data that applications should share, use LDAP, stuff like authentication and application user information. LDAP has seemingly been ignored by a lot of open source programmers. Evolution's LDAP support has flat out been broken, everytime I've tried it. Mozilla's works but lacks some functionality. Granted LDAP takes about as much knowledge as learning an RDBMS to understand, but ther are currently about 3 decent LDAP management tools (lape, Directory Administrator and GQ). With LDAP you can essentially have a database schema that all apps can program to, cause it's standardized (inetOrgPerson, etc.)
Other apps seem to be developed without a thought to integrating with other apps. I tried to integrate Sympa, OpenCA, cyrus, sendmail and OpenLDAP with a custom web front end about a year ago. I paid the salaries of myself and 2 other developers for about 8 months, trying to do this. It was a failure, especially in the cases of the Perl pieces. The CPAN Perl libraries didn't do LDAPv3 extensions, isolating code in most of these projects to use a different front end was hopeless and providing an interface to manage the configuration files for the servers was a lot of work. We got about 80% done before I sold the company (and codebase). We had originally planned to GPL our work then sell support and customization, with a calendaring solution and MAPI driver for outlook in the 2.0 feature set.
Most of the frustration we had and was due to using other people's code that was not extensible or modularized. If I had to do it over again, I'd do it in Java on JBoss (esp considering the BEEP servlets JSR for CAP and the great LDAP support via JNDI).
I don't think that developer's of various open source projects need to have some overreaching design group (a la GNOME or KDE) to implement these projects with integration in mind. There are plenty of standards already out there. It just takes some good design and up front research (something I've done a lot of) and thinking about how other developers and users might want to use this stuff for their projects.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm whining about my own failures, I should have made sure we had enough capital to do it all from scratch. I'm more concerned about our ability to compete with the Exchange servers and Lotus Notes of the world and have a stable, customizable platform that we own. Quit rewriting the same stuff over and over and build new stuff... innovate, be creative, push the industry forward.
There is a glimmer of hope, the Open Source Java community is doing fantastic stuff. I've never seen more modularization, code reuse, integration and faster development in any environment or community. JBoss really takes the lead, the feature list is amazing and I've used it in several corporate environments where it beat out commercial J2EE app servers. JBoss pulls from Ant, XDoclet, Jetty, Tomcat, JacORB, Axis, HyperSonic SQL and a bunch of other projects. Struts and the Java commons and taglib projects at Jakarta are another example of really cool work.
The point is, it all works together. End users don't care if you wrote it in Perl, PHP, Python, C or Java... Just that it makes their lives easier, if we want Open Source to get more places we have to make sure we can deliver on this. Considering most of us make a living programming, supporting or administering networked systems, which would you rather have, propietary crap or really good open source stuff? So next time your designing that project, or writing some more code think about how you can make integration easier. Documentation helps too... we shouldn't have to know fifteen languages and countless codebases to get stuff working together. Most of us specialize in a couple of things.
Well, that's been my experience and is currently my struggle, so hope you get something out of this... BTW, I'd loved to be proved wrong on any pessimism I may currently have.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Really, what does Exchange do other than implementing known things (mail, calendar, etc.) using its proprietary protocol? Cyrus is superior to Exchange in everything that it does, and the only thing that it doesn't do is calendar.
There are a lot of calendar applications, however the main reason why they aren't used widely is BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO WRITE SOFTWARE, HATE, HATE, HATE BEING ON THE CLOCK, especially when it involves "meetings", and especially when it allows others to force their schedules on them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Exchange has it's plusses and minuses. I like how easy it is to set up, I like how easy it is to maintain, and it's pretty easy to make the features it has useful.
However, there are two issues with it that bother the hell out of me: (Note: This is Exchange 5.5, not the latest one. Nobody where I work is interested in paying gobs more when there's free stuff out there.)
1.) The copy we have is limited to 25 licenses. This means that 25 connections are allowed at one time. More than that and Exchange punts you. "Sorry, you have to wait until a connection is open."
The IMAP protocol is particularly attractive, so it's used a lot. But it counts as 2 connections because it makes one for inbound and one for outbound. So you can have 12.5 simultaneous connections before Exchange says "Sorry, give me more money."
What makes it worse is that IMAP is rather persistent, as opposed to POP3 that just hops in and hops out. My company of 19 had to tighten control over who uses what and when over it. This alone is enough to make us move away from MS.
2.) You cannot uninstall Exchange 5.5. I boogered up the install once and had to reinstall WinNT because it wouldn't give me the option to remove Exchange and start over. Maybe a little more poking and prodding could have solved it without a rebuild, but I was in emergency 'We need it yesterday!!' mode and didn't have the keys to the company Tardis.
Exchange gets points for being very easy to use and run, but it is a huge moneypit. If I were running on less than 15 people, I'd be fine with it. However, for more than that I'm ready to learn how Linux works and build a server with that.
"Derp de derp."
Um... Yes, iCal will deal with "network transport"... but probably not in the way that you'd hope.
It'll allow you to publish and subscribe to other people's calendars over the network to a WebDAV server. It will let you "invite" other users via email, whom can then rsvp. I've never worked in an office with serious groupware software, so I have no idea what Exchange can do, but I assume it's more powerful than that.
Of course, I hate to sound cliched, but since it's standards based, I'm going to go out on a limb and *guess* that it would be very easy to make customizations that would run on the WebDAV server. Perl scripts that would run when people made changes, or something. Iduno how that shazz works.
Also, as people keep posting here, notice the recent advent of Mozilla Calendar. I've got *no* idea what sort of feature set it has.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
- First and foremost (for me, anyway): It's not available for Debian Woody. I've tried using alien to install the RPMs, but that doesn't work.
- You can access the Global Address List, if you have one, but you can't use it for auto-completion when composing email messages.
- You can use an LDAP directory for auto-completion, but only by hacking evolution's xml config file.
Also, Ximian Connector really doesn't add that much functionality. You can read your email on the Exchange server using IMAP. You can also send and receive meeting requests. If your co-worker uses Outlook to schedule a meeting, and includes you, you will get the request, and you can even accept or reject it, and your co-worker's calendar will get updated appropriately. This doesn't take free/busy time into account, however; you won't be able to see co-workers' schedules, and they won't be able to see yours. You do need Connector for that.My future's determined by Thieves, thugs, and vermin -- The Offspring
I see many people here aren't real fond of Lotus, but what would happen if IBM really decided to shoot the whole works on Linux and release Lotus as open source on Linux/Unix platforms? Here are some points for and against it - I suppose only IBM really knows how they would balance out.
For:
1) Would be a huge boost to their Linux effort, and might convince a lot of companies to get a Linux solution from IBM.
2) As open source, people could finally start to address all the things they don't care for in Lotus. Perhaps a license could be arrived at which retained for IBM exclusive rights to distribute binaries for non-open platforms, and include on those platforms innovations submitted by the open developers. For open platforms such as Linux and BSD, full availability.
3) As a free and open solution, Lotus might begin to do some serious damage to that end of Microsoft's business, and at the same time focus more IT departments interest on IBM.
4) Support contracts could still be offered, and in large scale operations would probably still be bought. Even with an open Lotus, IBM is still the logical supporter for the programs.
Against:
1) IBM wouldn't get any direct license fee income from Lotus on Linux.
2) Legal issues with releasing the code could be considerable.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I've never seen an Exchange installation that can scale to hundreds of users in one location without huge amounts of downtime, both planned and not. On the other hand, I've seen Unix-based mail servers that just work with no problems for years.
If someone just provided a calendar sharing system to go with the strongly supported POP, IMAP, and LDAP we already have, I think that would be enough for most companies to switch.
Is there some overwhelming reason that the server portion (i.e.: the communications) couldn't be reverse-engineered to make a samba-style "bug for bug" compatible "exchange server". Once the protocol was figured out then people could continue to use outlook. Backend might then be SQL server of choice + Sendmail/qmail/whatever + a webmail product (squirrel mail?) + ... you get the point.
Ideally this mythical product would support both the proprietary exchange server protocol(s) and some open protocol that other clients could interoperate on. Then Exchange/Outlook could compete on features & function rather than being the only game in town.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Because in most of the cases you point out (Evolution, ICQ, OpenOffice), the Open Source replacement needs to be compatible with the closed source original, or else many people won't use it.
As indicated by this Mozilla status update, work on the CAP/Calender server has begun and a preliminary build is already available for OSX.
Two real world minuses of Outlook/Exchange in MyCorporateWorld are:
- Practically, it's hard to afford giving users enough space in their inboxes. They cannot be trained well enough to delete mail or to move it to other folders. Of course, it would help some if they didn't attach huge Powerpoint files to their messages.
- After using Exchange for several years and ironing out the initial glitches, there's still instances where "messages go missing" that users were certain they had saved, maybe in one of those other folders.
I still use Unix mbox files for incoming mail along with MH and glimpse for searching and haven't run into any problems with insufficient inbox space or missing messages. But I like a GUI for casual use as well as a terse command line when the conditions demand it.Outlook users generally enjoy a reasonably well-designed GUI and integrated calendering features that's hard to beat.
I'm going to try Evolution in the near future. I'm wondering if the Bynari connector will give me a pretty good interface to the Exchange server if I need to use it?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This AskSlashdot is trying to demand code from the Open Source community. That is rude in my opinion. If he wants a copy of Exchange and Outlook, I expect him to put the effort into it. Learn to code and then start a project. Demanding that people who code on things for enjoyment start working on something else just because you need a free alternative to a costly product, that is arrogant as well as rude. From the sounds of it, he wouldn't even like to contribute to the project only use it.
Well, you HAVE to have the UI problems on the client side, I'd think. As for the server side, I don't admin it...though I can certainly deal without a GUI. But, we have 3 CNE's on staff, so they get to play with Groupwise issues day in and day out.
We're a consultant shop, and of the 3 NW6/Groupwise 6 networks we've put up, every one of them has had multiple, ongoing, continuing problems. And yes, Novell has been called in on all 3. We've stopped recommending GW to clients (both because of stability issues and Novell's questionable longevity in the market) as a groupware solution.
OTOH, of the 20 or so Exchange 2000 sites we maintain, I can only think of 3 major issues. One was no more than a misconfiguration causing some bounced mail, one was because the customer didn't stay on top of their backups, and one is because the client refuses to get more disk space or upgrade their server....Similarly, our handful of Lotus Domino sites simply work with little maintenance...not that I'd recommend Domino to anyone who didn't plan on using it's extensive database features.
As an aside, it always seems that when something made by Novell breaks, it requires Novell Support much more often than a MS solution does...Of the 20 or so calls made to vendor support services this year, I think 15 or so have been to Novell, and none to MS (the remainder would be to Veritas, CA, etc.)
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!
Some time ago I came accros this link, I havn't read the details, but it seems to be a free exchange server implementation... Maybe there's a catch somewhere... ;) Have phun, Thomas.
/ home
The link:
http://www.billworkgroup.org/billworkgroup
the free software community doesn't have an equivalent to
Microsoft Access (gui + form builder, not just Jet)
Replace the Jet backend with MySQL, and replace the form builder with any tool for building HTML forms. Stick some PHP glue in the middle, throw it all on an Apache server, and you're set.
ESRI ArcGIS (Grass doesn't count)
In a killer app discussion, it's wise to state why the Grass package does not perform GIS to your standards.
WinZip
Last time I used GNOME (about 1.2 or so), it had functionality equivalent to Microsoft Windows ME and Windows XP operating systems' Compressed Folders feature.
Will I retire or break 10K?
HP had an Unix solution I believe called OpenMail. They killed it off a year or so ago. That only leaves Sun's iPlanet, it does what Exchange does and more.
Why there is no open source solution is an interesting question. I think its because it doesn't interest them. Programmers who donate their time want to write code that is interesting to them. I guess writing a Exchange replacement doesn't turn them on like a kernel, compiler, graphics, or ???
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft"
Since when was Photoshop a Microsoft product?
Adobe Photoshop is available only for Microsoft platforms. Apple's Mac OS X is at least partially a Microsoft platform because it comes with bundled IE and because Microsoft owns (or owned?) several million dollars worth of non-voting Apple Computer Inc stock.
Another view: Adobe is the Microsoft of publishing software.
However, if you are happy with the feature set of Adobe Photoshop Elements (a $100 Photoshop package without high-end output capability which should be enough for most of those who do no work in print), you might also be happy with The GIMP, which is also available for Windows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, take vpopmail/vmailmgr+phpgroupware+axisgroupware+mozil la+ldap+mailman, install it and you have an almost ready, PalmSync enabled, collaboration featured web groupware suite.
They are all projects in very active development, i know of medium to large enterprises installing this kind of setup and working very fine with it, thank you. I cannot disclose right now who those enterprises are, but they will come forth as soon as the deployments are stable.
The projects ive mentioned even have some methods/scripts and knowledge to migrate from Exchange to this setup.
Give it time, by the end of the year, this combined suite of Free Software projects will have a fully enabled intranet collaboration suite.
Is it as easy to install, configure and administrate as exchange?? NO, its not. But it saves a bundle of dough (pays well too).
So, sit tight, contribute to this projects, and you will see.
Now, on the other hand. If you dont need windows on the desktop, evolution is a GREAT groupware suite supporting icalendar and other open protocols which include the sending/receiving of calendar data, tasks and contacts from one evo to the other. Of course the damned thing is b0rken in debian for which some people should be shot or...err... helped or whatever....
NO SIG
Where's Bourne shell??? Where's vi, sed, and egrep???
Here.
How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???
With this.
How do I read a PostScript file???
With this.
I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually
Red Hat Cygwin. The future is now.
No, Red Hat is not paying me to plug Cygwin.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The last three companies I've worked at had constant problems with Exchange. The users would gladly have swapped it for something else with simple, reliable IMAP mail if they could have just kept their scheduling. Your experience at one company does not change the fact that many companies have problems with Exchange.
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.
The reason that Exchange/Outlook are #1, is because they do the most things that people want done, more OFTEN and naturally than its competition.
Bullshit. Exchange is #1 because Office (and hence Outlook) is #1. Nothing else.
The only thing difficult about making an Exchange replacement is the technical (and legal) difficulty of deciphering MS' proprietary protocols. If the Justice Department made MS disclose that interface you'd see Exchange's marketshare drop overnight.
Hell, I remember when Lotus Notes installs had to cross their fingers every time they sent an attachment.
Hmmm, I remember when MS shops had to reboot their Exchange servers nightly to avoid lockups. Oh wait, people still have to do that.
Please examine why you are running exchange. The most common reason is that some manager in your group decided that you NEED to run exchange for some reason X. X is the marketing tool used to sell more Micro$oft products to your company. And besides, Outlook is already installed on 99 percent of the desktops in every business, so why not take advantage if ITS features. You know, the calendar would be so cool and all. Those arguments have been swallowed whole by management since Exchange was first shipped, and they will continue to be, because IT management in corporate America is GROSSLY incompetant as a whole. That is why you are running Micro$oft products in the first place. It is NEVER for technical reasons, it is ALWAYS about contract obligations and software availability (which most managers now equate to: 'What product from MicroSoft does that?'). There is no need for Micro$oft Exchange, and there never was. If your company uses Exchange as your principle email handler, then you are suffering, even if you do not know it. But many here do. The company where I work has an Exchange system. The people who run it are so well trained that they do not know what IMAP and POP are, which must be turned on by default because they are running here. The have learned to push buttons to add users. Log into your NT domain and Outlook automatically knows you. So tell me mister support person, what is my login and ID for Exchange? "What, do you have trouble with Outlook?" No, I want to use IMAP from my UNIX system. "What is IMAP?" It is an email protocol and it is enabled on your system, I simply want to know what my userid and password are so that I can use it. "Well we do support MAPI, we can set that up now." I am not trying to use a windows program to access my email. "Well sir, I am not sure what you need from us." I just want to know what my user id and password is for the exchange server. "Are you having trouble with Outlook?" ...
And so it goes. There are now monkeys where people used to be, and I suppose that we are saving money that way, but I still cannot read my email. :(
While it's not free, it's by far the widest platform support setup around, and while the full on Exchange Server emmulation is in the version that is in beta right now. I've had a number of calls to them discussing things, and here is the extra kicker that will make every Exec take an extra look -> Intergration with the Danger Hiptop. So now there is a competitor to the MS Exchange / Crackberry setup that runs on *nix in addition to everything else. Oh, and don't forget to toss in the anti-virus plugin from NAI.
Danger.com & Stalker.com
willing to ditch Outlook. My company sells servers that feature the following:
Until LDAP becomes the standard by which everything authenticates, we've got perl scripts to tie together all the password hell for all the different parts. It works, and hell, you don't need your damn Outlook client to check your calendar, email, or get a file you need when you're in Shanghai
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
I'm not ENTIRELY going to agree with the "easy to set up". Silly me wanted to grant access to certain newsgroups via the server and I must have done something wrong, because it tried to download the entire feed from news.wol.dk which is some 21+ thousand groups ...
... 21+ thousand times ...
...
How do you delete 21+ thousand groups from the server then? ONE BY ONE!!! You cannot select more than one group to manipulate.
ARGH!!!!!
[space] [delete] [y] [space] [delete] [y] [space] [delete] [y]
I killed a keyboard that weekend
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
n/t
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Here's what I meant by 'easy to set up':
I know nothing about mailservers, but within a day I was able to install it and have it ready for my company to use.
I have no doubt there are things that are obstructive at best. heh.
In your position, I would have looked for a way to automate that. Windows Scripting Host maybe? (I woulda used VB, it can do that...)
"Derp de derp."
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.
What about GroupWise from Novell? It's not open source, but it's as functional as outlook/exchange. That's what we're using.
Uhhh...I checked this one out before deploying Exchange for my latest client. Unfortunately, its licenses are just as expensive as Exchange/Outlook.
You're using her as bait, Master!
1.) The copy we have is limited to 25 licenses. This means that 25 connections are allowed at one time. More than that and Exchange punts you. "Sorry, you have to wait until a connection is open."
Soooo...why don't ya turn off license logging???
You're using her as bait, Master!
What? There's a switch I can flip to disable that? Or are you pulling my leg?
"Derp de derp."
My parents computer crashed about 3 weeks ago and it needed a new hard drive and all the data was lost. THey previously used netscape mail. Anyway I purchased a new hard drive and re-installed the system. My father needed a new more modern email client and he had MS-Office pro2000 which came with Outlook. I decided to implement Outlook because it worked great with his palm pilot and have all his contact with the adress book for emailing and would update it the next day because it was late when I finished..exe files and his pc was unscanable from the net. I went to www.grc.com and not one port was open. Secure right?
Well the next day I was going to update both outlook and Windows to the most secure patches and I noticed performance was awefull. I even recieved error messages saying that no dns server could be found yet the lights on the cable modem was blinking like crazy. I opened the command prompt and typed the infamous netstat -an and found open ports all over the place including 113 and 6667 which irc zombies were using and literally satuarating the whole line. I found 3 worms total and one being the infamouns verison 2 litmus virii in the Windows directory and that nasty modified worm even spread to my mother computer using client for Micrsoft networks even though she had file sharing off. Yuck
Anyway I downloaded a software firewall to monitor traffic since his hardware firewall sucked and I found all 3 worms sending DDOS attacks to who knows where! Litmus opens more backdoors in an infected system so my guess is the other worms found there ways after the system was comprimissed or it was the same hacker. I just gave up and reformated his whole drive again and this time installed the more primptive peagus emailer.
Folks it only took 9 or 10 hours for this wreck to occur behind a firewall that was configured to not allow traffic from the internet on his lan. After this I configured the firewall to block outlooks ports from both sides just to make sure it hides everything this time around. Outlook is a piece of sh*t and deserves its reputation.
http://saveie6.com/
Practice what you preach. TCP/IP is open and well documented your fucking company had the balls to copy the code from bsd.
Also you damn well know that if the protocols aren't working right that lookout won't work and no one will use the open source product because they will miss all their fucking viruses! If there is any chance to replace the server it will have to work with existing clients first or no manager will pick it because it won't be 100% transparent switch.
P.S. I can't spel
I too am gluing together an Open Source solution for email/webmail and the Calendaring is always the biggest pain....
Why?
The majority (not all) of geeks look at calendars, project plans, palm pilots as useless. In my case, I don't even wear a watch.
The only way to get this done is for someone to write a check and/or fund a grant. Once the project gets rolling, it will quickly catch up to Outlook and perhaps even merge a few OSS projects like Mozilla and Squirrelmail.
I hate to agree with the previous posters, but this is BORING, non-challenging work. Many have gone down this path, only to fall asleep and find something better to hack on.
Unfortunately, this is one case where Microsoft actually excels over Opensource. They have enough money to pay programmers to do mundane work and complete bloatware with a pretty front ends.
Has the Open Source Community mets it's match?
Is creating calendaring code that interoperates with Outlook beyond our reach?
Brilliant idea. Note the loud *HINT* *HINT* REDHAT!.... MANDRAKE?
Seriously if redhat want to do something truly clever, buy that damned bynari server software, hook it up with that redhat supertweaked pgsql and napalm the corporate "back office" exchange/ms sql market.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I've been running Exchnage for a small, ~500 user network for 6 years and we're fed up with the expense and security hazards. We just bought Notes/Domino to switch away from Exchange and the licensing cost for this migration is less than half of what it would cost for all the MS licenses needed to upgrade all our servers and cals to go to Exchange 2000.
:-)
Yes Lotus has a very steep learning curve for the administrator, but it is extrordinarily powerful in how you can customize the inner workings of the system. All those folks who belly-ache about how Lotus is such an arcane and difficult product are exactly the same kind of folks who complain that Unix and C and C++ are too hard to learn and use because they'd rather write Visual Basic progs for Windows. It takes a intense commitment and willingness to learn a sophisticated and complex system to succeed in the Lotus world, and a sysadmin needs to have "The Right Stuff" to become proficient at this. A Lotus messaging system definitely ain't for point-n-click monkeys to administer.
I do have to admit that the current client (R5) user interface does suck somewhat, but it certainly is plenty useable if you're willing to invest in a bit of end-user training. The new R6 version is going to be a step in the right direction, and if will only improve from there. The calendering functionality does blow away Outlook/Exchange IMHO, once you learn how to use it.
The best part of this project is being able to finally get rid of a major MS server system in our organization and I'm very glad for this.
Oh and BTW, we're running our Domino servers on Linux and AIX boxes
(Doesn't it seem a bit demanding for someone making money off consulting to ask why open source authors haven't solved his problem for him?)
Have you tried coding it yourself? If you're not a coder, have you thrown real money at any of the dev teams? If not, well, why not? They're subject to market forces too, you know.
Get off my launchpad!
My issue is this: I am ITCHING to kill our Exchange box. I would do it yesterday if I could. However, as much as a Linux advocate as I am, I'm still a believer in making changes for the better, not based soley on principle. ATM, it is simply to easy to have new user creation in Active Directory create Exchange mailboxes as well. I've done some testing with winbind, Postfix, Courier, and PAM to have IMAP authenticate to AD. I admit I was shocked to see it work as good as it did, but it just doesn't seem stable enough at this time.
I would change in an instant if I had:
That's it. The first is obviously trivial, so the real hangup for me is authentication. Protocol is trivial, it can be IMAP, POP3, whatever. I know authentication to AD from linux is somewhat of a large task, but show me the answer and I'll switch in a heartbeat.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Lotus Notes design may not be winning any awards, but guess what? As a designer you have FULL CONTROL to modify the UI however you like!
Translated: "Sure, the default set of user-facing interfaces that ship with your multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars Notes installation may be not only completely worthless but an active impediment to getting work done, but hey, you can always turn around and spend another several hundred thousand dollars paying full-time developers to attempt to graft actual functionality onto it!"
This is, sadly, pretty much par for the course. Any time someone points out just how badly Notes performs any of its alleged real-world functions (ie: email, scheduling, document storage and collaboration), its apologists trip over themselves to remind you how customizable it is, which is sort of like Ford Motors pointing out all of the cool aftermarket exhaust pipes you could buy for the Pinto.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Notes exists, because it's always helpful to have a perfect example of how not to implement an important idea. But I won't shed any tears when it's gone, and neither will anyone else who ever faced the horror of using or administering it.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Lotus Notes design may not be winning any awards :-)
Actually it has won several
As a designer you have FULL CONTROL to modify the UI however you like
This is like the (probably apochryphal) Henry Ford saying: "you can have your car any color, as long as it's black". In Notes, I am stuck with whatever UI controls Notes gives me (and most of them are cheesy). With Outlook, I can create new UI controls and integrate them using well specified interfaces.
And yes, I have used Lookout Express on a R6 prerelease version, and you know what, while it's a huge leap for Notes, for a person coming from an Outlook/Evolution background, it has "cheap knockoff" written all over it.
Practically, it's hard to afford giving users enough space in their inboxes. They cannot be trained well enough to delete mail or to move it to other folders....
First of all, you can set limits on your mailboxes and prohibit send (and receive) at certain predetermined levels. That usually clues them in. Also there's a mailbox manager utility that allows you to clean out old messages that are older than a certain elapsed time. I've used both successfully and 99.9% of the time they (the users) don't even notice.
After using Exchange for several years and ironing out the initial glitches, there's still instances where "messages go missing" that users were certain they had saved, maybe in one of those other folders.
I'd chalk that one up to "user error"...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Ease of install is important when you are evaluating several possible solutions to your problem.
... except the calendar. Exactly! You get a company of any size, and the caledaring, scheduling and resource management aspects of Exchange become really useful. Just because you say you don't like being on the clock doesn't mean that it's not useful for everybody else.
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that nobody else does. I used to work for a software company of about 200 people, and the calendaring aspects were very useful, especially for booking meeting rooms and the like. If we hadn't had a system for handling that kind of thing, things could have got quite chaotic - it's vital that if you have in important customer visiting that you've got a meeting room avaliable to talk with them ready...
I can understand that taking the word of a /. user at face value would seem foolhardy, however a simple Google search turns up this:
& q= license+logging+exchange
/. *can* be productive!
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient
I think you're probably OK with turning off License Logging.
See - sometimes reading
A little planning goes a long way...
Well, if you're actually looking for legit help, I'll give you the one piece of advice about the only major Groupwise problem I've had - don't run it on the former version of Netware. They really don't test it all that well, and it really does make a difference.
If you have instability problems with the Groupwise 6 agent, move to Netware 6. On the two Groupwise 6 domains I have, I still have no issues. They're running on Netware 6.
I had the same problem years ago - Groupwise 5.5 on Netware 4.11. It was a little painful. Upgraded the server (fastest upgrading server OS I've seen lately) and it ran fine. On the 5.1 servers with GW 5.5, I still get the vaunted Novell two year uptime. (only because I don't patch as often as I should)
probably the same as me:
1) I'm the most computer knowledgable person in the company.
2) The company feels it's better to do things internally to save money on both installation and servicing.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
This is a Microsoft-driven problem. We have literally dozens upon dozens of solutions for spreadsheets, word processing, typesetting, document editing, printing, formatting, conversion, storage, mail, clients, servers, and so on. Linux is Legos, you stack your bricks however you choose.
Once someone decides that they (the frustrated Microsoft camp) want to have a solution in the Open Source space, they'll give us the incentive to do so. Right now, we have all the tools we need to do our jobs, in many formats and flavors. Just because the Windows users do not, does not make this our problem.
I constantly find myself reinforcing this point.. the Open Source community isn't here to solve everyone's problems with Open Source software. We don't find all the cracks and fill them with Open Source "caulk". We are not a free development warehouse, to pick and choose what YOU want US to do for YOU, for FREE.
Over the past two years, I've seen hundreds of my close personal friends (myself included) pour their hearts and souls out to help the "Corporate Bottom Line" understand and develop solutions using Open Source software, only to get laid off, fired, and let go for no reason.. meanwhile NOTHING is given back to the Open Source community for their selfless efforts, except higher unemployment numbers by these companies exploiting Open Source software.
If you want it bad enough, you'll find a way to motivate us to help you reach your goals. Complaining about a problem that doesn't even remotely affect us, doesn't help you solve your problems any faster.
I have never donated to an Open Source project. Why? Because none of them have interested me.
I would donate to this though!
- Michael
I have yet to see a AC post worth reading.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
The guy that replied to you (Hektor Troy) basically hit the nail on the head. I split the sysdamin job with another person. I'm the guy who can run around and fix MS related problems, and she's the person who set up the background servers. Server related problems went her way, client problesm went my way.
:) (well, was anyway.. now I'm playing with the background servers.)
Then she went on vacation. Of course, that meant the mailserver (literally) made a big bright poofy spark and died. I made the decision to build a new mailserver and got it done!
Funny thing is, that machine's still running a year later. Heh. If you saw it, you'd think that was an amazing feat!
Just to be clear, though, I never needed to set up a mailserver before. The one that blew up was running long before I became sysdamin. I got field promoted after our previous sysadmin left. So I'm a newb pretty much.
"Derp de derp."
I work for a government agency in Arizona and we are ditching Exchange next weekend for a system built from open source components.
S quirrelMail
We expect other government agencies in Arizona and beyond to do the same in the near future.
FreeBSD
Courier-IMAP
OpenLDAP
qmail
Sympa
SunOne Directory/Calendar server
This can be done. The calendar was the hardest thing to find a replacement for.
Take a look at:
Replacing Exchange HOWTO and QVCS.
The first document is what inspired us over a year ago to begin this project. The second project is very similar to what we ended up with. We will be producing a HOWTO next month on how we did this.
Replacing Exchange is not that difficult if you understand how email works and how Exchange is cobbled together. We chose to separate the Exchange functions and put them in a web browser driven context.
The big task you will have is to fight the user conception, built through marketing and fud, that somehow Exchange/Outlook is synonymous with email in the same way that some people see AOL as synonymous with the Internet.
You will have to fight like hell for an Exchange replacement. A replacement has to be feature-rich, a replacement better be secure, and most importantly a replacement needs to be more reliable than Exchange.
If you can do your homework on these issues you should be able to get PHB and upper management to buy in.
The magical thing that Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Lotus and Novell, managed to do is transform the function of email into the monstrousity that Exchange/Outlook is and convince people to lay down gobs of cash money for something which fundamentally is no different than any other email system - its job is to deliver email.
We got tired of Microsoft sticking it to us for licensing. We got tired of virus after virus. We got tired of Exchange problems with no apparent reason and (worse) no apparent cure. We got tired of having our data held hostage by Exchange.
The big question, for you bofhs out there, is whether you can/will do something about Exchange. You can sit idly by while Exchange craps on you again and again or you can do something about it.
Ouch. So does my having a job with .. well.. less experience bother you?
Well, fret not: That's not my primary job there, I just absorbed it. I'm the company's artist/webmaster. I was best capable of filling the previous sysadmin's shoes, but my company couldn't afford to hire a replacement for him.
It's not the type of scenario where I walked in somewhere and said "I wanna job doing sysadmin stuff". Technically I'm a Lightwave animator/compositor. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
I wish you luck. I honestly don't know what else to say other than im listening. I haven't been in that position (yet), but I face it. My company may or may not succeed. The worst part is, I know that if I do lose my job it'll be a minimum of 4 months for me to acquire a new one. (and that's being optimistic)
I'm not really sure how to shorten that time other than to try to network with other people in the field. I'm working that direction, but I'm scared.
I really hope the economy boosts itself soon. I think people enjoy spending money.
I have a question: Do you have any advice for me as to how to minimize the impact of unemployment? What can I do now?
"Derp de derp."
Worked well for me too until I had to make it work on NVidia nForce-based chipsets. Sweet chipset (GeForce2, sound, LAN, etc all built in with practically zero contention on the shared RAM and literally zero on the AGP buss since the peripherals all run through AMD's interCPU buss - oh, and no less than 6 USB ports on the board I have to hand (MSI K7N420 Pro)) the LAN card driver (only) is closed-source, the closed library they ship for it (nvlanlib.o) is apparently incompatible with gcc 3.2 - sorry about Mandrake 9.0 (and Redhat `Null') distributions, it won't recompile for love nor $$$. Now, what I completely fail to understand is that the FGeForce2 and sound kernel modules are completely OSS! Like, d'uh? It's akin to shipping an all-American vehicle with metric rims...
In case you don't understand the subject line, `proves' in the sense used there means `breaks', as in `tests to destruction'.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I appreciate the tips man, thank you. :)
You are definitely right about diverisification. That's how I've been able to survive a few rounds of layoffs.
Cheers dude
"Derp de derp."
The old adage in the computer industry always was "No manager was ever fired for buying IBM". Things haven't changed that much, just the name of the upper dog.
I hear the argument about sueing a lot. I even hear it from managers who had to suffer the pain of a Microsoft audit (an audit is their way of saying "thank you" to loyal customers who MS feels haven't been stripped of cash sufficiently yet).
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
The hardest part of running Exchange is to find qualified administrators. I'm not talking MCSE here (I know some very capable MCSE's, but in general MCSE is not a valued qualification in my book).
A good Exchange admin can get user-visible uptimes that rival those of *NIX based solutions.
And make no mistake, top brass don't care about availability. They'll raise a stink about it and life goes on.
The "Exchange is easier" argument has been raised only anecdotally in this argument so far, which is good because it's plain untrue. It is at least as hard as setting up a *NIX solution (and chances are, Exchange will beat *NIX on functionality).
And that functionality is my pet peeve. When users look at me to prevent the next variant of Klez, I tell them that they picked the gee-whiz user friendly gooiey over my security concerns, and would they please work it out amongst themselves? It's rare that I have users who actually want all the automation nonsense, but not a single one of them has followed up on my suggestion to write to MS to get something done about the no-questions-asked automatic opening of attachments, e-mailed JavaScript and stuff.
Users don't want risk, but they can't be bothered to do something about it. So, they get what they asked for. Heaps of functionality. For their benefit, and the dubious benefits of others.
It's all down to consumer choice.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.