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Open Source Microsoft Exchange Replacements?
Carl Farrington asks: "Do you think you could try to raise public awareness of the importance for an open source replacement for Microsoft Exchange (Outlook/MAPI compatible for shared/public folders). Current offerings are SuSE Linux Groupware Server, Communigate Pro (Stalker Software), Samsung Contact (ex. HP OpenMail) all of which are not open source / free. Kroupware is in development, but there will be no Outlook Connector for it. otlkcon is in slow development as a possible connector for Kroupware. There is also OSER (Open Source Exchange Replacement) which again looks like it needs more help. Is there any chance of getting some people to back this stuff? It's so important and is probably the major problem facing Linux as viable replacements for Win2000 servers." While this seems to be a question that
keeps
popping up in one form or another, it's always worthwhile to come back and point out alternatives, in development, that might need your help to get off the ground and running. So, if you're looking for an alternative to Exchange, would you be willing to contribute some time to one of the projects listed above? If you've been using Unix as an Exchange replacement, what did you do and how well has it been working?
"Outlook not so good"
funny!
You're right, Communigate isn't open source. It is, however one of the greatet things since sliced bread in terms of functionality/ease of use/stability. It runs on open source, isn't from Microsoft, works wonderfully, and isn't all that expensive.
Good enough for me.
Mod point free since 2001
Slashdot has no collective memory. This story run constantly.. Look at www.bynari.net for a good solution available NOW.
I am using Cyrus IMAP as an IMAP server, with the Bynari Connector to do Contacts and Calendars for outlook. This is less than ideal because storing contacts and calenders in a mail system encoded with tnef is plain ugly, but it works. For the windows desktops at least. We don't plan on Linux desktops just yet, but servers, almost totally converted. Samba + OpenLDAP + Cyrus IMAP + Postfix. It's working amazingly. Nothing to patch, no crashes, fast, secure. It's a match made in heaven. Outlook works 100%. I'd like to find a calendaring/contact system that didn't use Outlook though... perhaps something that stored in LDAP, and was very flexible. I dont know what to do with Calendars though.
I know that this product isn't exactly open source, but there have been persistent rumors that it will be release as such. I would also urge many of you who are in commercial environments to investigate this product as it is enterprise ready, works well with Outlook, etc.
2 Cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
I think that's an understatement... from the front page of their site, go to If you would like to help out with the OSER project, please see this page and then click on If you want to contribute code, please see Writing code and then you get...
TODOYeah, they might need some help... =)
Honestly, sounds like a great project, but for the love, people...
I think part of the problem is that what people are looking for requires a lot of work to create. Exchange does have a lot of features that, while they may not work as well an OS equivalent, work adequately well, are (somewhat) easy to administer and are integrated together. Could a good alternative be put together, definitely, but the amount of work may be more than some are willing to put forth without monetary compensation.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
But then, I get by just as well in unix with plain old console-based email clients and bland sendmail. But I can appreciate what a useful tool it can be for saving business time, and hence would like to see something similar reach some sort of maturity in the OSS world. I for one shall be offering my skills for one of the projects mentioned !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Many people have become familiar with using services such as hotmail or yahoo as their main form of email.
You could take this oppertunity to use something like http://www.phpgroupware.org/ which will replicate all the mail/collabaration/task/meeting scheduling functions of Outlook.
Also its free and open sores software, take a look at some of these screenshots or try out the live demo and see for your self how great it is.
I'd like to mention that I have no affiliation except having a linux server hidden somewhere at work running this and allowing many people who get stupid outlook viruses an account on it too see if they like it, so far I'm getting a great response.
There is no god
We started using the Open Exchange groupware where I work, and I must say, it is a very capable and professional package. Beyond the usual email, adressbook, and calendar functionality, I have used it to track jobs and projects, maintain document revisions, and it has all worked very well. I have even become a fan of the web interface, because it really is convenient to be able to access all of the above from any given computer.
Definately a contender to keep in mind...
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.
honestly, can someone please tell me what outlook does so i can understand why people can't live without it or alternatives? its one of those programs that people swear by and use all the time. i've never used it so i'd like to know what it's all about.
p.s. i am not trolling. i really don't know
The news items suggests there are several software initiatives underway to develop an open source replacement for Exchange. Has there been any collaboration between these teams or perhaps the possibly of merging the talent that is currently spread around the various projects? I'm not advocating we consolidate into one project, but it just seems like there are so many...
There's something called BILL workgroup server, and it acts as an exchange replacement.
Here is the url www.billworkgroup.org
Maybe then OSS might be ready to take on Microsoft's ace in the hole? How many projects are out there? How many have gotten fucking anywhere? Here's an idea; why dont we all just go install Netscape 4 again, and beat ourselves in the head until we bleed? Oh yeah, Exchange is dead meat. LOL!
I think they forgot one: www.bynari.net. Their blurb from the front page:
and...Anyone using this?
..where a good majority of the features provided by Outlook can be incorporated into a web based application, thereby reducing the threats created by using Outlook, and allowing portability:
....
- scheduling, contact management : easy
- Attachments : easier....
- calendar sharing : easy...
Give me the man hours, a good development team, a solid web sever and database server, and you could have a semi-decent web based, accesible from anywhere, email solution. Email is such a simple application, and its so feasible to do the same work as a client, via server to browser interaction....
if none of this makes sense, its cause im running on about 20 cups of coffeee...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
- SMTP - Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla and most other email clients can send mail using SMTP.
- POP3 - Older standard for email retrieval, which Outlook Express and Netscape/Mozilla can use.
- IMAP - Newer standard for email retrieval, which can manage group and folder types of functions. Many email clients use it; not sure if Outlook does.
- NNTP - Usenet standard for groups - works Just Fine, and there are lots of clients, including Netscape / Mozilla's mail clients and newsreaders.
- Web Conference Boards - There are *so* many of these out there, and they're often a much better choice than shared folders or similar groupware. Depending on how many messages you're trying to handle, your users will often find simple dumb systems friendlier than powerful complex systems.
- HTTP and/or FTP - If you're trying to publish files to people, these are much better standards than email. Some of the web conference board things have convenient uploading interfaces, or otherwise you'll need to do permissions of some sort.
- Shared File Systems - SAMBA, etc. - If you're enough of a Microsoft shop to be running Exchange, surely you're also running a file server network of some sort. Set aside a directory for people to drag files into, and tell them to mount it as their "G Drive" or whatever.
- Calendar Systems - This is the other hard one to replace, but I've seen a number of calendar systems out there, typically web-based, and you can email people URLs to click on if you want to integrate with email. The one thing MS seems to have done well is encourage Palm and Nokia and other PDA makers to develop tools for syncing their PDAs with Outlook Calendar. I think some of the Linux-based systems have probably done that.
MS Outlook lumps a whole bunch of functions into one program, so if your people get used to using any two of them they tend to be hooked for life. It's not a very good choice, and if you're going to do something like that, it's much cleaner to use a browser as the one big tool you're hooked on.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
measure a product on it's ease of use, stability, security, cost, etc. whether or not it is OSS or not shouldn't be an issue. it seems that exchange is a rather nasty program to admin, but it also seems that groupwise from novell is quite good. my school district uses it, and it is overkill for most teachers, we just need mostly simple email, but all the collaborative features are good. i think our problems have been on the admin side, since school districts aren't known for paying top dollar. if there was an OSS replacement fine. but it isn't the be all, end all. sorry. unless you're RMS or something, everything isn't about software philosophy. there are tons of good middleware apps for linux, and more to come. whether they are oracle, notes, db2, etc. just let the best program win.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Maybe you should start by asking the Ximian guys why they can't release their Exchange Connector's source code... There is probably something in there that they don't own, so they had to license it. And if they had to license it, it is probably something so complex technically or legally that the average OpenSource developer should definitely not put his nose in it.
I am assuming of course that the poster/submiter of this story wants compatibility with existing Exchange clients, right?
Shouldn't OSS be about solving problems that people want to work on rather than trying to be a cloning engine for Microsoft software?
If someone wants an exchange replacement, they will make it...if not, why fuss?
If you like what exchange does, buy it or code your own replacement. If you don't, then don't worry about it. Most people seem happy to kludge together solutions out of lots of little parts that can be used for many purposes. Exchange isn't a little part and it really has only one purpose: to be the server side of outlook. Most people here hate outlook too, so why do you want a clone of exchange???
I think what most people forget is that in order to replicate Exchange's functionality, or even come close to offering a fraction of the features of Exchange, you're going to need to put in close to the same amount of work that Microsoft did. If I remember correctly, Microsoft had a team of no less than a hundred programmers working full-time for two years to produce Exchange server 2000. Logic would dictate that the Open Source community would need to do the same, with the same amount of resources. A considerable undertaking. I believe it would make more sense to enlist in a corporation like Red Hat (who doesn't have the same amount of resources as Microsoft, but they do have the talent and organization) to begin development on a project such as this.
End of Line.
You are unlikely to be able migrate every desktop in your organisation to Linux in one day; some may well stay on M$ Windows for years.
You cannot afford to loose the groupware (think shared calendaring) that Outlook/Exchange offers.
You cannot afford to allow your organisation to fragment into islands - incompatible groupware could do this.
Your users will want to migrate at their own pace.
All of the above means that it is VITAL to fully support TRANSTION - ie interoperation between the different desktop technologies in an organisation. File formats (word/excell/powerpoint) are well supported by OpenOffice & Gnumeric; email interoperation is easy (SMTP/IMAP/POP); shared disks (Samba); authentication (openldap, pam_ldap/M$-AD - almost there).
MAPI interoperation is (IMHO) the most important missing component that is hindering the widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop.
How about Exchange4Linux / Bill Workgroup?g roup/home
http://www.billworkgroup.org/billwork
Also, has anyone tried Ximian Evolution with any OS Exchange replacements?
It seems that, for years, I swore our IT department would not convert off of Groupwise until we had an open-standards alternative that gave us the same integrated mailbox, public information store, and calendar solution. That was back in '97. When nothing prevailed to grasp as an integrated standard, the pressure finally caved when we had to make the choice between upgrading Groupwise or migrate to Exchange.
As we reviewed the options, we noticed that the only reason we were still using Novell servers was to support Groupwise. It was at this point that we did a cost-of-ownership study and found that supporting aging Novell servers was going to cost us more over time than a single platform solution from M$. The choice was made to convert.
Our conversion was very successful, and recieved much praise from the end users. Why? Because they all wanted to use Outlook. No one really cared that we were using Exchange, what they really wanted was Outlook. (Btw, the Groupwise plug-in to Outlook sucked at the time, maybe better now, but back then it was terrible)
As an Outlook user myself, I have to say that it is a great application. It works well, provides many options, and integrates with everything.
With that said, I believe our IT team would readily accept an opensource alternative, particularly if we could cut down on the cost for licenses. Not only that, but many of our partners and clients would convert too if they didn't lose Outlook. Honestly, I think fewer and fewer people outside of IT even know what Exchange is. All they want is outlook.
I can't offer much to the development of an Open Source Exchange replacement, but I sure would love to see one sprout up.
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
Blank TODO...that just means it's finished.
;-)
"free and open sores software"
This new method of programming is spreading fast unless you are one of those out-of-touch developers.
Visit this amazing phenomenon at lepercolony.sourceforge.net
Here's a project worth checking out: Citadel/UX. Admittedly it's only about 80 percent of the way there, but the thing that makes Citadel stand out from its open source brethren is that it's not just another Cyrus/Postfix/OpenLDAP/etc. rollup with some loose stiches put in to make them act like a single system.
/etc/mail/complicated.cf and /etc/init.d/S90scary.sh, but they don't mind running a "setup" program and then customizing with a web browser.
We're actually taking the time to build something good from scratch. We've got a true journalling database oriented message store (thanks to Berkeley DB) including single-instance store (a message sent to 100 users doesn't get saved 100 times). Built-in IMAP, POP, SMTP protocols. A nice calendar service, and a Web interface. It's even got its own instant messenger.
The thing that's important, though, is that it's designed to be easy to install. One of the very few things that Exchange 5.5 had going in its favor was that it was relatively easy to install. Citadel aims for that as well -- plug in the RPM's or tarball, run the setup program, and you've got a basic server up and running. Inexperienced admins might be scared by editing
Where we really need the extra development work right now is to start writing some connectors for popular client software. Currently we are aiming for 100 percent compatibility with the Kroupware project (so you can use the Kontact client without having to install the clunky Kolab server) and eventually Evolution (which has a 'connector' architecture). Eventually we'd prefer to do everything in Mozilla (using Mozilla Mail and Mozilla Calendar), since it's cross-platform.
Again, it's not a drop-in Exchange replacement today, but it's a project worth watching, or better yet, helping out on.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
they should name it Linux Open Source Exchange Replacement
sulli
RTFJ.
One alternative I've found is Suse's OpenExchange which though it sounds Open really isn't. You still have to pay out the Wazoo and what good is a Linux solution you have to pay for? However, if you're willing to pay, it does do everything an Exchange server does.
The poster is right, there is a severe lack of a competing Groupware component for Linux. One thing people can't get over is the fact that you HAVE to have MS on the desktop in the corporate world, a good deal of the alternatives I've researched are completely *nix, both client and server.
We need to admit that an "email solution" doesn't mean pop/smtp anymore. You need full calendaring/appointment scheduling etc. and right now no one provides this in the OSS world. Hell, there aren't many that make a proprietary product that will do this on Linux.
I first saw this story posted this morning on Ask Slashdot and went to read another story first..when I came back it was gone! I searched to find it but to no avail. Now it's back!)
all of which are not open source / free. :) ).
Why in particular should the products be free or even open source? You seem to be looking for the cheapest way out. I think what you should be looking for is an _alternative_ to Outlook (that runs on Linux), not necessarily something that undercuts it. It is not like you are going to go in and modify the source after all (if you were, you would probably be contributing to the projects right now instead of posting this
Stalker Communigate Pro is awesome...very cheap..maybe 100 times cheaper than MS Exchange. We don't have the mapi connector because I'm trying not to become dependent on MS Office at my corporation. Definitely give CommuniGate Pro a test out. The trial never expires and is free to use with a limited amount of accounts. Also you can use 5 MAPI accounts to test it out. Runs great on linux too. Wait another day or so till 4.1 final is released though. Calendaring, group lists.
EudoraLook Skin is awesome with Yahoo element pack. Looks just like Yahoo webmail.
Almost anything. The MTA part of Exchange is actually a small part of what it does. Exchange is groupware software, sendmail is "just an MTA".
maybe so, but if you can get a good office groupware package that is supported and oss, then you don't
have to worry that MS or lotus or whoever is going to stop supporting your version and force you to
upgrade for more $$$ every 6 months
Also, if you have problems, you don't have to count on the vendor's attention to have it fixed. For example, why does outlook still have macro viruses? Why isn't MS fixing this problem? I don't know, and nobody at MS seems to care.
and even more important, why pay someone for the same old crap when you can get something better for free?
MORON! Thats all i can say!
Don't forget OSExchange (on SourceForge).
True, development has pretty stalled, but it looked like a good project, etc... etc...
Of course, this is just dumb. Why does everyone want a free lunch? I can see the point of having an alternative to, say, MS Exchange. But why do people always want the freebie, besides the obvious reason of being cheap? It reminds me of the spoiled brat who always gets his way, and never wants to work for something. The commercial software market contributes to innovation and progress of computing in general, and provides jobs to computer programmers. Not everyone wants to live off of scraps for the shear joy of giving away free software to the masses. More and more, I'm believing that the /. community is nothing but a bunch of cheap bastards who never buy software, and are always looking to steal IP (music, movies).
....IMAP?
"It's so important and is probably the major problem facing Linux as viable replacements for Win2000 servers."
Right, because Lotus Notes has the majority share of corporate e-mail solutions or because Bynari offers an Exchange replacement that runs on Unix.
This is such a stupid statement. Active Directory is a much bigger problem in replacing Win2k servers since your Linux servers would more or less be stranded on the network as is.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
We can post a bunch of really great ideas and cute comments here . . . but I thought the idea was to assemble a team!
I'm not a super-hacker OSS dude, but I'll contribute if someone (who is really qualified) gets something together.
Count me in!
I am a partner at a medium sized multimedia shop and my experiences have led me to believe that creating a superior alternative to exchange is the definately the soft-spot in the dragon's armor. Exchange keeps a lot of people Microsoft who would otherwise migrate to OSS alternatives.
To walk you through what we were trying to do:
We are a multi-platform shop. Typically we use OSX boxes as workstations for every kind of development imaginable, animation and email/browsing. We use Linux boxes as web and file servers (with an occasional sun box) and use windows machines for 3D and testing.
We wanted to have integrated calendering and scheduling that would synch with our palms and be completely web accessible and integrated with ALL of our machines.
I looked long and hard at exchange because it DID everything we wanted it to do - EXCEPT play nicely with non-Outlook based systems. Even the Outlook client for Mac is a laughable bit of software. I can only theorize that MS made it to appease a few designers in Redmond or it's part of some antitrust strategy - its so hideous.
In any event what we had to settle for is using NOW CONTACT and UP-TO-DATE. We strand our Linux systems and don't have a nice Web-based interface. But it works on our mac's and palm synchs.
The challenge in creating an OSS exchange killer is creating something that is compatible with exchange and yet embraces other software clients as well. Let's face it - people would be more motivated to create an Exchange killer if Outlook was available for Linux systems. As it stands you are creating something primarily for windows systems.
I'd look to a large company like IBM or SUN (or maybe Apple - iOrganize) to push something like this through because they have much to strategically benefit from this as well as provide some "big-picture" guidance that such an alternative would require.
It's not a matter of price or function.
How often you choose worse product with better license? Because i'm doing that quite frequently.
--
Invisibile black light hits! You die...
This Is Not a Sig
I worked at a company which sustained most of the raw network services(DNS, mail) we needed on a single ancient Sun pizza-box single-processor system, maybe 200MB of ram, and one or two rather old SCSI disks. Clients used POP or IMAP to get their mail, and all was good. It almost never crashed(maybe once every 6 months), people liked the speed, etc. This was with 50 employees. All was good.
About a year after I joined the company, we got bought by a company which was thoroughly impressed with itself IT-wise; they were geniuses, we didn't know shit, supposedly.
They DEMANDED we switch to Exchange, because goddammit, we needed to be able to click the "Yes, I'll be there" button when they sent a meeting announcement. So we threw a Quad 500mhz Xeon box with 2 or 4GB(I forget which) of ram, 6+ SCSI drives with a high-end raid controller, etc. at the 'problem' and hoped for the best.
It crashed constantly. It corrupted its database incessantly. It had to be rebooted every week, sometimes more often. People were always having problems with the Exchange client; disconnects from the server, crashes, weird error messages, hosed mailboxes(which meant you lost all your mail). It took forever for the client to launch in the morning when you first opened it. All in all, we went from having to spend maybe an hour or two a month supporting mail services, to a full-time employee spending several hours a week feeding the damn thing. Rarely did people use the meeting scheduling stuff, or any of Exchange's other groupware features. The whole thing was collosally stupid.
Isn't it really fucking sad when a software package barely running on a $30,000 system is worse than a software package running nicely on a system you could buy off ebay for $100, and you did it all to give people features they never used anyway?
A friend worked at a company where someone suggested they move to Exchange off of POP/IMAP services. The CTO intervened VERY quickly and shot the whole idea down, saying it would be a terrible idea.
If someone at your company makes a similar suggestion and tries to get Exchange through the door, tell the execs to find another company that switched to Exchange, and ask them about reliability, TCO, and whether anyone is actually using the few things Exchange gets you over "just a mail client".
Please help metamoderate.
A knowledgeble sysadmin. Get one of those and a free *nix.
four-oh-four
Most of the problems seem to be with MAPI and Microsoft COntrol what Outlook does. However, on Linux we aheva hugely ca[able email program in Ximian's Evolution. If it were to exist on Windows and have a server based company wide contacts calendar sharing and task managment Microsoft would be under pressure even on their home turf.
The reason is that most in the OSS community just want free knockoffs of MS products. The argument of actually wanting OSS is crap, when in reality they just want a free ride. OSS or not, if its free, everyone is happy. I'm sorry if this rubs some people the wrong way, but its the truth.
It's not like they actually sell it anymore. (j/k)
replacement, the community would have come up with one.
It worked with M$ word, after all.
I think you folks need to take the hint that the OSS community is not interested in catering to your whims, and just fork over the $ to M$.
Its a few years old, but still should work http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-11 -07-001-05-NW-LF
In my office we completely remove exchange and put up a complete system without shedding any money (FREE) except for the hardware of course. We used it for both local and internet mails.
FREE software:
qmail - mail
vpopmail - pop3/multidomain
courier-imap - imap3
qmail-scanner - email filter
spamassassin - spam filter
squirrelmail - web-based mail
openldap - email directory
clamav - antivirus
ezmlm-idx - mailist
apache - webserver
qmailadmin - email administration
With this u can use clients eg outlook, mozilla mail, evolution, eudora, etc
Features
SMTP Mail Server with SMTP-AUTH (Plain, CRAM-MD5), TLS (SSL) support, and SPAM/Virus Scanner.
POP3 Server with APOP and SSL support
IMAP Server with TLS (SSL) support
WebMail Server
Quota Support (usage viewable by webmail)
Autoresponder
Mailing Lists
Web-Based Email Administration
It will not happen until then.
I am on a forced march to Oracle Collaboration Suite or Exchange 2000, by dec 31.
------------
It will be too late for me...
How many of you could actually pitch exchange *out* of a client (or avoid putting it there in the first place) if such a version were available?
;)
I think it would be easy to do this in smaller companies, where they don't have an IT department, or much IT experience. I suspect it would be somewhat harder in "I want a support contract" corporate environments.
You make the mistake of assuming that corps. will act logically. Now, if I could go in there with an OS exchange solution and just *slightly* undercut MS
but this time it's appropriate though, that's what's funny. haha! laugh!
Geez, I've only had Outlook corrupt my primary .pst file what, 8 times?
:(
Sadly enough, the above sentence is as played out as the grandparent's.
...are already implemented in Cyrus. RTFM if you haven't noticed. The unproductive one, and I mean specifically an intrusive scheduler/calendar, no one bothered to implement because no engineer willfully will use such a thing.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Like how DOS was free. Windows 95 was free. Office 95 was free.
It's a conspiracy, man!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I use Symantec Act for the office. Though it does not have a mail server, it allows you to do all of the group stuff with Calendars and the like. I couldn't install Exchange on my server as it kept breaking during installation and I was not about to shell out thousands for Exchange. Exchange is just not that important to me. Group contacts and calendars are essential, it is great without the MS tax. I would work on a free exchange port that ran on Linux, but how long are we going to wait until it actually comes to fruition and we have a usable system. 2 years is my estimate.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
> So, if you're looking for an alternative to
> Exchange, would you be willing to contribute some
> time to one of the projects listed above?
Or some _money_?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Welcome to my foes list.
It includes all licenses for Exchange, MS SQL and desktop licenses to connect to the server and run Outlook 2000 locally.
And even if there is an Exchange replacement you still need an Outlook replacement if you are running Windows on the desktop. Users want to sync to their mobile phones, palms, etc and Outlook has the best support for syncing
I use Open Source when and where it is appropriate ie we don't buy MS Office we use Open Office.
You mean that all the file and print had moved to Microsoft, and you didn't notice it was worse, slower, less easy to manage, more prone to crashes and generally shit?
WTF did your IT dept do all day? Were they constantly cosseting the NT boxes, or did nobody in your company ever open a shitload of files and kill the NT servers?
Jeez - Novell has been (for the last 12 years at least) and will continue to be the king of file and print - NT is a fair application server, so long as the applications are well written (SQL Server - yes, Exchange - no.)
I'd love to see a decent OSS Exchange replacement, but I'd be equally happy to see a stable Exchange equivalent for Windows, so I don't have to drive all over the place repairing the Exchange boxes that inevitably fuck up and corrupt their own data.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Hi,
I installed freebusy at my company. It is just a feature of outlook. It gives almost the functionality of exchange's calendering and I HAVE NEVER HAD A PROBLEM with it. I wondered if anyone else had ever used it. Best of all it is free.
Still working on a contact db, but im thinking one of the things discussed here will work.
Paul
You don't need yet another Exchange replacement.
Use a web calendar. This one works purrrrrfectly:m zou/webCal/index .html
http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/
It provides all the fancy features that Outlook has, and more.
If it can handle a university with thousands of users, then it should be OK for most people.
Ive done it, ive used it in LARGE environments (2000/4000) users.
It requires tweaking and a bit of patience but its a great tool, XML-RPC/SOAP enabled, and it has an Outlook connector called HAMOA (which is mysql-like open source). It also has the bricks already layed out to sync to palms and whatever.
Its a great groupware infrastructure, better in many terms than exchange.
www.phpgroupware.org
NO SIG
The notion of tightly integrated servers and clients strikes me as stupid. I'd much rather use a high-quality web-based groupware suite. If you really must have a GUI for some operations (e.g., calendar maintenance), it can be implemented as Java applets or through SOAP, but with the web based interface being the primary interface.
What utter bollocks.
Email is email - SMTP/POP3 provide a perfectly good delivery service.
Perhaps you are thinking of calendaring - it's true that a straight SMTP/POP3 server won't do this.
Equally, a mailserver doesn't typically corrupt its own data or require frequent reboots.
Even on Microsoft products, it would be possible (with SQL Server and MAPI) to make a calendaring solution that doesn't rely on Exchange, though fitting this to the Outlook client may need some cleverness.
VB programmers really, really should keep it to themselves.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Failure to run competent Anti-virus software on both the client and the server is not the fault of Outlook nor Exchange. You can't blame Microsoft for going cheap on virus protection, ever!
Exchange/Outlook is great but I think the real barrier is Active Directory. With AD you get:
Windows takes the cake when it comes to large scale infrastructure management. I hate to be a Microsoft promotion but 2003 server has some fantastic office sharing capabilities that are not available from an open source project.
Is exchange really the killer app? Or is it outlook? Both?
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
All programs expand until they can send mail. Except Outlook :)
Ok, it's not (yet?) Open Source, and it's not free, but it runs on Linux and we've been using it for about seven years now (the last 4-5 on Linux).
In all that time I don't think I've lost a single message. I regularly keep 10,000 messages in my inbox (you know, all the "important" ones that you intend to do something with some day) and it hums along prefectly happily.
I requires basically zero administration. It just sits there and takes care of itself. It works well with Outlook as a client (important if you can't get your users to give it up) and using a server-based message store means I don't lose any messages when my client disk goes toes up and I can access all my mail and folders from anywhere (remote IMAP or it has a very nice web interface now).
Sure you can do email for free (apart from the full-time admin(s) you have to keep on staff) but if you have a little money to pay for a server, Contact is an excellent way to go. An excellent non-Microsoft replacement for Exchange.
Very highly recommended.
G.
Hi,
As it happens I have just today started writing a calendaring server. - It will be vCal / iCal compliant. OK, at the moment there is hardly anything there, but a suite of vCal tools (vCal readers / writers, etc) should be available withing a month or so and then I will progress from there.
Regards,
@ndy
Like many people the company i work for runs their stupid exchange server in propietary M$ mode only. I run linux and use it for everything but email. I have to have a separate machine running windows for that. I'd happy pay for a way to turn that machine off and use evolution or mozilla for my mail. I know about the Ximian connector, even bought a license for it but unfortunately we have the wrong version of exchange. What we need is a good open source library, proxy, adapter, what ever, that mail programs can use to talk to exchange in it's proprietary mode. My understanding is that the problem is that MAPI is a very twisted RPC protocol that no one understands. Sort of sounds like a job for Tridge.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
They just want to break it apart so that they can go about replacing it all in manageable chunks. Doing server and client replacement simultaneously is just too complex. What they want is a replacement back end so they can swap that out with their limited IT resources and then move users one at a time to the native client for the new server.
Yes, it needs to connect to Outlook, and to other clients as well, such as Evolution and Mozilla Mail.
But what an Exchange replacement REALLY needs is to provide a handle on the mess of emails that pile up -- by parsing every incoming header, message and attachment and putting all that info into a relational database, where it can be properly indexed (including the attachments!!) and managed. Then, searching your email will be feasible and it will be possible to selectively purge and archive stuff. Plus, there will be all the Web connectivity you normally get with a database. These are the areas in which Exchange really falls down.
A good product in this area could clean up, because Exchange is really deficient when it comes to search and management.
So the idea should not be to clone Exchange, but to provide a vastly superior system that is backward compatible with Exchange's client interface.
Today, many users use their email as a de facto document management system, and with Exchange/Outlook, this has a lot of very bad consequences.
I may be an a Free Software loyalist, but I do have to admit that the Exchange/Outlook combo can do an awful lot.
In fact, it's near impossible to find one app that does all that exchange does.
But at work I have yet to see anyone use Outlook for anything except an email client, and I really have to wonder how the salesmen keep selling them on features that no-one there intends to use.
Rather than look at what Exchange/Outlook does for your criteria, perhaps you should look at what people are actually using the programs for and look to replace those functions that are needed.
But expect logic to fail if you are dealing with OS loyalty issues. I work at a non-profit that could benefit greatly from reduced licensing cost, but they've been unwilling to seriously consider any alternatives.
Read, L
I'll beat the crap out of your favorite exchange server admin for free. And I'll even do it under an open-source compatible license!
I'm not a programmer. Just trying to pitch in and do my part.
While I find the idea of an Exchange replacement under Linux nice, it's also worthy to note that a lot of 2K/2K03 IT admins would probably like an exchange replacement running on Windows as well. It's not because you can afford a windows liscence that you can necessarely afford (or actually want to) shell out extra money for everything that could be replacable and potentially more stable/easier to manage.
What I hate about MS's licensing isn't the fact that it costs about 50$ per CAL seat after paying for the OS itself, that I can live with it. What I don't like is all those CAL seats for ALL the software after... it's nuts, CAL for SQL after buying SQL server, CAL (client access licenses) for MS Projects after shelling 1000$ for it, CAL for this CAL for that, in the end, your server for 50 users costs a fortune, and forget it if you want to run it in cluster mode; there's no rebate, you have to shell out exactly 2X for the licenses, plus Win2k costs you more for Advanced server (because win2k server cannot cluster). I think you can make 2 nodes with the standard 2003 server though, but still... you need 2x of everything.
At work I simply ditched Exchange and used a standard POP3/MAPI E-Mail server (merak) which came cheaper. For the contacts management and exchange of information, we run this through a local intranet that does its job pretty well. Of course having something like exchange would be really nice, but the horror stories I heard about it and the fact that I would have to shell out another few grands out from my budget simply made me back off.
If there's anything replacing Exchange and/or having some solid functionnality for outlook running under Windows out there, I'm sure there would be a lot of people willing to at least evaluate it.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Does your company IT bureaucracy disable POP/IMAP access to the exchange server?
Cutsomized munpack
This special version of munpack adds a "-m" flag to extract "message/rfc822"'s to a named file. This can be useful if your company has annoying policies (must have exchange account; no POP or IMAP access; etc) designed to force you to use Microsoft Outlook and Exchange.
Instead, you can set up a rule to "forward as attachment", and then use a combination of this tool, some procmail rules, and a shell script (included) to read your mail on any UNIX system with any standard mail reader.
Exchange handles Active Directory integration (you need to add Samba for that), IMAP, POP3, and shared collaboration folders. You can cobble together replacements for most of it except the requirement to handle MAPI for Outlook integration.
Now why do you want to replace MS Exchange? I love MS exchange so much, that I even help MS produce fixes for the product!
How you ask? Well it's simple. I write tiny bits of code, and release them into the wild. Some of the "glass half empty" folks call them "viruses" and "worms". They also call me nasty names like "hacker" and even "terrorist". I don't like that kind of language though.
I prefer to think of myself as an Independant Microsoft Security Analyst.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Seriously, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it in more detail. Domino runs on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and the AS/400. The client is available for Windows and the MacOS currently, and runs very well under Wine. There's also iNotes, which is a web-based client for mobile workers or those on "non-standard" desktops.
Domino supports POP3, IMAP4 and LDAP V3.s MIME, S/MIME, HTML, NNTP, and X.509 certificates. With some work, you can tie the Domino Directory to your AD tree.
Also, the Outlook client can easily exist in the Domino network - you can use the Global Address Book, personal folders, etc.
No, it's not Open Source, and no, it's not free, either, but it's a damned good product nonetheless.
http://www.lotus.com/notes
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
They discussed and tested the following
Only Easygate and Samsung had full Outlook MAPI support, whilst Communigate and Bynari Insight Groupware had partial support.
The April archive is online and link is here. There are a number of PDF files with the article details in them.
I think one of the largest problems with shared calendars have been that there's no standard for it. CAP seems to address that problem. It's still a draft of course, but I'd assume it won't change at least radically anymore.
No calandar & shared folder support thou :(
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Alas, Netscape seems to have totally abandoned calendar support. After spending all that money acquiring the technology, they never got around to properly integrating it! Pathetic.
Alt-N (http://www.mdaemon.com) makes Mdaemon Mail server & Groupware, which works similarly to the Bynari connector. If your stuck on Windows it's worth a look. The server itself is cheap, and rock solid. The antivirus is nigh-inpenetrable, and they've recently integrated SpammAssassin. Hoping for Linux support in the future.
How big is your pst file? (why do I see this as being a phallic jab)
Anything greater than 200M can be wild country where anything goes which is kind of silly as I have seen up to 2G behave fine and some 250M crap out.
The OSER project seems to agree:
Guys, does it have to be that Outlook-compatible?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Exchange 2003 went RTM Today:
0 3/06-30Exchange2003RTMPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Jun
Does anyone know of a project that allows storing of Evolution's data inside of a MySQL or Postgres database? If something like that existed, it would be pretty easy to code up a web-based frontend.
--It's Pimptastic!--
The RHSD project has a number of projects that handle simple installation and administration to match functionality of microsoft projects, including email, domain controller, etc.
http://www.rhsd.net
From what I'm hearing, Exchange has the same problem I've seen in every single Microsoft product I've used. It's feature bezerk. I don't mean it has too many features (how can you have too many features?). I mean that the features are piled on willy-nilly. They just want to make the feature list as long as they can. They don't think about making the features work together, or breaking backward/forward compatibility, or making it easy/reasonable/possible for the user to find the feature that has to do with what he wants to do. NOBODY LOOKS AT THE BIG PICTURE!!!
And that is why they have to assign so many people to developing and maintaining their products. It's not a matter of delivering the best product. It's a matter of simply keeping the thing from collapsing of its own weight!
I have had experience on both sides of the fence. And I have to say that even though I prefer to stay away from MS whenever I can, Exchange is by far the best groupware product out there. I am not basing this opinion purely on the merits of the software but overall ease of use and cost in a corporate environment.
The current cost of one (1) Exchange license is $67. So a company with 200 "concurrent connection" would have to cough up between $14,000 and $17,400 depending on the version of Exchange they purchase. Compared to a total cost of $0 this is a lot of money, but how much do you have to pay someone to administer this Exchange server? You can hire an MCSE fairly cheap these days and he/she should not have any problems admining this server for you.
On the other side of the coin you have an open source solution that has probably been put together with a fair amount of Linux/Unix customization that requires a significant and deep understanding of whatever flavor you are running.
Whoever put this Open Source solution together is probably very hard to replace. This is something I think most corporations would see as a significant liability...aka "what if you got hit by a truck tomorrow" scenario.
Exchange admins are a dime a dozen, Linux Voodoo Masters are not.
Just my $0.02
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
For us corporate KDE people, Kontact is the future, how close is Citadel to supporting that client?
Also, have the issues with trying to get it to run under FBSD been worked out? Its still tagged as 'broke' in ports.. ( last i looked )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's all true, and based on experience - probably about 10 years more than the knobhead moderator.
Bri.
Now I have two problems with any email technology: spam and viruses
The SUSE product makes reference to anti-virus technology in the index of one document - but no content is there. There was no mention of spam.
As a potential enterprise customer they lost me completely at that point.
NOTE: I'm the author of ScheduleWorld.
t ml
Some of ScheduleWorld's features:
1. Both the client and server are free
2. The client is in Java and works on Linux, Win32, and the Mac.
3. It is very secure. An interesting and short
description may be found here:
http://www.scheduleworld.com/itsYourLife.h
4. It uses Java Web Start to keep it up to date. Once you install it you will never have to install or update it again (happens automatically).
5. It uses the same format as Outlook/Lotus Notes and you can export your data at any time if you want to move to another product.
6. Outlook interop isn't quite ready yet, and the SOAP API isn't quite ready for public exposure yet but both will get there.
7. Corporate time sheet extensions (with full SR&ED - Scientific Research and Experimental Development - tax credit reporting) will be completed and ready for use in less than 2 weeks. This would be a "for pay" feature.
http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/
Cheers.
Schedule your world with ScheduleWorld.com http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/ (Java Web Startable)
Look, just because it comes on a CD doesn't make it a single program. Exchange is just a bunch of crap thrown together in a nice box, with a nice installer, and a big price tag. All that crap can be done in typical unix fashion with different programs that do their job really well instead of half-assed and insecure. Use Qmail, Vpopmail, Qmailadmin, Courier-IMAP, Sqwebmail, for email (you can even run them over SSL). Use WebCalendar ( http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/ ) for calendar and calendar sharing (you can run that over ssl too) WebCalendar also emails reminders, you can export events into outlook, and it emails new appointments. Use Samba for file sharing. Or use WinSCP for filesharing for remote users. Use jabber for instant messaging. The only trick (not really much of a trick) is using getting the authentication uniform so that people don't have to login a million times with different usernames and passwords. A note about Sqwebmail. You can customize the look, it has spellcheck, and users can change their own password and it also changes the pop3, smtp (if you use smtp auth patch), and webmail password. It also has a basic calendar that can be enabled. Another note about Exchange. Everyone wants calendar sharing, but if you ask them if they are using it they usually say no.
I tried phpgroupware a few months ago. Looked like it would have been nice if it had actually worked. Some of the apps worked, but most of them didn't. Many of them appear to have been poorly coded, with little or no error checking. Many PHP errors spewed onto the screen while the apps tried to happily chug along anyway, and some apps pretended to work but didn't actually do anything.
> If MS put out something that: ran on open source, .... Nope. Monkeys aren't flying out of my butt.
> worked wonderfully, and wasn't all that expensive,
1) The proposed alternative will fully support Microsoft Outlook at the front end; and
2) The proposed alternative is capable of transferring content out of Exchange in toto with all the scheduling and calendaring content.
This is/should be partially possible. My reading from years ago on HP OpenMail indicated that they had sorted out the connectivity issues by developing a drop in MAPI replacement on the client, allowing users to use their usual Microsoft Office suite - but freeing us poor sysadmins from the ravages of the Exchange Server witchcraft/voodoo enabled chicken coop.
The issue of content transfer is probably a more difficult one, but not insurmountable. I use Exchange Server 5.5, which uses the MS Jet DBMS (cough) for storing content. If there are any clever motivated hackers out their looking for a mail challenge, then that's the area they should be poking around in.
There are plenty of good backend technologies to deal with the other meat and potato problems of mail, so tackling content management/web access/other problems should be avoided.
If someone can develop a solution that addresses these issues, they will have a chance at gaining real recognition. Until then, everyone is better off using Evolution on Linux and avoid tackling Microsoft in one of their areas of strength.
http://saveie6.com/
It says "Welcome to the Bill Workgroup Server and exchange4linux website" and right on the front page adds "BILL Open Workgroup Server is under the GNU public licence. BILL is also part of the exchange4linux (exchange for linux) project on sourceforge.net [...] exchange4linux/BILL now includes support for Meeting Invitations and Free/Busy and the forwarding of all Outlook Objects in e-mail."
This links to the exchange4linux SourceForge page, and unlike OSER has actual downloads and complete setup instruction on it. I'm guessing that this BILL comes from Bill Hughes, an e4l author.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I can understand that you (and maybe a lot of other people) may feel that getting a free replacement for Exchange is incredibly important, perhaps even the most important thing that needs to happen to linux. However, what really matters is what the programmers feel is important. Unfortunately, I'd venture to say that most programmers who write free software are not expecting to make much (or any) money off of their project and therefore will not be motivated toward working on a project that seems to be centered around pleasing _businesses_. Programmers who work on free software usually focus on pleasing individuals, namely themselves and not too many other people. Sorry to put it like this, but maybe what it's going to take is instead of hoping free software programmers will create the program, hope that free software _donators_ will hire people to write the program.
LQT Systems has been selling Chronos, a system I developed when I was working there, to many clients. Numerous enterprises have replaced the calendaring part of Exchange with Chronos successfuly. The tools are out there. You just have to find them.
calendar facility is basically done on the client eg (outlook, evolution) they dont need any server for that. shared folder can be done in many ways (e.g samba, nfis, imap). those that you mentioned can be done using free software but i havent had the time to include it in our server since we have no requirement for that purpose.
MS Exchange Server (server end; NT only), MS Outlook (client end; Win32, MacOS). Very limited support of open-protocol clients (IMAP, webmail?). Microsoft Corp. wants to sell you Exchange 2000, these days, but Exchange 5.5 is still very common.
Lotus Notes / Domino (server end, Linux supported), Lotus Notes (client end; Win32, MacOS). Limited webmail access (iNotes).
Novell Groupwise. http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/ Server end runs on either Novell NetWare 5/6 or WinNT. Client end is proprietary Win32 client or webmail. A native Linux client is under development.
SuSE Linux Openexchange Server (formerly SuSE Linux eMail Server). Standard, good open-source components (Postfix, Apache, Cyrus IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL) preconfigured to work well with one another, plus a couple of proprietary components: YaST2 for graphical administration, and SkyrixGreen for integrated scheduling and group discussions (shared folders). Client access from any OS, including but not limited to webmail. A full-functional trial version (lacking only "maintenance") is available for US $20 at http://www.suse.com/openexchange/slox_eval_form.ht ml . Sites are known to scale well to at least 1,000 users per site. The largest deployment yet known (March 2003) is 1,900 users.
Bynari Insight Server, http://www.bynari.net/ . Server end is Linux-based. Intended as a plug-compatible replacement for MS-Exchange Server, based on POP3, IMPA, SMTP, and LDAP, but also with full support for all the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management, task lists, etc., when used with MS-Outlook clients. Review: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6734
Bynari InsightConnector, http://www.bynari.net/ . Extensions that load into MS-Outlook clients to let them perform MS-Exchange-type functions (scheduling, contact-management, public folders) without needing an MS-Exchange server, using only open-standard IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP servers, instead.
Samsung Contact (formerly HP Openmail), http://samsungcontact.com/en/ . Server end can be Linux-based (or Solaris/AIX). Based on SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP. Supports proprietary protocols for e-mail, scheduling, etc. native to Samsung's Contact client (which is available on Linux and Win32). Webmail access. Implements Microsoft's (documented, for a change) MAPI protocol for scheduling, public folders, offline folders.
Oracle Collaboration Suite, http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/cs/ . Formerly Steltor CorporateTime, http://www.steltor.com/, until that firm's recent acquisition by Oracle. (That product is said to have emerged from Netscape Calendar.) Does IMAP, POP3, SMTP, E-mail, real-time conferences, voicemail, scheduling. Apparently implements all of the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management,
...since we don't have to work to subtly (or not so subtly) break interaction with competing software and/or every standard we can lay hands on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Because most users who have used Outlike like it and prefer it to other mail clients. And as others have pointed out Outlook isn't fully functional without Exchange.
The original question posed was how to replace Exchange, but really the question ought to be how to fully replicate the functionality of Exchange in conjunction with Outlook. So there are actually two separate questions that we need to ask:
- Will someone produce complementary client and server software that does everything that Exchange does in conjunction with Outlook?
- Will someone produce an Exchange server replacement that works flawlessly with Outlook?
The answer to the first question is of primary interest to those who prefer a complete, non-MS solution, while the answer to the second question is desired by those who are happy with Outlook but want to avoid using Exchange.Since Microsoft controls both the client AND server software it has huge opportunities to make life difficult for anyone attempting to create an Exchange replacement. For this reason it ultimately makes more sense to replace both the client and server. This is obviously a huge amount of work, particularly when done to the level of integration and polish of Exchange/Outlook.
Check out DogFood http://dogfood.sourceforge.net/. It's nearing version 2.0. It's extremely robust with alot more then just email and schedual support built in. Version two is going to be out by weeks end and should hopefully by up on sourceforge soon. I'm not only a developer I'm also a user.
----
In a world without walls of fences, who needs windows or gates? - Joe 'devvincy' Ecker
I hope the third little piggy got mad cow - ^_^
Is that like 'HackingCoughWare' or, perhaps, the more subtle 'ScreamingInfantWare'? Ok, perhaps this is a troll, but I've historically had a hard enough time selling open source stuff into various enterprises. ("MySQL? Aww, what a cute name. Now go get us something that sounds professional." I've heard that. Literally. Twice.) I realize we're all smart enough to know better.
Selling a product is as much (if not more) selling an image than it is selling features, reliability, etc. At least for the PHBs I've had to sell to in the past. Trying to bring a mission critical piece of software in that's named after an anoying childhood malady will, before anything else, elicit a bunch of laughs from the powers that be, and then there's that much more of a hole to dig out of.
Oh, well, there goes what little karma I had, but I had to say it.
Look - here is a real one for ya all. Dual PIII-1000 system, 1 gig of RAM, mirrored pair of 72 Gig 10K SCSI drives in a 2U SuperMicro chassis connected to a 100 mb/s burstable circuit at level 3. That's what my company uses to host our exchange users; our own use plus those we host for.
Setup? Lesse, a basic load of W2K, hit windows update and did'em all. Single vendor provided driver was for the SCSI 0-channel RAID card. Time? About an hour.
Loading Exchange 2000? First, run dcpromo to turn this box into an Active directory domain controller. This process also automatically installed and configured the DNS. Then stuck Exchange 2000 CD in drive, followed the next next next, finish clicks and sat back. About 30 minutes later Exchange was running.
Configuration? Added domain name, added a user and left the checkbox for "Create Exchange mailbox" checked. Bingo, new user with automatically assigned e-mail address based on policy we wanted to use.
Full web access. Done. Full shared calendars and public folders. Done. Delegate access with full ACLs. Done. Offline support. Done. POP3 support. Done. IMAP support? It's in there. NNTP? All set. Instant Messenging? It's in there. IRC (chat) - It's in there. x.400 and SMTP, of course. No open relays by default. S/MIME? Digital certificates? Yep and yep. The list goes on, I won't bother with any more.
Total time to get up and running, a single afternoon.
OK, so it's up - now what? Well... nothing. Every night we do a backup, using built-in APIs that allow backing up without taking the information store offline. Virus scanning runs automatically and updates itself daily automatically. Antispam is fully automatic using statistical and phrase filtering. Nothing to do but look at the cute charts of spam blocked by user. Every so often there might be an applicable windows update to do - ok, so, hit windows update, download and (the ONLY part that sucks, I'll admit it) reboot.
That's it. Our uptime is 100.00% The only reboots are planned. Period. The hardware is not esoteric. The loads are easily managable on a simple dual PIII.
Client performance is flawless, and very fast. Database corruption? What's that? Never seen it. During preproduction testing we regularly would pull both power cables simultaneously while the machine was doing an full-text indexing crawl across our 60 gigabyte stores. Upon restoring power the entire server came up without a single hitch and without any delay whatsoever; the failed crawl was detected, and restarted. Transaction logs were played back and 0% loss sustained. We did this at least 30 times without ever suffering a single corruption or anything more than a few red Xs (something needs fixing) in the event log (followed by a few yellows (we're fixing it) then pretty blue I's to tell us "it's fixed.")
Anyone that thinks Exchange is just a POP/SMTP/IMAP server hasn't a clue. Anyone who would like to tell you that Exchange crashes is either lying or can't run a server. Period. With over 75 Exchange boxes in production and never a single chance to test our off-line disaster recovery plan -- we could not be more pleased.
I am not advocating a particular position...yet. Just stating what people see in Exchange.
Why do people use exchange at all? It includes most if not all the groupware functionality that a lot of companies are interested in, in a single managed package, and exposes an API for additional functionality.
These functions include:
EMAIL (pick your favorite connector)
DIRECTORY (The exchange metabase is what Active Directory is derived from, that seems to have a better DS interface)
NEWS (or a simple pre-IM method for collabaration)
GROUPWARE API (extend functionality, also using shared NT domain security)
CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT WITH ROLES (I have deployed the entire iPlanet base package. I like the standards based cross platform method, but manageing the functions seperately out of a Java browser ran like mud on our high-end R&D boxes, not to mention the what-manager-goes-to-what-service confusion.)
A comment was made about OpenLDAP-OpenSSH-IMAP-INN-Whatist patched together with mod_webdav for calendars, or posting them on a Samba share.
That may be nice and all WORKING I admit, but what about deployment and migration and administration? Yes it's stable, yes its secure, yes you don't dumb w32_klez krap if you stick with Mozilla, but what bean-counter on the board is going to be interested in lots of hires in IT to fight the hydra? (I'm currently looking myself) Better pay protection money to the MS racket and more to PSS, rather than the revolving door of headcount from HR.
The big sticky spot with exchanging Exchange seems to be calendering. There are basicly three ways to do it: 1) Outlook, 2) iCS (iPlanet, etc.), 3) mod_webdav. Now the reason END-USERS (like your boss who you have to sell this to) hate web-clients (#3) is that they run like the mud they suck, and they never look the same way twice. Security wise you are doing file i/o (I think) through a web server, a very sensitive topic. Good luck making a OSS outlookish API connecter. iCS is out there, I have my druthers, but it's worth looking into.
The most insightful comments here have been made from the NON-TECHNICAL management perspective. Also, go take a look at the recent article from down under about the future of Debian. Down near the bottom is some very insightful comments about the big gap between developers and marketing, and how that can be very detrimental to superior products.
The reason is that most in the OSS community just want free knockoffs of MS products.
Actually, the users want the MS products, while the IS folks just want a product that won't cause friction with management and users, won't eat up all their time and budget, and won't require signing some Faustian deal with a large corporation that has put ever greater demands on them to provide a full accounting for every single piece of software on every desktop in your organization...all while constantly changing their contractual and support terms, reducing the support lifetime of the product, and demanding ever more time-consuming and intrusive license tracking requirements.
The argument of actually wanting OSS is crap, when in reality they just want a free ride.
Actually, given that IS folks don't pay for this stuff out of their pockets but instead are spending funds allocated for internal business systems, your notion that "they just want a free ride" is crap. There are very good reasons for wanting OSS. Just ask all those companies that could easily afford to use Win2K/IIS but chose Linux/Apache instead.
Im dealing with a lot of small offices and we thought we would do the trial version of SLOX. So far I am far from impressed. The big issue has been the sorting of contacts by COMPANY instead of something like ... LAST NAME?!
... but not great.
Also, the outlook connector needs some more work. The cost is also a bit on the high side ($1250 for a year, and only $1250 for a year. I cant buy say a month to see if it is going to be worth $1250).
Also, changing the interface for your users seems like it would not be very fun but if you had a large crew on the job, I bet it could be done.
If you dont mind all your users just using the web interface, then its not bad
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Another note about Exchange. Everyone wants calendar sharing, but if you ask them if they are using it they usually say no.
The main exceptions are VPs/division heads/CEOs, who want their secretaries to be able to manage their schedules for them. And guess what? They're precisely the ones who approve IT deployments.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
in slashdot a few months back. It talked about a government (Germany I think) that was going to develop an open source Exchange-like server?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Bill Workgroup -- brought to you by Mickey Rooney. I Can Make Change!
Uh, think I'll not show that one to the boss.
Shouldn't OSS be about solving problems that people want to work on rather than trying to be a cloning engine for Microsoft software?
Bingo. Sometimes I shake my head at the lengths people go to bash M$ at every chance they get, then spend tons of effort to clone them. The first blatent one was when RH shipped thier default windowing system to be FVWM95. I still havn't gotten over that one. KDE and to an extent GNOME are not too far behind either. For example. Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?
Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.
Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.
Don't get me wrong. I like OS and there are beautiful examples of its success, like Apache, Linux, Galeon/Mozilla. The last one is an excellent example. I never thought of what I would want out of a browser, I just knew they all sucked a few years ago. However, Galeon is exactly what I want out of a browser.
So, what software do I use on a daily basis? Linux for an OS, WindowMaker for a window manager, mutt for email, vim for an editor, and lord forbid a closed source calendar called corporatetime. I believe that Oracle bought this, its difficult to find info about it anymore.
So what is my point? I get along just fine without M$ nor do I use any software that really has a M$ equivalent. Why do these topics come up all the time? Maybe we should be cloning M$'s slogan too. "Where do you want to go today?" It is a fitting question, right now the answer seems to be "Wherever M$ was yesterday?"
The users in our company are heavily dependent upon Public Folders and the Calendar in Outlook. Yet, we were being eaten up by Spam and the odd virus that would get through our filtering on the Exchange server. It got to the point where we had daily downtime and two scheduled daily reboots of the Exchange server.
Our solution was to remove the load of incoming email from the Exchange server, moving over to a FreeBSD/SendMail/SpamAssassin POP server. Internally, the Exchange server is still available for Public Folder, Calendars and in-house email, but all outgoing and incoming email never hits the Exchange server.
We didn't remove Exchange from our organization, but we did remove it's biggest liability: MS-specific virii and Spam.
Are you talking about Sobig-E or the price tag? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
MAPI does not replace any of these things. MAPI is a set of COM interfaces that define the interaction between a GUI and an email service provider, all within the client PC. The proprietary over-the-wire protocol used between Exchange and Outlook is sometimes incorrectly referred to as MAPI, but so what.
What's needed is a MAPI service provider that implements all the standard protocols, including the ability to store "special folders" (e.g. a calendar folder) along with the necessary metadata. This is what Bynari has attempted to do but their implementation is cumbersome.
I looked into doing this at one point, but I don't seem to have enough free time.
-Graham
A lot of the software components listed as part of an MS-Exchange replacement do run under MS-Windows as well. For serious loads you would be far better off installing Linux and XPde to please the PHBs than running it under MS-Windows.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There are some fine products which are available as a replacement for the Microsoft Exchange. E.g. Troyzen WEB Organizer is the WEB based application which has all the functionality of the Exchange and more (and it is considerably much more reliable - I think it's running on Linux server and it has been entirely written in Java). I think that you can still try demo @ www.troyzen.com, click on demo and username and password will be readily available for the test drive. Cheers.
Mod you down for criticizing Microsoft? On Slashdot? Your obvious attempt to suck on Karma's tit disgusts me. I hope you're condemned to an eternity of Windows Me.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
... I think you're not going to find it anywhere!
With over 75 Exchange boxes...
HahahaHArLoLHEEHEEWhooooah! HahahahahaBlarDeeHar... Hahahahaaaahaaaahaaa RDRR
Please don't tell me I'm the only one that laughed out loud when I finally made it to the end.
the Horde.org framework with its many apps living in its CVS do it ALL! I replaced an entire outlook setup with php front end, mysql backend and imap for email, but you can use whatever you want. Amazing!
Go get the entire contents of their CVS and fire it up! Win32 or any os, its platform neutral! Super slick our company can log into the horde system from anywhere and run ALL our office shit remotely!
the IMP email client alone is drop dead amazing! Unified calendarying, sharable tasks, notes, calendars, contacts and more, permissino groups, etc etc. Its a winner!
Because you might want access to your data from twenty years ago twenty years from now.
Of course, you can always print out every mail on the server and store it in a giant salt cavern somewhere... so I guess non-os software is practical after all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
calendar facility is basically done on the client eg (outlook, evolution) they dont need any server
:)
While mainly true, the share calandar held on the server is much easyer to set up then having to go round each machine an manually add a Personal Folder.
This is what turns a email server to "groupware", but then if you don't need.
Anyway, WinNT admins would not use either way, it no pointy-clicky icons
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Instead of farting around starting yet another server system go contribute to the OSAF and their new PIM system. It is using a great architecture and will be the OSS groupware system of the future.
Got Code?
Who picked their acronym for them, Microsoft's PR firm?
As mentioned elsewhere, outlook integration is provided via the (commercial) binari connector. The KDE client will eventually have it's functionality integrated with the new KDE Kontact integrated Mail/Organizer, though whether this will make the KDE 3.2 release is uncertain.
As also mentioned elsewhere, one of the major achievements of the project has been to develop open standards (including several RFCs) for groupware interoperation. The documentation can be found here.
It seems like the server is pretty stable and complete (mostly consists of integration of several other projects). The KDE client seems like an interim solution until Kontact is completed, or until functionality can be added to cross-platform projects like Mozilla Mail. There is also a Web client interface under development.
You're using ClamAV on a production box?! You do realize that the OpenAntivirus definition files haven't been updated since October, 2002... For Bob's sake, spend $80 and get F-Prot or something else that gets updated more than twice a year.
I think you can download it from www.exchange4linux.org
Open Source software has been the bedrock of Internet email servers for 25+ years! Who needs Exchange?
you convince Blackberry and other companies to support you. Our execs could probably not give a rat's ass about Exchange vs Stalker, but tell them Blackberry integration isn't supported...
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
It always seems that OS is most likley to support open standards.
Although you can save your docs out in XML, very few Office users would ever think to do so (especially docs coming in from the outside). And so documents age and age until they reach oblivion...
But you have a good point. You can buy commercial software that supports open standards, in either case it just takes discipline to think about long-term survival of your storage. You're just more likely to achieve that by accident with OS software.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you go with something that follows a published standard, it is a lot simpler to keep things going while changes occur in the network, work habits, whatever. That is why outside the software industry you have standard grades of steel, bolts, minumum requirements for concrete etc. This works well in industrial environments, with high levels of organanisation, but the software industry is mainly individuals working on individual chunks of projects.
The reason the internet works is because of RFC's, not because of the work of any single company with standards that only they know.
Thanks for helping me look like an asshole, taco! >:(
RL
Why copy?
If someone requires a replacement for Exchange, then surely it is a necessity to clone the functionality of Exchange first?
You can push the merits of alternate software, and I for one will listen, but you can't, in business, drop an application like Exchange and switch to an differently-operating application and expect productivity to remain the same!
Progess, something which OSS is not a stranger to, takes time. I'd love all the machines at my place of work to use an open source desktop, but a straight switch is out of the question.
2G is the limit that Microsoft "recommends." At least in Outlook 2000. I doubt anything has changed for XP.
but try mdaemon with the new groupware (no not the novell bs) add-on. Runs great on moderately powered 2k professional machines, and is a SNAP to set up. Installs in just minutes, and without the massive bloat, bugs, gaping security holes, etc that exchange has.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Actually, the users want the MS products, while the IS folks just want a product that won't cause friction with management and users, won't eat up all their time and budget, and won't require signing some Faustian deal with a large corporation that has put ever greater demands on them to provide a full accounting for every single piece of software on every desktop in your organization
You just described Microsoft, but there are many other commercial entities providing software. As a software developer, I see the labor market get more and more eroded, partly because of free software. Apache essentially made the Unix web server market non-viable. The likes of Lotus Notes/Domino and Oracle DB, which are higher up on the food chain, may be next on the OSS hit list. In the end, where is the commercial software market? And then what happens to OSS? A parasite cannot survive without its host. And in this case, the commercial software market is OSS host. Commercial software feeds the OSS parasite with models to copy. We know what drives the free market. What drives OSS innovation if the commercial software market dies?
Actually, given that IS folks don't pay for this stuff out of their pockets but instead are spending funds allocated for internal business systems, your notion that "they just want a free ride" is crap.
What does the source of funds have anything to do with it? Someone needs to take responsibility for the damage that OSS does to the marketplace. Companies that sell software need to recognize that their use of OSS is promoting their own demise. The old catalyst for software development (money) has been replaced by geek fame. That and a dollar will get a cup of coffee.
You must have never tried it before you posted this. It's got to be the most annoying piece of junk web interface I've ever used. I had no choice to use it since our stupid exchange servers don't correctly do IMAP.
Anyway, using any web interface for email will always be useless because you can't have the sophistication of a stand along application.(aka automagick matching of contacts from an addressbook in the send field).
...and false.
.haeger
You already have a program that is bug free, does what you expect.
Log into any IRIX or solarismachine and type "man true".
DESCRIPTION
true does nothing, successfully. false does nothing, unsuccessfully.
One of my favourite manpages.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
http://www.sf.net/projects/jical
People should rather clone Lotus Notes, which is a far superior product.
Total, complete, utter *bullshit*.
What does the source of funds have anything to do with it?
It has EVERYTHING to do with your earlier comment that "The argument of actually wanting OSS is crap, when in reality they just want a free ride."
The point is that an IS Director that chooses OSS ain't getting a free ride regardless of which choice he makes. Here, in the REAL world, he's taking a RISK by choosing OSS over an established name brand product. Ever hear the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"? In most large companies free software has traditionally been regarded with suspicion. If the business wants a "free ride" they usually wouldn't bother to use OSS...THEY SIMPLY PIRATED COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE.
Companies that sell software need to recognize that their use of OSS is promoting their own demise. The old catalyst for software development (money) has been replaced by geek fame. That and a dollar will get a cup of coffee.
Christ, you sound bitter. OSS is *not* unique in providing products that can affect other products and businesses. Where the hell were you when Microsoft started putting everything but the kitchen sink into Windows and put countless small software developers out of business? Probably weren't born yet. Stop bitching like a wuss and figure out another way to make a buck. I know lots of good programmers who still have good jobs. And even OSS software needs to be installed, configured, modified, and enhanced. Many people make a good living doing that.
Not KMail, pine, emacs - at least, not for me, not so far.
As for Lookout, AKA VirusFlypaper, I've had that freeze, go crazy and/or slow, and bluescreen frequently (both Lookout proper and Lookout Expletive, I mean Express).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well, that's partly correct. But it's also partly because KDE kind of forces it to be there, and GNOME which doesn't had to have a similar layout.
In fact the default GNOME layout doesn't look much like anything else. It has a vaguely Mac style panel at the top and a vaguely MS style window list thingy at the bottom. You can put the window list up at the top as well if you like, in fact I know quite a few people who do that. It tends to be a bit cramped though.
Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.
*shrug* look at Gnumeric or AbiWord. The fact that OpenOffice looks like MS Office is because originally Star Division were trying to sell to business, and they believed they had to keep things exactly the same if they weren't to scare people off through retraining costs etc.
Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.
Tru dat. See GNU C extensions. I'm not convinced that those are a power play though, as all too often the Microsoft extensions seem to be.
While an exchange replacement obviously has some application ;-) what I need is an Access replacement. If one existed then that linux market would dwarf the exchange one.
Access may be inelegant and messy, but I have dozens of clients who use it as a front-end system for sqlserver. Most of these don't do anything else much with their PCs but some wp/spreadsheet, and would seriously consider going to linux tomorrow (probably would with the licence fees) except for being hooked in with Access applications.
The Access replacement would have to offer 85% much of what is in Access already with a relatively simple migration strategy as these systems are suffciently complex that costs and time rule out a complete rewrite. That is we need forms, reports and a scripting language - prefably VB compatible or with a VB translator. The sqlserver side could generally be replaced with postgres with an acceptable amount of work.
In my experience there are now many, many companies out there who are sticking to Office97 because Access97 does what they want and can't afford the upgrade fees. If a viable Linux strategy existed they would take it. Unfortunatly as yet there doesn't seem to be one.
The article says that there will be no Outlook Connector for Kolab (= Kroupware). This isn't true, as there are commercial Kolab plug-ins for Outlook.
But what about high-quality and secure open-source client software for windoze? There used to be Netscape Communicator - but that's years ago. Since then, what are the alternatives to Outlook-(Express)?
Mozilla is it definitly still not. Too many bugs and problems, specially with the Mailclient. Not to mention a groupware/calendar client. There are plenty of current alternatives for the Linux desktop - evolution, KDE, etc. I know companies which still use Netscape 4.X as there standard mail-client software!
But what comes next?
Lars
Over here in a big german publishing company this is the exact and sole reason we keep running Win2k Servers: Exchange. We could switch Print and Fileservers over to OS-Software. We are running firewalls and proxies with Linux already but we have to stick with Exchange and since Microsoft makes us pay for every single client connecting to MS-Exchange we can as well leave the print and fileservers running. Theses two server licenses arent killing us (in terms of money). As soon as there is a real, usable and easy to administer OS-Exchange Replacement I would have a much better position on demanding the use of Linux on our servers. I bet we would switch rather today than tomorrow. Promise!
cu,
Lispy
I've only tested moregroupware myself. Apart from a bug or two due to developement status (and a recently discovered hole thats being worked on) it actually looked quite cool. PHProject and Twig are the two classic PHP based Groupware giants and each have a large community.
w are.org/
http://www.phproject.org/
http://www.moregroup
http://twig.screwdriver.net/
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I think something web-based is the best possible solution. I am surprised that Earthlink and all the other major ISP's are not offering some sort of commercial Enterprise email package (no matter what it's based on). (I think it may already be happening.) Perhaps it's just time to move the email out of the Office (pun partially intended.) Perhaps Earthlink shoudda bought lifestyle.com before it tanked. One drawback, of course, is the possibility/probability of local connection problems. Perhaps a local MTA could help. (I am sure /. can think of better ideas, but this is just some "yeast" ( a starter. :})
I know it's not OSS, but I think people should really checkout Novell Groupwise as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange.
It supports integration with Active Directory (if you need it), LDAP authentication, IMAP, has full collaboration calendaring support. A webaccess frontend (IE Hotmail), and starting with Netware 6.5 should have a fully functional Linux and MacOS client. Heck in Netware 6.5 (possibly 7) you can even run the server portions on top of Linux, so you don't even need the Netware Kernel (supported distros as of now are SuSe and RedHat Enterprise Edition).
We use it exclusively and never get hit with the latest virus email scare. Anyways I think it's worth a look at least.
I don't think this is quite the correct place, but I am sort of new and don't really know how to post a new AskSlashDot question, so... In light of this discussion is there even a start at any kind of replacement for Publisher? I would like a good, high-quality desktop publishing package (with a nice GUI, of course). Anybody know of anything?
It would seem to me many people here have the following ideas
/reboot /repair an exchange server(or servers) and I now think its the worst thing in the universe.
1. Exchange is good. What it does hangs together, and the end user likes it.
2. 'I got this other / or other products together and we have a nice working setup not too far from what exchange offers.'
3. I hate Exchange and MS sucks, oh and I had to fix
4. You don't need exchange
5. Look, you only need POP3/SMTP/IMAP - use this other stuff
So, rather than go on with all the differing and squabbling, I will tell you how it is.
1. There is no open software to match exchange. Some claim to do what exchange does, and to some degree, or even largely, they might.. But none match exchange as a turnkey solution.
2. There are commercial solutions. We tested SCO Open Mail and SUSE exchange server, along with Samsung contact. All can work as exchnage replacements, and offer similar functionality. All claim to be cheaper, easier to run, and all claim that they equal the function offered by Exchange. You also need their outlook connectors to get this functionality.
3. Exchange is still the best solution to 'Groupware' that money can buy. Make sure you buy the right hardware, install and configure the system correctly, plan your AD correctly and set your corporate standard for email and so forth. Make sure you have solutions for Spam, Virii and backup.
A note to those who bitch about cost. Bottom line, Email/Groupware is now close to, if not THE tool for business. If your company want groupware, then feel free to look into solutions that fit the bill. You don't have to buy exchange. But you do have to seriously consider exchange. Its a damn fine product, and any good IT person would ignore where it comes from and look at the requirements and consider exchange.
If you or your company only need POP/SMTP/Imap then you don't need exchange. If you do need groupware, then thats different.
There have been some sensible posts regarding this question posted, but a lot of noise by those who can't abide MS or their products. In reality most if not all the competition is also closed software, so the attacks on MS are somewhat misdirected. MS Exchange is a product of a company that believes in the productivity and innovation of its workers. That is something to be respectful of. The effort put into exchange has provided the world with a very fine server.
The free software movement, has as yet not quite got there in the case of exchange. This is not a reason to attack MS or the free software movement. It would be nice if some people are fundamental in their thinking would be a little more 'real' about the real world. There is good software produced in non open software methods, and that itself is not a crime.
Any company and ANY IT staff member should look closely at exchange and what the company needs and wants. You'd have to see what money was in the kitty and take into account any other factors. Many of the posts here have been pretty amataurish by their nature. If you want to attack Exchange, lets have solid reasoning behind your claims, rather than blind hatred, or stories of bad installs and planning.
AdmV
We`re all equal
It may not be free, it may have a bit of a price tag on it. but Lotus notes/Domino will share calendars,
server up webmail, i really like its security(notes id file, like carying around your pgp ID). can be ran on linux so as to scan for virii before it hits any winblowz boxes, and while they dont make a linux client anymore, it does work flawlessly when installed with wine. I admin'd domino when i worked for a very large company, and the more i used it, and took a class, i saw even they did not use it to its full potential, in plain english, its a freaking bad ass mail server.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
I have customers that rely heavily on Exchange Server 2000 and I have tried to woo them over to Linux server options and their advantages, however they wont' budge because they need the ability to use Outlook/Exchange. These folks use Outlook and are opposed to free alternatives such as phpGroupware. I was hopeful that they would accept some of the options even a few others that seem as good or in some ways better than phpGroupware, but they really turned their noses down at these options. Someone please finish up an Exchange Server replacement with a connector!!!
Clean, fast, simple, functional, PHP-based, does all that mail/todo/calendar/scheduling stuff through your web browser: twig rocks
Microsoft is one of the larger publicly owned corporate entities in the US, and the world as well. As a publicly traded company, ownership in the company is shared among millions of shareholders, all (well, most) of whom hold equity shares in the firm. So, if you decide to make some business decision that is going to cut profits by some major percentage, a large portion of those people who own the firm along with you are going to get ticked off. Wouldn't you get mad if your business partner said "I'm going to throw our money down the toilet?"
It doesn't make business sense to develop products that coexist peacefully, or to use open specs, or whatever- while in the long run it's probably better off for all things to coexist, publicly traded companies cannot do things that involve long term planning. It's all about short term profits, as long term planning leads to short term revenue loss and thusly perceived financial stupidity. this tends to get CEOs, CFOs, etc booted on their ass, which they don't usually like.
Now, if Microsoft was PRIVATELY held, like a giant Japanese zaibatsu, they could do as much long term R&D and strategic planning as they wanted. or they could give software away for free, since they would only have to answer to themselves.
But they don't. They answer to millions of shareholders, many of whom are very large financial institutions who lean on them to produce more $$$ when they are down.
Don't ever expect them to produce anything that is going to play well with others; it's just not going to happen. It's important to understand why, because that gives you the key to fighting them- open source on all platforms is really driving them mad, because it gives consumers smart business reasons to not use MS, and thusly creates business reasons for MS to play along with open source.
Vote with your wallet- that's all they understand.
EOM
I think the main point here is that people want an OSS clone of a Microsoft product so they can have a "free" alternative.
The post wasn't "I really hate Exchange/Outlook, is there an OSS solution that is just like it?"
synchronization with hand-helds
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
We did this last year. We were on Exchange 5.5 with Outlook. Just got tired of monthly reboots, zombie Exchange processes, viruses, and those damn Outlook profiles.
We put together a system we called Steamroller. Courier-IMAP, OpenLDAP, qmail-LDAP, Sympa, Squirrelmail, and SunOne Calendar Server. Works like a champ. Adios Exchange. Adios Outlook. Adios crappy problems with no obvious cause and no obvious answer.
Courier-IMAP = maildir IMAP
OpenLDAP = store user passwords and info
qmail-LDAP = grok LDAP for info, virus scanning, SMTP
Sympa = distribution lists, err mailing lists
Squirrelmail = webmail from any computer
SunOne Calendar = uh, calendar
We didn't try to clone Outlook or try to claim that our system was Outlook/Exchange. We distilled what was essential in Exchange and added it to our system and added some refinements.
The big selling point for us was that an email system that goes down is like having no email system at all. We were able to trade some, uh features of Exchange/Outlook in return for rock solid stability.
We were also able to whip up some nice Perl cgi scripts to do administration of the system and a plugin for Squirrelmail that allows the users to have out of office functionality.
We have a HOWTO document if you are interested. You may want to check out QVCS as well
http://www.dulug.duke.edu/~icon/qvcs-guide/
There was a handful of users who resisted the change, however, we worked hard to sell the idea to IT staff, managment and the users. A big plus was having the new system running in parallel for several weeks for users to try it out before we migrated. The migration itself was smooth, a few calls from people who did not attend training, a few 'how do i...' questions and that was it.
Is very handy for our users to go to conferences, training, etc and get access to their same mailbox or calendar as if they were sitting at their desk.
End result was that it removed a PITA administration area and greatly reduced the overhead on our help desk. Nothing like setting up 25 or 30 Outlook profiles on a single computer at a fire station.
Please...if it wasn't an anti-MS venomous rant it'd be marked as a troll or flamebait.
I've done Notes admin and Exchange admin, and I know which I prefer. But that's personal preferences to some extent, and familiarity with the product. And, by the way, God forbid that we should ever have to upgrade servers or infrastructure! Upgrade video cards to get the latest and greatest and wreak havoc with poorly or non-supported drivers -- sure. But not servers, no!!!
Mind you, given you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are required to buy additional software to backup an Exchange repository, maybe the rest of the post makes sense. News flash -- NT Backup will backup an Exchange repository. Always has. As you say, it's a fairly basic function of real server software.
Want additional niceties? Sure, there are third-party solutions such as Backup Exec and ArcServe. But I've successfully used NT Backup for years to backup and, more importantly, successfully restore Exchange databases.
It's really not that hard, you know, if you take just a little time to learn how to properly work in an enterprise piece of software rather than simply charging in like a "manuals are for wimps!" hero.
The best thing for people that wish to replace Exchange/Outlook is to replace email.
No, seriously... There's no possible way you can satisfy the demands of salesguys who will not accept an email/calendar solution that isn't Outlook; and nothing will integrate with outlook well unless it's from Microsoft.
What else then? How about IM/calendar?
Certainly the infrastructure for IM is in place. Users don't need retrained, because nearly everyone has used it [and if not they've probably used textmessaging]. And nearly all IM protocols allow for 'different' message like calendar requests and the such. Plop a gateway that can translate IM email [or eventually do authenticated messaging between companies/servers] and you're set. No more outlook; no more exchange. And salesguys can accept it because while it does the same function it's "different".
If you agree that free software is more attractive to business than commercial software with similar features, function, and ease of use, then we agree. My point is that this also effects the commercial software market.
University research and the OSS community are different, in my opinion. You can't equate the development of TCP/IP with the development of mysql or jboss. These distict groups had/have completely different motives.
We are a brazilian ISP (targeted on providing the best IMAP e-mail there is). We work on two fronts, corporate and non-corporate. On the corporate front, we host company's MX.
:-(
Our core business is all open source (qmail, courier, squirrel, etc). We provide a "dropin" solution for Exchange servers. The only problem is we don't connect with outlook
We have been searching for comercial/non-comercial solution for this for quite a long time. There are some solutions, but none of them are IMO good.
I am sure our company would be willing to colaborate on efforts to build such a tool. I've seen some comments of people willing to "sponsor" something like that.
Why don't we try to organize something?
Just give me Ximian on the Windoze platform. My company may care right now whether or not I run Linux or Windoze, but they don't care if I run Outlook so long as I can talk to the Exchange Server. Why can't we get Xiniam for Windows?????
Chandler is what you're looking for. go help develop it.
.
. hmmm
In addition to the random dropouts, I've had instances of Lookout failing in an amazing array of predictable (and unpredictable) ways. One Lookout would reliably bluescreen the machine on Send and Recieve yet its neighbour with identical settings was fine. And only Lookout, everything else on the same machine operated (as much as you get this under MS-Windows) flawlessly. Another machine on the same LAN would sit there spinning its wheels on Send and Recieve, about one time in 3 or 4. In both cases the tech responsible for them (I only did the Linux gateway, but being a tech get asked about everything with a cable in it or buttons on it) tried everything and eventually had to wipe and reinstall the entire OS (Win2k) on each box to make things happy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
WRT the DIY version, you can set Linux up to merge inputs from multiple keyboards (actually, that's its default behaviour and dissuading it from doing that is one of the big traumas involved in making multiple independent X instances work), so you could plug two potentially mangled keyboards in and lay one to each side, and potentially also have another unmangled keyboard before you as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'd love a standards based solution that permitted my users to have different clients. Some that were standard to their chosen platform, others that were in-house coded. I'm sorta wondering how hard it would be to take phpgroupware and put a web services front end on it so it could be an actual GUI app for desktop users and a web based one for remote users.
Of course, I'd be using the open source computer of choice :) A *nix for the rest of us
Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?
;)
Seems like an awfully small thing to pick on. I don't think "on the same side of the screen" alone amounts to a huge amount of copying. That said, you obviously don't know what you are talking about. Try a default install of GNOME CVS or in Debian or go download Ximian desktop and you'll see that they both have two bars that divide the functionality based on type to achieve a (arguably) cleaner result.
And MS has mostly copied it's GUI as well. There's no reason to throw all the UI development that dates back to the 80's and before just to be "original". MacOS had most of the stuff Windows has now well before them.
I don't know, but the only place I saw the window grouping feature before XP was KDE/GNOME. Is this possibly something MS decided to copy from them? When will we see virtual desktops in a standard MS gui? Also the spiffy transparent selectionbox is clearly from nautilus
For something really different, you could look at Slicker and of course everyone knows SuperKaramba. That's Open Source GUI innovation for easy to use desktops. There's a bunch of really good and interesting window manager ideas as well. Just check out Ion, for example.
Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.
Except that MS didn't "invent" how an office suite is supposed to look like either. There were office suites before Microsoft's and they copied them. Lotus had one. As a result, much of the same functions as in Lotus 1-2-3 are present in Excel.
Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.
Open source projects do this?
Is all this incessant bickering, truly pathetic.
Commenting on software you've never used, never administered, too blind to see that theres actually some really great software out there which ohhh noooo Microsoft makes....
I use Outlook as my work email environment (thus my rant about the need for real standards, not Outlook/Exchange.) It *does* have a POP-like message download capability, and my mail folders live on my laptop. Unfortunately, Outlook keeps them all in one huge opaque undocumented-format binary file which will lose them all at once if it gets corrupted. You can move things off into multiple files without too much loss of functionality, but my current mailfile with the last 12 months of mail is about 1.2GB, too big to back up easily. (By contrast, my Eudora home email system has about 5 times as many messages, and is under 100MB.) Many other mail systems keep messages in a file system structure where they can be backed up or searched with other tools like grep.
If you need to access your mail from multiple machines, rather than from one portable machine, you need to make an intelligent choice about how much processing lives on the client vs. the server - it sounds like you should use a network-based windowing system like X or one that's a bit more flexible like Sun's old NeWS Network Extensible Windowing System (one of Java's direct ancestors) or a Plan 9 terminal. If you need the email to be central-server-based because you're using multiple clients, then the file systems underneath should also be central-server-based, not client-based, and rather than shove the mail back and forth across the network to process it, you can do that on your host server as well
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Q: Why change exchange?
Okay, here come my answer to each of the choices above.
Don't! Migrating away from exchange is a MAJOR pain. It is very complicated to run two groupware systems besides each other, integrating the data is a nightmare and actually converting the data from the exchange store to something usable is almost impossible. I learned this the hard way, so please, PLEASE reconsider.
If you want open source just because of wanting open source, you have the wrong idea. You might find it cool to have this nice open source groupware package running on this open source OS, but all your users want is email, share agendas and syncing it with their nice little PDA. They are not interested in software or hardware, they are interested in getting their job done!
Exchange CAN be stable and CAN work. But don't use anything less than first class hardware, dedicate a large, multiprocessor box to exchange and know your job. Exchange needs a VERY capable administrator, or things will crash and burn. Anyone who believes Exchange is easy because it has a nice little GUI: Think Again! This is a very complex piece of software (some say fundamentally flawed). If you are not familiar with running Exchange Admin in raw mode, don't even think about administering exchange.
of the app
and that the end of manufacturer support doesn't mean the end of exploits (with no new patches)
but you trumped my point.
Not only is yours a good point, it's a better point.
gewg
"SuSE's messaging server does everything Exchange does, and better. Built around Postfix, OpenLDAP, squirrelmail, and Cyrus, this is a rock-solid messaging server, with group calendaring, meetings, and contacts. SKYRiXgreen, the Webmail interface, is so functional it removes the need for a separate email client. I tried it on all manner of Web browsers, and it worked on all of them. If you must stick with a favorite standalone email client, all major ones are supported. No client licenses, excellent admin interface- this is a fine product."
4 59 6
this is posted at:
http://www.rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=
hope this helps, cause if it does, i know some middle and high schools that would highly consider it in the state of california; i'm not joking...
It's all about short term profits, as long term planning leads to short term revenue loss and thusly perceived financial stupidity.
It's somewhat amusing to me to read this, as I just finished a book on the "crash" of 1929, written by John Galbraith in ~1950. He noted in the conclusion that this was likely one of the contributing factors to the crash/depression, and predicted that this phenomenon would not go away any time soon. 53 years later...
(Found the book...it is entitled "The Great Crash 1929")
Sorry, but it's a completely honest accounting of the problems the windows admins had keeping that box running. And no, it was not a "built it ourselves" box, it was a huge HP rackmount system, with an HP raid controller, etc.
Initially they were using a dual processor box, but it kept corrupting its DB, which they insisted was a hardware problem- specifically memory. So we swapped it with a quad processor box we had, swapping drives etc. Problem didn't go away, and funny thing- the old box passed a week's worth of testing with memtest86.
Please help metamoderate.
Please don't post usless comments.
Please don't assume people are incompetent.
I've run Exchange servers since Exch 4.0. If you have solid hardware (you mentioned some quad Xeon box.. did you build it yourself or was it on Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List?)
The system was a huge HP rackmount server. Three entirely different sets of hardware were tried- we performed countless diagnostics on the first two systems. The Exchange admins kept screaming "it's a memory problem, a memory problem!", except that we ran memtest86 for a week on one of the systems, with no problems- and it was all ECC ram. HP techs couldn't find anything wrong, even after swapping out the daughtercards the ram was on, etc. etc. Futhermore, one of the systems HAD been a Linux box with uptime records of MONTHS.
As far as the database being corrupt, sounds like faulty hardware to me.
THREE sets of hardware were tried- two HP's, and then out of desperation they pulled a desktop P4, threw a shitload of ram in it, and gave up.
Also, your client issues could be you didn't size your hardware properly for your user count (but with the hardware you describe, you should be able to handle 1500+ users easily, since you didn't specify your user count i'll guess its below 1500).
Whoa. That's a new one. TOO fast a system for the user base(150 people)? We(unix admins) told them it was gross overkill, but they kept insisting they needed gigs of ram, multiple processors, and huge raid arrays...
Please help metamoderate.
http://davenet.userland.com/2001/06/07/mossbergOns martTags
google search
EOM
that is quite an excellent book. I work for a brokerage house, and it's interesting to me how techies on slashdot see companies and their actions, and how the people with money see them. it's usually a 180 degree difference.
EOM
...an actual Exchange replacement, a client that provides the Exchange functionality is necessary. But as already stated, MS runs Outlook off proprietary, undocumented transactions to provide groupware functionality. Which leads to developing one's own method(s) of providing groupware functionality - why chase a company already known for changing practices to limit cross platform support and/or competitors? I don't see a reason to stick with Outlook when a client exists to provide the same features. Novell might bring an alternative now that they've announced Linux support, however few I've spoken with liked Novell's groupware alternative.