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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?
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
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...
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.
I'm evaluating the Bynari software now and looking for people with real-world experience with the server. I've had problems getting the client to work reliably with a mirapoint IMAP server but the company claims, fairly enough, that they can only guarantee the connector will work if you use their server. Anyone out there use it? Any other good experiences with the client and other IMAP servers?
All told the bynari people seem eager and their product has some great promise. Yea, I know it's not open source but right now I'd take ANY non-exchange solution for calendaring/contact management in an Outlook client environment. My god exchange is a horror.
closed minded is as closed minded does
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
It really comes down to people being cheap, nothing more.
Exchange 2000 (I've tested 2003 and it's going to be impresssive) with the current SP is quite nice. During the initial launch there was a lot of bugs, noting the first SP was bigger than the cd install.
Now, it's pretty rock solid. We use a sendmail front end under solaris to do our initial queuing, aliases and distribution. Being skeptical over migrating to Exchange we decided to keep our sendmail frontend in case of a catastrophy. From there we have 4 exchange servers, 3 in the US, one in Europe. It could be done with 1 but we cater to remote offices to make their lives more pleasant.
We previously had a Netscape + pop3 implementation about 3 years ago.
We have 1 exchange and domain administrator for nearly 600 employees. One. The amount of problems and headaches we go through is quite minimal now.
For the price you pay Exchange just works now. You can have a functional server up OS + exchange install in about 3 hours if you know what you are doing.
Oh and screw the smtp gateway for antivirus scanning. That won't do you any good if an internal user sends an email to another. We've been using Antigen from Sybari. It does real-time scanning with 3 different engines, incoming and outgoing. It will also scan any message you move between folders or grab from a personal folder you just attached. We've never seen a single virus, Not 1, get through in nearly 3 years.
I know I've heard many horror stories of Exchange 2000, Outlook and viruses. I truly believe if you take the time to sit down and plan the installation (most people just jump into shit blindly) you can have a very competent mail system running on a Microsoft product. The problem is most Microsoft admins are guilty of being next next next admins and give MS a bad name.
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
I have Samba + Cyrus + Exim set up at a couple of places. I was looking into providing a central address book through OpenLDAP. So my questions to you are:
Thanks :)
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.
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.
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.
Second that.
I'd lose my job if someone found out that I'd picked inferior software on a moral issue (unless of course it was hand coded by a 3 year old kid in a sweat shop).
Management couldn't give a monkeys about the license. They just want to know that when they click Send & Receive, it will indeed Send & Receive. Every time.
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.
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
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.
There is a lot of money out there for whichever company comes up with a decent non-MS solution for 'groupware'.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
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.
You missed what I am saying. I am saying, yes, Exchange sucks to admin. But I like its features, and there isn't anything out there that is reasonably priced or competitive or does a nice job like Exchange does in the end.
That's why you should outsource your Exchange users to an ASP. That's what I did, and it costs $9.95/user per month.
That eliminates all of the crappiness and makes it so all you have to do is setup the clients or give them a link to OWA on their desktop/favorites list.
But if you do that, why have a sysadmin.