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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
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?"