Slashdot Mirror
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"
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 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.
There's something called BILL workgroup server, and it acts as an exchange replacement.
Here is the url www.billworkgroup.org
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???
Love it or leave AC, you just posted an ad for an expensive piece of carp software!
I urge you to consider choosing your path wisely in this matter, and don't follow knee-jerk responses like this one!
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.
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.
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
Outlook Express does little more than email.
Email is the least of the features of its big brother, Outlook, however. Outlook handles: task lists (very important...our comapny uses hierarchies of these task lists for all bug tracking in development , because it's stupid enough to be flexible with regards to input), global contacts (as in, for an entire organization), group management, Sticky notes, alerts, a "journal" which tracks changes on all your office docs (fucking awesome), syncing with pocketpc and I THINK palm, publishable schedules, and this is jsut the stuff I actually USE.
Best of all, Outlook is pretty stable, unobtrusive, and surprisingly easy to use. And since our smtp server cleans viruses before they even GET to Outlook, the second biggest downfall is eliminated for us. The biggest, of course, is price, and our license came "free" with the MSDE subscription we get anyway to do our work.
I prefer Squirrelmail for email, and use iCal at home for the killer rendezvous support. But for doing all the sundry business crap I gotta do on Windows, Outlook is second only to a personal assistant (insert secretary shagging joke here).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"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));
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.
On email? never. Its the lifeblood of our orginization, and there's absolutely no way I'd be willing to put in place an inferior product. And the managemnt knows this. Our IT department can comprimise on plenty of things, but email can't be one of them.
Mod point free since 2001
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.
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
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
It's so substandard that you and your pals can't code a replacement for it if your lives depended on it.
And PHP? Bwahahaha. You may start coding. Let me know how it goes.
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.
Listen. I moved to this system from TestDirector, and I must say it kicks the SHIT out of the latter. I've also used a couple other solutions I won't mention because even though they suck, I'm friends with their developers.
1) Outlook's native, not activex/java-inna-window, so it never crashes. TD (and one of the other apps) has the tendency to do that unless you use their client, and they make you pay per license. Outlook's client is basically "free," since it comes with MS Word, Excel, and all the other crap you "have to have" at a business.
2) Most of them FORCE you to enter information. This can take a long time. Sometimes, I just want to add a task to remind me to find a faster way to execute an algorithm. It is much quicker and much easier to use Outlook.
3) Generally (at least 90% of the time), even WITH all the extended information, I needed to meet with the tester who found a problem to watch them replicate it. It's nearly impossible to codify some of the more complicated activities we perform, and many testers, sadly, aren't technical writers. They're clever sadistic people who get their jollys off in proving you wrong (j/k guys, I love you all! Beta Forever!)
4) There's nothing by way of completeness or exactness that you get in a bug tracking system that you CAN'T get with Tasks. Need to know what version they're running? Say, "hey guys, when you enter a task, include the version." Done. Need to include a screen shot, patch file, etc? Done. Need to SEARCH on these things? Done. Maybe not as nicely as you'd like, but you can do it...and it's already here.
But then again, I *like* post-it notes on a whiteboard. And I used to work with this guy.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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
"carp software!"
Carp, Haddock, it all sounds fishy to me.
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.
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.
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.
What utter bollocks.
Email is email - SMTP/POP3 provide a perfectly good delivery service.
The mail and the folders should reside on the server. The status of the email (read/unread) should reside on the server. Using POP3, it ends up on the client. Even if you configure the mail reader to leave mail on the server, you don't have server based folders, nor do you have the server keeping track of which messages have been read.
Equally, a mailserver doesn't typically corrupt its own data or require frequent reboots.
Look, if you want people to believe your arguments about whether Linux is better, quit spewing FUD. You complain when Microsoft spews FUD about Linux, don't do the same. Many, many organizations run Exchange with no corruption of the data store and no need for reboots. Get over it - Exchange is a good product.
VB programmers really, really should keep it to themselves.
Does that make you feel better? Not everyone codes in C/C++/Java. Big whoop. I bet I get a lot more done for the company I work for than a C programmer would. Right tool for the job.
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
Well, at least that eliminates Outlook.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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
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.
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,
E-mail software should do e-mail, not be some bloated "groupware solution".
Let me guess... You don't administer a network for a bunch of people who want to share contacts and calendars, as well as send/receive e-mail?
I would love to plug in an open-source e-mail server, but it doesn't fit the bill. Groupware is what is needed by management. Thinking SMTP,POP3, and/or IMAP alone will meet their needs is awfully short-sighted.
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.
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.
There _are_, they just aren't Outlook-compatible. PHPGroupware is what my company uses - it goes far beyond what Exchange/Outlook provides. However, it doesn't use Outlook itself, and thus many corporate types won't touch it. Yes, that's stupid, but that's where we live.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I guess it all depends where you work. I work at a software company, and like just about every software company we compete with MS in one form or another. As a result, we have to seriously consider each and every time we choose to purchase something from MS because it is in our best interest *not* to fund our competition. Forcing the workforce to learn a slightly different email/collaboration client is a far smaller price to pay, esp. if you consider that if you're hirering high enough quality people they should be able to easily pick up a new tool. In the past, it was much more difficult to avoid funding MS to compete against you because the alternatives weren't great. With open source we have a decent alternative, and I think a lot of companies are going to wake up ("wait a sec? why are we sending thousands of dollars to MS every year??"). Ironically, in my company this idea is coming from the management (c*o)!, and is actually facing more resistence from engineering because they're the ones stuck in their ways technically - the marketting and sales people couldn't care less (all they do is check email and set up appointments, and whatever vertical customer tracking software they use). Anyway, as MS enters more markets, they force more and more companies to compete with them and sooner or later we're all going to wake up and say whaaa?!
This is where someone reminds you that the "because it's not from Microsoft" statement is what instigated the responses.
Negate the price of any piece of software, then decide what is inferior/superior. Oh, wait, first take out your holier-than-thou attitude, your extended expertise and experience with basic software operations, and your ability to provide free seminars and documentation that can contend with most of the $40 books you have to purchase just to understand how to manipulate the software. THEN compare them.
Sorry son, but the cranks that push that money into Microsoft are RAW copies of Gates. They're CEO's and CFO's and CTO's and Presidents and Vice Presidents and Board Members who have several million dollars on the line and would prefer not to have some ADHD, short attention span, impatient prick kid copping an attitude because his mind is on a golden contract and not what button to click.
Anyone who believes Exchange to be a 'simple' application is short minded and has never actually administered an exchange server.
I'm probably not done with this one...
on the sixth day God created man.
on the seventh day, man returned the favor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.