Exchange Alternatives Round-up

richi writes "eWEEK has a review of Linux-based alternatives to MS Exchange: Group Where? Almost Anywhere. Focusing on how well they integrate with Outlook, it looks at Bynari Insight 4.2, CommuniGate Pro 4.2, Gordano 11 and Scalix Server 9.2.1."

Comments

They forgot about ExchangeIt

[SailorFrag]

ExchangeIt is another option.

Disclaimer: I used to work there (but not on that product), and I still think that company is really cool.

Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell the sales dept that some people (like me) are turned off by the lack of pricing information. "Contact us for pricing" is really anoying, as I can't quickly and easilt compare price/features. It also usually indicates (IME) something that is way over priced. I usually won't even bother contacting them, as there are too may other places willing to tell me what it costs.

None of them are solutions

[DogDude]

How can any of these be considered a viablealternative if "None of the products provides full Outlook-to-Exchange feature fidelity in Outlook"?

My *real* alternative to an expensive Exchange server in house is: hosted Exchange. It's *much* cheaper for small businesses, and there's no need to sacrifice any functionality.

Re:None of them are solutions

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Our organization has been running for several years with a web-based calendar and contact list system. One thing we have going for us is that nobody in upper management has ever worked with Outlook, and the few that have not been able to name a capability in Outlook that doesn't work with our system. (They complain because they have to do it in a browser instead of having it all come up through the Email client.)

We migrated the stafflist to LDAP, so the argument about the staff list not showing up when composing emails has been vanquished as well.

I think what people need to realize is that contact and scheduling systems are an amalgam of several networking protocols. With a pretty front end. I keep forgetting the pretty front end. In any case, and fool with enough time on his hands and a DB backend could build his own.

Exchange is rarely the right solution

[realmolo]

I do a lot of networking/computer repair for a lot of businesses, and many of them use Exchange. But you know what they use it FOR? E-mail. Nothing else. Yeah, they at one time may have used the calendar/scheduling features, but they eventually realized that secretaries could do a better job doing the "old" way.

It's not that Exchange is bad (though any program that has an entire cottage industry dedicated to backing it up can't be great), it's that it does TOO MUCH. Very few companies have any chance of getting all their employees to actually use all the features of Exchange. And, really, it might not be worth their time to train them on it in the first place. MOST businesses just need good email. All the *collaborative* features simply require too much of a change in the way people think about their job to really get used.

For the vast majority of small-to-medium-sized businesses, they'd be better served with a good Postfix/Courier-IMAP/SquirrelMail setup, with greylisting and SpamAssassin and anti-virus scanning. All of which is free. And MUCH more stable than any Exchange setup I've ever seen.

The only thing that Exchange has over everything else is that it can use domain usernames/passwords. Big fucking deal.

Re:So...

[Red Flayer]

From MS website:

Exchange Server, the Microsoft messaging and collaboration server, is software that runs on servers that enables you to send and receive electronic mail and other forms of interactive communication through computer networks. Designed to interoperate with a software client application such as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Server also interoperates with Outlook Express and other e-mail client applications.

From wikipedia:

Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice. Exchange is now to be simply email and calendaring.

MS prefers its clients to have to license separate software for these tasks, this allows both greater specialization and multiple revenue streams.

Re:Is Outlook really the killer app?

[ckaminski]

Every office I've been in could replace Word, Excel and Access with any other 3rd party application, Lotus, Corel, Borland, etc.

Name me one Windows based groupware app that you could replace Outlook with. Evolution doesn't count since it doesn't run on Windows, and is a BLATANT copy of Outlook.

How about Kolab?

[sskang]

Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Kolab Server, considering it's now stable and usable software based on well-proven components. The server is free software, and there's the third party Toltec connector for Outlook users. This project really doesn't get enough attention...

Re:Don't worry about this jackass

[zaphod123]

A couple of comments... My previous job was at an ISP. Your configuration is big iron compared to the boxes we were running sendmail on. Two sun servers with dual 300 procs servicing 10000 users. This was
overkill before the need for spam filtering.

We could always tell the customers who ran exchange. Their mailserver would go down at least once per week. You can blame poor administration, etc, but it was consistent from site to site....