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Exchange Alternatives Round-up

Posted by Hemos on from the good-news-for-the-it-set dept.

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."

7 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Active Directory integration? by charnov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Without full AD integration it's still kind of pointless. Not to mention the hundreds (thousands?) of programs that need Exchange. The closest I have worked with administratively is Domino and that was an admins nightmare. I run Exchange 2000 servers (again) and I tell ya, other than the dollar cost, these things are great.

    --
    [RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
    1. Re:Active Directory integration? by Noaccess0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That depends on your environment. There are still some companies who run 5.5 (I work at one) because the AD structure is so large and encumbered that duct taping a messaging environment to it would be really bad. Granted some of the new features of E2K3 SP1 are pretty nice (cross admin group movement, etc), it's still an ugly migration path for legacy clients. Let's face it, if your sites and subnets are not designed along MS whitepaper specs, you are going to have issues with routing in E2kX.

    2. Re:Active Directory integration? by b0bby · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Hmmm, for a 30 user network you could use SBS, which can ONLY have the Exchange server running as the AD master, so you shouldn't need different boxes. A few years back I went that route, we rely on shared calendars in Outlook heavily and when we were forced to move from MS Mail & POP I looked at all the options. At that time, SBS really was the only decent option, much as I wanted to use something Linux based. It's worked out well, though the 16gb limit is a pain. If you've only got 30 or so users you should check into it, though these days there are more/better options.

  2. Replaces the meeting room by charnov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you don't have a decent amount of corporate experience, a lot of what Exchange is for may seem alien or useless, but I would have to say along with our document management system it is the core of IT infrastructure for where I work (a multibillion dollar, multinational financial services company). Simply, Exchange provides for email service in all its forms (pop, mapi, imap), news server, webmail backend/front end (along with IIS), public folders, collaborative contacts, mails, document checking, etc., global contacts, shared calendering, shared tasks, etc.

    What makes it so special is that it is tightly integrated with MS Office (stuff like round robin document collaboration needs Exchange to work well...it's nifty) and Active Directory integration for management, contacts, policies, etc.

    There are a lot of things to get on Microsoft about, but Exchange (at least from version 2000 on) is mostly a thing of beauty. I wish my users only needed straight email, but they need to be able to things like schedule a meeting on the fly from their cell which notifys all the attending, their secretaries, etc. wo can all weigh in and do conflict resolution and get a meeting time set all while the principle in the field is talking to a client in seconds. I haven't mentioned how it all plugs into our document management system and the archiving necessary for NASD, SEC, and IRS compliance that I haven't seen from any other vendor.

    If all you need is mail, you'd be insane to go the Exchange route, but if you are already building a Windows infrastructure, you'd be just as insane NOT to have Exchange.

    --
    [RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
  3. How about alternatives to Outlook? by helicologic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd be more interested in a discussion of alternatives to Outlook. At my company I have no control over the use of the Exchange server, but I can use whatever I want on my desktop. I use Evolution, but frankly it's pretty sucky and gets worse with each release. Anybody out there in my boat, stuck trying to talk to the corporate Exchange server from a Linux desktop? What do you use?

  4. Groupware never got anybody laid... by defile · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Groupware Bad
    And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

  5. Re:All too big - Hula is a better way to move by bad_outlook · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oh, I completely agree, on my home web/mail server I've used Horde/IMP, squirrelmail, openExchange, and a host of other PHP/IMAP/MYSQL based email solutions; Hula is none of these. It includes it's own web server, mail server, and can even do it's own virus and spam scanning via Spamassasin and Clamav - but all of the Hula backend is written in C (not PHP) and uses it's own database backend, so it's tons faster than any of the PHP based solutions and scales accordingly. In the works are LDAP too, so again, this is a different way of handling an old problem.

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    bad_outlook
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    Is this vague enough for you?