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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."
ExchangeIt is another option.
Disclaimer: I used to work there (but not on that product), and I still think that company is really cool.
Personally I think these solutions only mimic the problems that Exchange had, why not go a different direction? My money is on Hula, the great open source project launched by Novell with 20,000 lines of code from their proven NetMail. New versions of NetMail will be built from Hula's codebase, so it will be used in large companies/implementations. It's come a LONG way since February, and I have it running on FreeBSD currently. If interested, hit the mailing list, and we'll help you out.
bad_outlook
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Is this vague enough for you?
It may be a good idea to check out OpenGroupware.org. IIRC, it integrates with Outlook and they are also heavily working on OpenOffice.org and Mozilla integration. This is awesome if you want to transition your backend first. Once you get the back office off of Exchange, you can move the front office to OOo and Mozilla, followed by a switch out of the OS from Windows to Linux or BSD.
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.
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
RTFA:
The problem with MAPI has been less an issue of reverse engineering a protocol, and more an issue of trying to replicate the DCOM interface. Microsoft piled on the technology stacks in making MAPI, thus confounding attempts to create a compatible connector. It was only a year or two ago that Ximian finally figured it out.
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I'm surprised that the article neglected to mention Novel's GroupWise. Most of your leading anti-Microsoft shops tend to be very pro Novel, and GroupWise is still very much alive and kicking (with version 7 just released yesterday). It supports e-mail, instant messaging, appointments, Microsoft Outlook, and it even comes with a license of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
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.
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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ximian hasn't figured out the MAPI, they use WebDAV as their line protocol, I suspect. Could be wrong. Exchange supports WebDAV access.
Trying to reverse MAPI line protocol is insane. What you want to do is write a client-side connector, like all the vendors in the article. I'm working on one at openconnector.org
MAPI, btw, is a semi-documented standard. There are at least two books on it. But still, MS keeps tweaking it and doesn't release the changes, so we have to go back and reverse engineer those changes. In all its just a lot of coding, rather and reverse engineering.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
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?
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.
I don't know why always when there is a discussion about "enterprise messaging systems" OCS is never mentioned. OCS is a US$60/usr messaging system that has Email, Calendar, a WebDAV/NFS/SMB/FTP File Server (Oracle Files), Webconference, UltraSearch (Lets you search inside documents in your Oracle Files installation, in your email, in the intranet or internet etc), it also has Wireless access (via Voice/PDA/Phone/etc), and in the new version it will have Instant messaging, all inside an Oracle Database. and you don't have to pay for the database, you just pay per user and all the Oracle stack is included.
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.
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...
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. It has outlook integration and it's open source, so there is no vendor lock-in. http://kolab.org/
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
He is obviously on an Anti-MS kick.
Exchange is good software. It Just Works. And it performs exceptionally well. I've been working with it for years.
I consulted at a Univerisity with two Active/Passive Exchange clusters servicing over 12,000 users. Some used Outlook, some used POP/IMAP, some used OWA. It was Exchange 2000, later 2003. It's not like these were powerhouse big-iron type machines, either - quad processor boxes with 4GB RAM attached to a Clariion, I think they were 2.4Ghz Xeons. Of course, those were the mailbox servers - we had other machines for connectors and OWA front-end. But that's just normal best practices with a busy Exchange environment.
Another placed I worked at had dual-processor Compaq DL380's running the show, with over 2500 users per node. No sweat.
Usually, poor performance on Exchange is due to mis-configurations and not enough disk I/O. You can throw as many processors you want at Exchange, but it's really all about IO.
This guy also doesn't know the first thing about database servers if he's bitching about the memory usage on Store.exe. Store.exe is (as we know) the information store database service. It will use as much memory as it needs, and as is available. Usually the big memory usage is just cached data. Store.exe will give up all it's cached paged as soon as another app requires it. A lot of these kids now a days still think every app needs to run in 200k memory or it's "bloat." What's the point in having 4GB RAM if your applications don't use it?
They've obviously never administered a large database server. A big MS-SQL database server will cache the whole database, if it can. 1GB on store.exe? Try 4GB on mssql.exe.
I agree that there's issues with Exchange when it comes to administration (Public Folders can get unmanagable if you don't pay very close attention to user activity, although since Exchange 2000 I've never had any issues with PF Replication.) Overall, there's no other system that's as capable as Exchange for your basic groupware needs. It's VERY stable.
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I just finished an article for Redmond magazine on this subject that was published in July - considering it came out very pro OSS groupware, I was fairly surprised it made print. Admitted, it did get listed as 'opinion'... I'm also a longtime MAPI programmer and have a pretty solid understanding of how Outlook and Exchange work and don't work. Being polite, ever since MS added 'security features' in Outlook that gorked thousands of custom groupware solutions (some with very large corporations)I've been looking for anything OSS that can replicate the functionality of Outlook and Exchange. Guess what - it still doesn't exist and probably never will. The problem isn't finding an Exchange replacement - it's finding a client that can speak to your Exchange replacement. A client, not a web interface, but a full-featured PIM client. I know, web interfaces are a lot more robust than they used to be but it's still not the same as a native app. 95% of the work in an Outlook/Exchange environment is being done client side. Google MAPI and TNEF and you should get a sense of situation. You'll find many OSS groupware vendors give the server away for next to nothing but charge for the Outlook connector because a) it takes a hell of a lot of work to spoof Exchange to a level that Outlook will believe and b) it's a great revenue source. One of the biggest problems is there are now at least a dozen OSS Exchange replacements of widely varying quality. IMHO, there is still not a single product that will adequately replace a power-user combo of Outlook and Exchange, yet. Unfortunately, by the time OSS groupware gets it together, Exchange as we know it probably won't really exist anymore. The next version is sounding very modular and will be moving away from the traditional monolithic structure. OSS Exchange replacements are, in general, slavish half-ass replicas of Exchange rather than innovative products because that's what the market wants. The problem with hanging off the tiger's tail is that when the bastard changes direction you really get sent flying. As some other posters have mentioned, Hula is very exciting and not just because of jwz's essay 'Groupware Bad' (which really belongs next to esr's 'the cathedral and the bazaar' in some future anthology). Nat Friedman (of evolution fame and now working for Novell) is one of the people behind Hula and I suspect Evolution may be back burner while effort goes into improving the Hula web interface. Final speculation - Novell has an OSS client and an OSS groupware server. They also have Groupwise, perennial #3 in the groupware wars which runs quite comfy on Linux and Windows and has the same mail server under the hood as Hula. Wouldn't it be interesting if Groupwise made the transition to open source as well?