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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."
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.
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.
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.
Any perticular reason when I go to the website and open up the Flash demo to see how it works, it says "Best viewed in fullscreen" inside the non-resizable popup window?
Are they taunting me?
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.
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
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -