Microsoft Exchange Replacement

[James McDonald]

Vu Pham wrote:

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: linux-users-bounces at linux-sxs.org 
>>[mailto:linux-users-bounces at linux-sxs.org] On Behalf Of Ben Duncan
>>Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 9:00 PM
>>To: Linux tips and tricks
>>Subject: Microsoft Exchange Replacement
>>
>>Does anyone know of a OSS drop in replacement for Microsloth 
>>Exchange Server ?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I am looking for the same thing. I 've tried Binary Insight server (
>www.bynari.com ) . I think it's good for small systems. One of my customers
>is using it. It was good when they started with small number of users, but
>now I think it does not scale well when the number of share folders and
>emails increases. They are working on a new verson 3.0, beta at this time. I
>'ve not tried it yet.
>
>I also tried Suse's OpenExchage ( now of Novell ). It seems nice, but the
>connector for Outlook seems having problem with Outlook 2003. I tried it
>with Outlook 2003 and met some problems, made a google search and found some
>other people having similar problems. One of the recent articles says that
>NetLine will release a new version of OpenExchange this March with big
>improvements and the new version can run other some other Linux distros
>also. Currently OpenExchange 4.1 can only run on Suse Server 8. I really am
>anxious to try the new one.
>
>I am trying Groupware 6.5 right now. Just downloaded their eval versions,
>and am installing into my RHES 3 under Vmware into my notebook :-)
>
>Vu
>
>  
>
I have done the same sort of looking at the products as Vu and it seems 
that the OpenExchange product from Novell is static. The open source 
version vu mentions http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/ is 
forked from OpenExchange and runs on java. If you know about LDAP / Java 
/ Postgres / apache / tomcat / Perl then it's an interesting several 
hours to install (that was a few months ago on fc1). It's hardware 
requirements for a large environment would be hefty due to it's java roots.

Unilever.com is using a linux backend and a custom written IMAP plugin 
in Outlook. The issue is that the standard outlook pst file needs to be 
moved to a server so it can roam with the user and the calendaring and 
scheduling is 'local' only. Meaning that you can't grab every bodies 
freebusy information but they can do personal calendaring and scheduling 
fairly well.

Lotus Notes may provide an alternative as it can be used with Outlook 
and includes the free/busy scheduling ability (I hear)

http://www.scalix.com/products/ <== these guys make a email server that 
may do what you need.

http://www.egroupware.org/ <== if you want to use a simple browser based 
email and colaboration/calendaring/scheduling software this may be 
suitable also it's got a heap of modules so you need to do a lot of 
tweaking ... Install was easy though.