Exchange Replacement

[Kevin D. Clark]

dbunker at boston.com writes:

> I haven't used it since the mid 90's, but the best groupware package I've
> ever used that in my mind competed with Exchange was Firstclass
> (http://www.firstclass.com/).
> 
> It didn't run on any *nix at the time, but it did support our mac clients,
> and a quick perusal of their site shows that the latest version is being
> ported to Sun and Linux.
> 
> It was a very slick package, and worked well for our installation of 3000+
> clients.

I must politely disagree.  I've used FirstClass, and I have a very low
opinion of it.

A couple of problems that immediately come to mind with FirstClass:

   o  didn't handle larger mail messages.  In one case, when somebody
      sent me a 500k PDF file, when I tried to snarf the email via
      IMAP I consistantly crashed the mail server  (I managed to get
      the mail via POP).  I wrote to FirstClass's tech support about
      this, but I never got a response back.

   o  Even worse that Microsoft's Outlook not being able to
      intelligently deal with the "References:" header, the FirstClass
      mail *server* *actively strips these out*.

   o  The FirstClass *server* is one of those programs that feels
      comfortable word-wrapping people's emails, which means that the
      authors of the mail server thought that they are smarter than you
      are.  So, if you try to send a long URL to a co-worker, he or
      she has to tediously paste it together in order to access the
      URL.  Or if you try to send an ASCII diagram to your co-worker,
      it will word-wrap this as well.

   o  FirstClass does other boffo things with headers and attachments
      too, things that should never be done.


I'm glad that I don't FirstClass anymore.



To interject a comment here:  what does Oracle offer in terms of an
Exchange replacement?  I see their ads out on the web, but I know very
little about what they're offering.

Regards,

--kevin
-- 

Go UNH!  Beat Cornell!