MS Exchange Server competition

[Dan Coutu]

On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 18:56, bscott at ntisys.com wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, at 11:30pm, greg at freephile.com wrote:
> > People are often looking for Linux work-alikes for MS Exchange Server.  
> > Novell just announced that they are making SUSE OpenExchange GPL.

I recently did an investigation for a client of Linux based
alternatives to Exchange. I found two that were very good
at providing full blown Exchange capabilities and compatibility.

One was the Novell/SuSE OpenExchange product. It has come a
long way over the past couple years. It now provides full
support for shared calendars, shared files, etc. in addition
to email. My primary beef with it is the cost. For small shops
the cost, while cheaper than Exchange by 1/2 to 1/3 less, is
still substantial.

The OpenExchange server is a complete standalone system.
In other words, when you buy it you get a full-blown SuSE
Linux system with the email server in place. So you need to
install it on a computer by itself. You can't just install
the software on an existing system that you already have.

The second, and more cost-effective, was a product sold by
Bynari that is called Insight Server. It provides about the
same functionality as OpenExchange for about half the price.

Another nice thing is that the Bynari product can be installed
on an existing system of yours that is already doing other
work. It will run on multiple flavors of Linux. So it's a
lot more flexible.

I'd have to say that for someone who needs a true alternative
to Exchange, because they plan to use Outlook with it (and
maybe Evolution as well), then one of these products is the
way to go. None of the FOSS programs provide all the 
functionality that these commercial products do.

For specifics on these:

In order to buy Novell OpenExchange you have to go through
one of their partners. Their partner that covers New
England is Systems Solutions out of New York. You can
find more on their web site at:

http://www.systemssolutions.com/html/softwarea.htm

The Bynari product has more information at:

http://www.bynari.net/index.php?id=1169

I've not yet deployed either of these and so cannot provide
first-hand experience. I'm currently waiting on the client
to decide which to choose and when to deploy it.

-- 

Dan Coutu
Managing Director
Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC
http://www.snowy-owl.com/