Alternatives to Exchange Server

[Dan Coutu]

Here's a follow-up on what I've found.

I found two commercial, very viable, solutions in this
space. Both support not only the regular email capabilities
of Exchange but also calendaring and in at least one
case collaboration (kind of like net meeting with a virtual
whiteboard). Oh, and they both support shared file folders
just like Exchange does.

The more expensive of the two (about $2700 for 35 users)
is the SuSe Openexchange product. It turns out that you can
only order the base product with a 10 user license directly
from Novell/SuSe. You have to work through one of their
distributor partners for larger quantitites of licenses.
This worked out okay though. I contacted a company in NY
that was listed on the SuSe web site and they were quite
helpful.

Openexchange is built on top of SuSe, naturally. It is
designed to be a standalone turnkey system. Just install
it on Intel/AMD hardware and go. They claim it is easier
to administer than Exchange is and it supports more options
that Exchange does.

The other is the Bynari Insight Server product. This can
be installed on a variety of Linux systems including
Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo, and Slackware.
The Insight server is cheaper because in addition to the
licensing costs being lower, $1199 for a 50 user license,
you don't need to buy new hardware for it to run on. It
can run on an existing server.

You can learn more about these from the vendor's websites.

http://www.suse.com/us/business/products/openexchange/

http://www.bynari.net

My client is currently reviewing the options. I suspect he'll
want to try the Bynari product. If so then I'll send out a
note describing how that went once I've got it installed and
running.

Thanks for the input provided earlier!

-- 

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