OT:Exchange good

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 19:02 -0700, Stephen P Rufle wrote:
> I think one main thing is "Either these things matter to your client or
> they don't.". If there were a base product or a series of products that
> just needed assembling to be as good or better then Exchange. I would
> think a group of people could stitch it all together in a way that would
> be sellable. Unfortunately I think there are some missing pieces.
> 
> I think a big set of use cases would be helpful. The other thing as a
> developer that comes to mind is SVN being a better version of CVS. We
> need free software version of exchange that from its beginnings was
> designed by the hive mind :)
> 
> ex.
> Should be able to be do online backups
> Should be able to run as a cluster of machines so load could be distributed
> ... etc
> 
> 
> What I think is that if there were the equivalent of Apache but in the
> Collaboration space that would be great. All the current players I think
>  are Commercial Open source that means they have investors or
> shareholders to answer to. If there was a solution available I think
> people such as Bryan could advocate using it in place of exchange.
> 
> Did this search
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=exchange+replacements&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=100&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=y&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
> 
> Found
> http://zarafa.com/
> which is different from Zimbra do not know anything about it.
> 
> You also have these companies that have already written a bunch of stuff
> and then decide to open source it. This generally does not work because
> the requirements were gathered by a single company trying to solve a
> problem on their own. I think Mozilla was mired with issues at first for
> some of the same reasons.
----
I think we are talking apples and oranges here.

While I can appreciate the desire for a turnkey solution - i.e. a
drop-in alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server the predicate is
itself, a compromise in that you are forced to adopt a specific vision,
implementation and rule set that is likely to be less than optimal.

For example, I have seen people who run Zimbra that don't care for the
anti-spam implmentation and then run another box to be the MX for the
server, scan the e-mail and then pass it on to Zimbra which just adds to
the cost. That setup is not untypical of many Exchange Server setups
too. I remember when I used to do 'programming' with Filemaker Pro, the
developer community used to laugh about the 'workarounds' needing
'workarounds' in order to deal with the myriad of things it didn't do
very well. There is no perfect package and if there were, EVERYONE would
use it.

Perhaps the greatest feature of Linux is the ability to employ the parts
and pieces that you choose, i.e. Sendmail/Postfix/Exim/etc. for SMTP,
Dovecot/Cyrus-IMAP/UW-IMAP/etc. for mail delivery and so on. A turnkey
setup doesn't permit much tinkering with these things at all.

There are collaboration packages that are not corporate driven such as
Horde, Kolab, Open-Xchange which are entirely community driven and not
part of a corporate strategy nor subject to a corporate whim and of
course there are many others that were mentioned up-thread that are
offered as 'community' based versions of the commercially supported
products that are undoubtedly built from open source packages.

In a general sense, I think most people 'recommending' commercial
packages are largely unfamiliar with most of the packages out there,
many of which are very good like Kerio or Communigate Pro but the
easiest thing is just to say Exchange Server - it used to be said that
it was always safe to recommend IBM and that now is Microsoft. What
happened was that by giving Outlook away freely, Microsoft got people to
believe what they wanted was to take this program Outlook and make it
groupware. Of course Outlook is crippled in every conceivable way to
make it painful in various insidious ways unless you had Exchange
Server. The fact is that Outlook has always been a high maintenance,
extreme security risk client.

While I can appreciate that some here would love a drop-in admin lite
soup to nuts alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server, that sort of
suggests that the driving force is expedience and somewhat dismissive of
the whole point of open source. Sometimes to be an admin you actually
need to be an admin.

To drive home my point...I typically set up clients with cyrus-imapd
which automatically creates a base folder set, subscribes them to those
folders including 'shared' folders, sets their quota, assigns a basic
setup of server based 'rules', indexes their mailboxes for fast searches
overnight, expires their 'deleted e-mails' automatically after 30 days
and expires their 'SPAMBOX' automatically after 7 days. Exchange Server
can't do most of that and cyrus-imapd is free (well, I've never seen
Exchange Server 2008 and its capabilities).

Craig