OT:Exchange good

[Bryan O'Neal]

You make some very good points.  The first is that we are comparing apples
to oranges.  I could not agree more, Exchange and its prospective
replacements are not mere mail systems.  For example you solution for a mail
system does not take into account any of the PIM/Collaboration requirements
exchange users demand. The second point you make is that people recommend
solutions they are already failure with.  The old adage to this is the
correct way to do something is they way you know how to get it done.  Which
is why many admins are constantly looking for new tools. This is also why I
am looking for an alterative to Exchange.  As for Admins need to be admins,
this too is very true, however admins are expansive.  A good one run you a
minimum of $30/hour, in the end TOC and ROI are all far more important the
techno bling. That said for pay and turn key solution are occasional a far
better way to go.  The responsibility of the IT/IS professional is to ad
value not bragging rites.  That said, remember that the real Exchange
replacement of Zimbra is a closed source proprietary for pay solution, if I
was a pure nix/mac shop using ldap and krb I would use it instead of
exchange.  However if I was working in an almost pure MS shop I would still
recommend Exchange.  Then again, if you really did not require much more
then mail, I may recommend outsourcing your mail solution or using postfix.
It is about the rite tool for the job and I believe Exchange can be the rite
tool. However, I thank you for the Horde, Kolab, Open-Xchange suggestions.
I have looked hard at Open-Xchange before and it fell short in several
places.  Not the least of which was the price (again, not as open as the
name may imply) I will look into the other two.  And while I understand
peoples dislike for Microsoft, I also feel it clouds peoples judgment of
Exchange.  And I defend it only because the implication that any one who
chooses an MS solution is not a good admin.  Of course I lost a job
opportunity with Scottsdale PD because I lean heavily to Linux and did  not
believe in a pure MS shop, so I get reamed from both camps and have become
somewhat used to it ;)

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Craig
White
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 9:03 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good

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

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