OT:Exchange good

[Stephen]

Ironically this was part of the point everyone was argueing. that
there are better indevidual replaceemnt for excahnge, but exchange is
one of the best at its collection of fucntions.

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Bryan O'Neal
<boneal at cornerstonehome.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen