Exchange replacement

Derek Neighbors wrote:

>>Hi,
>>
>>I have been out voted into having our company switch to using Outlook at
>>the desktop and a Microsoft Exchange server. (Oh the nightmares) We had
>>a conversation about this the other day after this was decided and the
>>person who made the final decision thought that we NEEDED exchange to
>>run Outlook. After explaining to him that you don't need Exchange to
>>run MS Office w/ Outlook, he mentioned that he wants to switch from the
>>web based phpgroupware to using the shared contacts within outlook. This
>>is where my problems come in at. I need something that runs on Linux
>>that will emulate exchange. I have come across exchange4linux along
>>with some pure client side contact sharing solutions. After going
>>through the installation proceedure for exchange4linux, I found out that
>>after I loaded the client MAPI plugin for Outlook, that it required a
>>key on the server to allow clients to connect (thus costing money per
>>seat). I then looked into using public and shared folders in IMAP - we
>>run UW-IMAP. I created the necessary environment for a public folder
>>and got it to work nicely with #public showing in the namespace list. I
>>can't get Outlook or Squirrelmail to subscribe to it, and outlook
>>probably wouldn't allow the creation of contacts in this folder. So
>>that solution isn't going to work either. Any other ideas?
>
>
> Contacts and shared mail should not be an issue. Generally it's
> calendaring that is hard to provide a solution to. I suggest using
> cyrus-imap for mail and LDAP for your shared contacts. I have not found a
> good calendaring solution as of yet. It would be interesting to know
> their full thinking on this matter.

At my last job they were looking into Meeting Maker as a calendering
application. It has clients for most OSes, and for the ones it doesn't, you can
use the web interface.