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Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com)
Linux.com has reviewed
three open source messaging servers. "This week on Linux.com we
reviewed Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, three of the highest-profile
open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. All of them have their
defects, and all three offer commercial versions that make installation and
maintenance easier than it is for their open source versions. We've also
talked to marketing people from all three companies, and while they all
talk about growing sales and a rosy future, it's obvious from the reader
comments attached to the reviews of their products that none of them is an
immediate threat to Microsoft's domination of the corporate messaging
server market. But on the other hand, each one of these products has at
least one or two features that Microsoft Exchange lacks."
(Log in to post comments)
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 29, 2006 20:39 UTC (Fri) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] I looked at Bynari Products initial product offering when it was first released (can it be four years, already?), and was impressed. However, neither Bynari Products products, nor those of Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, provide support for right-to-left (RTL) languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
It is this kind of idiocy which keeps so many non-Western governments and institutions from embracing Linux, Unix, and F/OSS.
The marketplace is there. Forget about Hebrew, if you don't like Israel; but for gosh sakes, just think about all those petrodollars that are up for grabs.
I run both Fedora Core 5 and Debian Etch on my two Linux boxes, and on both of them I author documents in Hebrew, using OpenOffice, and maintain steady email contact with family and friends in Israel, using Thunderbird.
Regardless of whether a product is commercial or open-source, these companies need to add RTL support. I mean, they're in business to sell things and make money, right?
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 3:27 UTC (Sat) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] > However, neither Bynari Products products, nor those of Scalix,> Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, provide support for right-to-left (RTL) > languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
...huh?
Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but isn't that sort of thing the province of the mail client, not the "messaging server" ?
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 1:39 UTC (Sun) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but isn't that sort of thing the province of the mail client, not the "messaging server"? Yes, of course you are correct. I should have specified that the GUIs for none of these products are offered in RTL languages, such as Hebrew, Farsi, and Arabic. It might seem petty, especially when English is taught in public schools in most Middle Eastern countries, beginning at an early age; however, native-language support is the sort of thing that "makes or breaks" deals -- especially at large corporate, governmental, or institutional levels. Thank you for mentioning my error.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 29, 2006 20:51 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I'm a die-hard believer in just setting up an IMAP server and leaving the "collaboration" alone, but there is one very important feature that so far no open-source Exchange competitor inplements: integration with Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 8:37 UTC (Sun) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] What exactly does Blackberry do that IMAP IDLE doesn't? IDLE is supported by most IMAP servers as well as many cellphones (nokia E61, palm treo, sony ericsson P900,..).
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 2, 2006 1:16 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] it doesn't work with a blackberry.
yes you can get it to work with other phones, but that's not what executives want (and most phones have too small a screen to be useable in any case)
it's not that blackberry is doing anything remarkable from a technology point of view, but they have the infrastructure and mindshare that it doesn't matter.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 2, 2006 1:25 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] The point is that the Blackberry doesn't support IMAP, and the installed base of the Blackberry makes those other handhelds you mentioned appear equal to zero.
The Blackberry Enterprise Server also has way more functionality than mere email. It provides synchronization services between the handheld and the desktop (including address books, web bookmarks, etc) and it allows for sending data between the handheld and custom software running in the office using the same reliable data channel that is used for email.
What I'd really like to see is a Blackberry Enterprise Server that itself supports IMAP. Then you could use it with any mail daemon. Then I'd like to see the SQL Server requirement dropped in favor of abstraction to any JDBC data source. The BES is already written in Java so there's really no reason it should require SQL Server.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 29, 2006 20:52 UTC (Fri) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] Someone help out an old-timer here. What is it that is so magic about Exchange that makes it so hard to find in the open source community. The only thing I've ever seen used that classic email (e.g. Thunderbird over Postfix & Dovecot) lacks is integrated calendaring in the mail client.Calendaring? We're way behind in IT mindshare in this incredibly important, must-have product area because of ... calendar sharing? Is that really so hard? What gives, here: what am I missing that makes this such a big deal?
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 29, 2006 21:06 UTC (Fri) by hisdad (subscriber, #5375) [Link] We need an OS xchange replacement that can integrate with outlook.Outlook is used by corporates.
It must support _outlooks_ methodology. Thats a lot of reverse engineering.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 29, 2006 21:36 UTC (Fri) by gvegidy (subscriber, #5063) [Link] You may want to look at the Kolab project (http://www.kolab.org), theydefined an XML-format to store all groupware data on an IMAP server.
Additional to linux (KDE Kontact) and webmail (Horde IMP) clients there
In our company we are using the Konsec Konnektor for about 4 month with
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 19:16 UTC (Sat) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link] Seconded. We use Kolab with the Toltec connector in a mixed Windows / Linux environment. (Linux uses Kontact IIRC). In the beginning there have been some glitches, but they are sorted out now (of course one never knows).
Calendering Posted Sep 29, 2006 22:57 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Calendering is actually a very hard when you start getting into the part that people want: Finding free time on 5-10 people's schedules. In an organization of 10,000 people you end up just feeling the cpu's and memory burning on the exchange, meeting maker, and groupwise servers everyday as managers, project guys, etc all try to do "busy-searches"
Pretty much every company I know who has cracked this nut ends up with a lot of phd's trying to cut down sort, cpu, and other NP problems.
Calendering Posted Sep 29, 2006 23:05 UTC (Fri) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] Pretty much every company I know who has cracked this nut ends up with a lot of phd's trying to cut down sort, cpu, and other NP problems.Sorry, but I have to call shenanigans on this one. This isn't a trivial problem, but it's certainly not compute intensive. Pulling the schedules for the N employees over M days is O(M*N), of course, not O(M*TotalEmployees) (OK, maybe your database inserts a log(TotalEmployees) factor, but still). Once you have them, sort them (O(N*M*logM)) and traverse in order looking for an empty slot (O(M)). Everything here is linear at worst, there's not even a dependence on M^2 or N^2. And the data is tiny: a few dozen entries per employee. You can do the query and then sort it on the client if you want.
Calendering Posted Sep 30, 2006 4:35 UTC (Sat) by azhrei_fje (guest, #26148) [Link] Well, I assume I'm missing something really stupid here, so I expect someone will point it out to me. :) Why not just keep a bit vector of each employee's free time? Assuming a 40-hour work week (a configurable value), that makes 480 5-minute blocks of time. Simply choose the employees that should be attending the meeting, use a bitwise AND, and bingo! you've got all 5-minute intervals that overlap. If you need 15 minutes contiguous, just scan for 3 bits adjacent. The calendaring tool can keep the bit vector up to date for each employee quite easily... As the employee's calendar changes, update the vector. Okay, so now tell me why this won't work!? ;) (It's gotta be something really simple, but I don't see it.)
Calendering Posted Sep 30, 2006 11:33 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It probably works. You can add more complex rules (like conditional invitations, exclusive-or attendants, etc.) but the basic algorithm seems alright to me.Probably there are other calendar operations which are not so linear. Maybe smoogen would care to elaborate?
Calendering Posted Sep 30, 2006 16:11 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] I am not an expert at it myself... just worked with a bunch of guys who had done it at Lotus and Novell back in the 1990's.. so their knowledge might be a bit slow. The issue is that schedules are not static. Meetings move, new deadlines get added, people tend to close off most of their time to avoid meetings, nd so you have to have priorities (a self set time space is a 0 class meeting, your level 1 boss is 1 class meeting, his boss setting a meeting is a 2 class meeting, and then you get to deal with 2 level two bosses trying to set up meetings with the same 4 people at nearly the same time..)
I am guessing that at the time I was working as a sysadmin for the calender people talking war stories.. the time that it took for a meeting to be set up might cause race conditions and stuff.
Calendering Posted Oct 2, 2006 9:49 UTC (Mon) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] AFAIK this is exactly what Outlook does. The Exchange server keeps a list of free/busy/tentative time for each employee, meeting room, etc - but only for the next month or two. When creating a meeting, the Outlook client retrieves this free time from each employee (you can see it doing this, takes time). Then "OR"s the busy times together and just looks for a slot. It displays all the free/busy information so you can manually override the suggestion. Quite simple.
(I suspect Outlook retrieves and maintains a list of times rather than a bitmap - it seems to have 1 minute granularity - but it's still no big deal to OR the time slots.)
Calendering Posted Oct 2, 2006 9:58 UTC (Mon) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] And there really IS a need for more complex calendaring systems than Outlook / Exchange can handle. In my organisation we've had additional (non-Outlook) web-based calendars to handle holidays and customer meeting rooms.
So yes, calendaring is important. It should be straightforward to match the facilities in Outlook/Exchange. But it's a very attractive proposition for advanced features that Exchange doesn't support, even if they needed to be accessed through a different (web?) client.
Calendering Posted Sep 30, 2006 16:30 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] As I say below.. I am not an expert about this. I worked for a startup in 1996 that hired a bunch of guys who had done one of the original Notes and some people who had worked on an early version for Novell. I was just the sysadmin and the janitor who would try to ask questions to find out why the webcalender program was going to be so hard.
The guys then went into traveling salesmen problems and saying it was non-trivial to solve the problems so you have to cheat. The issue with the limited number of meeting rooms seemed to be the hardest with the level of the person scheduling as a way to break that. The E was the most requested thing they could remember bcause people would ask for a reschedule all the time because they had meetings at different sides of a complex.
One of the groups I later worked for ran the calendering systems for a 10,000+ place. Usually meetings would get asked to be scheduled at peak times during the day... "shortly after the previous meeting ended, beginning of the day, after lunch, and end of the day". So the servers would have times of no usage beyond checking when a meeting was happening, and then 100's of requests for meetings at nearly the same time.
Calendering Posted Sep 30, 2006 23:05 UTC (Sat) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] I suspect the difficult part is converting the social conventions that govern meetings into hard rules that can be programmed in.
In that way, it'll be like bug-tracking systems and billing systems: even if they get everything technically right, they can still suck.
How exchange differs Posted Sep 30, 2006 0:18 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] I'm not Exchange export... nor have I used Outlook for any length of time but I believe the following to be true.
Here are a few things that differ although I'm not saying all are critical or good:
1) Single login - login as a domain user and you don't need to specify a password for outlook/exchange with MAPI
2) Global Addressbook - Just type in someone's name and matches showup until you get it right... kinda a pain because often you can't figure out what someone's email address really is... because it only shows their name
3) Calendars, Shared Calendars, and Calendars for resources too
4) Attachments can be file(s) on a network share
5) One copy of an email/attachment for multiple recipients
6) Email expiration
7) Integration with LDAP/Active Directory
8) Todo, contacts, etc.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 2:22 UTC (Sat) by odie (guest, #738) [Link] I worked with Exchange/Outlook a couple of years ago, and I cannot see the appeal. It is (was) a nightmare to maintain. and didn't actually work all that well. I once implemented a for a client an sql-based iCal-exporting system that worked much better in two weeks time. The thing with Exchange is mindshare. Corporations like Outlook for some reason I have never understood (I supported Outlook for two years, and in my opinion it is pure garbage). They want alternatives to emulate the clumsy model of Exchange, where every user has their own individual calendar and data is sent about in user-intesive ways. Free alternatives want to design correctly, and often get stuck on their way towards the Right Way.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 2:26 UTC (Sat) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (guest, #39670) [Link] I confess that I don't understand the widespread infatuation with M$FT Exchange, et al, either.
I use sendmail and dovecot. The user chooses his client and they all have worked well with this
What is the argument that e-mail and calendars be integrated? Apple probably understands
Whenever I worked in corporate environments where it was mandated that we use Lotus Notes, or
So I am missing it... what useful business function is delivered by Exchange which is not already
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 3:29 UTC (Sat) by Viddy (subscriber, #33288) [Link] I work for a company in NZ with ~10k of its employees that have user accounts and have a email client active and monitored while they are at work 9-5, monday to friday. Our business is a MS shop on the desktop, with AD/Exchange/windows file servers + Outlook on XP on Dell client machines.
Everyone uses exchange/outlook for mail and calendering, and it works well. There aren't any gestapo tatics to 'make' people use the calender, one just does, because thats whats done.
My point is that exchange, while ripped on by many folk, is actually (in my experience) pretty bloody good, and if OSS folk want have a replacement for exchange, I'd suggest that they catch up first.
I'd probably point out that I don't particularly like proprietary MS software, but one has to give credit where credit is due.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 10:19 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] That's about my understanding of it..Were I work we don't use Outlook or Exchange or none of that. It's just LDAP + Thunderbird + Imap no calendering features.
But my father works were they use exchange. Just a ex-accountant higher-up execuative. Knows a bit about computers, but never has no desire to be admin or learn the in and outs of anything since MSDOS-days.
They use a database backend and work with spreadsheets and do basic accounting programming with MS Excel.
At his work I think it's very typical setup. For them it's just basicly address book, calendering, and Email. That's what they use exchange for. Thats probably what most people use it for.
Going feature for feature with Exchange is probably a waste of time. Most people don't use most of Exchange's stuff anyways. Now Exchange and other commercial groupware products have feature that go far and beyond just email stuff. Novell Groupware is like that. They were originally designed in the days were you had non-Unix-style networking (ie no TCPIP) and everything you did computer-wise was intended as the entire document handling proccess.. The 'paperless office' stuff. (remember that?)
But Email, Calendering (including sharing out dates and setting meetings and such), Address book are absolutely critical. Setting up a intellegent plugin/extension system with good documentation and samples would probably be more then sufficiant to take care of the rest of the people that use one or two of the more oddball features Exchange provides.
Now of course with Linux systems they have Email down. No problem with that. For address book setting up Ldap is a bit of a pain for some people, but it does the job and it'll integrate with other stuff, such as SSO.
But calendering stuff isn't so hot. Although it seems to have gotten much better. Maybe with protocols like 'iCalender' will help. A lot of stuff seems to support that. Haven't realy heard of anybody realy deploying something like that though using Linux.
Anybody use something like Kolab or Scalix or whatever to setup calendering services?
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 16:12 UTC (Sat) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (guest, #39670) [Link] So in some environments the booking of meetings works on Exchange, by the sound of it.Interesting.
I did neglect to mention LDAP based address books, but, that's the vanilla flavour in Linux, and
I personally use Apple's iCal, of late, for personal calendar and sync it with my Treo. I then
I haven't used Kolab, though I'd be interested in hearing what other people use especially if it
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Sep 30, 2006 21:19 UTC (Sat) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link] Your original comment mentions people subverting the calendar system by not storing their data on it, or by intentionally blocking out all their time so you have to phone them. Of course, no software will be able to solve this problem; it's an HR problem. But when people use the system, Outlook/Excahnge works well for calendaring. Case in point: Where I used to work everyone used outlook and even meeting rooms and bookable resources (such as projectors) could be reserved through outlook. This made it possible to easily reserve space and equipment and people at the same time. But if someone intentionally withheld information or lied to the system, it was bound to break (i.e. filling your calendar with "busy" time so nobody can book you). In practice this wasn't much of a problem.
Where I work now nobody really uses Exchange's calendar. A meeting will be initially scheduled but nobody sends updates or cancellations. Meeting rooms have to be booked by phoning someone who's in another office. And half the time the higher-ups don't even show up for the meetings. As a result meetings tend to be very ad-hoc; even our weekly status meetings don't start until the boss rounds everyone up just before the meeting starts.
No software can fix the problems my current employer has with scheduling meetings; it's an organizational thing. It doesn't hurt us because we have a very small office, but for us the Outlook calendar system is not very useful. However, for my previous company it was great. It wasn't perfect; you can lie to the system, borrow resources without booking them (this is more of a problem than meeting rooms, because you can kick people out of a room you've booked, but if you can't find the projector, good luck). Also the system didn't have any features for finding ONE of MANY resources; for example you typically had to invite every meeting room to your meeting and pick the best one that accepted the invitation; the system couldn't just find a room for you. But in practice it was still very useful, and I've yet to see the equivalent in OSS (not that it doesn't exist, maybe Kolab does this, I don't know).
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 7, 2006 19:29 UTC (Sat) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link] I can confirm that Kolab does Calendaring in a mixed (KDE/Windows) environment. Though to be honest I did not even know that outlook can search for free "slots" automatically, I simply choose a slot and see if noone is busy (but then I only invite few people a time). So this "auto" feature I've not tested.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 1:03 UTC (Sun) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] You see a large group of marketeing and sales people has (somewhat) learned to use Outlook and thus want everything to be done via Outlook.
When evaluating CRM solutions our previous CEO gave the finger (actually he did exactly that) to the CRM systems that couldn't integrate with Outlook...
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 11:55 UTC (Sun) by Erich_J_Ritzmann (guest, #39670) [Link] But doesn't Outlook just use IMAP? Dovecot works great around here serving out IMAP, with Linuxand Apple mail clients of various flavours. I somewhat discourage the use of M$FT clients around here, so I can't say with 100% certainty that it's a good fit in that department.
The calendaring aspect of Outlook how does it communicate? ICS? Anyone played with that?
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 15:10 UTC (Sun) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link] Outlook can do IMAP, but in such a poor way that it is impossible tocreate a business desktop that people want to use. For example, it is slow for large mail folders, you cannot store your sent-folder in an IMAP folder and your local folders remain visible. If you want an open source server, don't use Outlook. Thunderbird is usabel, but the better Windows e-mail clients for IMAP use are The Bat and Mulberry (none of these are free software).
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 1, 2006 17:41 UTC (Sun) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] Outlook uses a MS propiatery extension to IMAP that they call MAPI which handles all the calendar, adress book etc.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 2, 2006 7:57 UTC (Mon) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] IMAP is a wire protocol, MAPI is, well, an API. This is like saying the libc is an extension to TCP/IP.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 2, 2006 10:06 UTC (Mon) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] Maybe. Though Wikipedia claims that MAPI refers to both the API and the proprietary wire protocol. So hardly like libc, with MAPI you can't be sure precisely what the wire protocol is.
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 2, 2006 10:19 UTC (Mon) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] The article says "The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed." at the top.
MAPI is a bit like the Camel framework in Evolution. It has plugins for various protocols, including SMTP, IMAP, and the "Exchange protocol". We made such a plugin at a previous employer of mine, I was on the project even.
Of course, since Outlook uses MAPI (when using *any* protocol, including IMAP or their local mailboxes), and Exchange does as well (using it to access its storage, with a "local" plugin similar (but not the same) to the one used in Outlook), the wire protocol Exchange uses ends up being fairly similar to the API, using DCE-RPC, like many Microsoft protocols.
Why do people insist on exchange? it's simple Posted Oct 2, 2006 1:26 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] it's what they know.
it's easy to setup and maintain (for small systems), outlook is 'free' and already installed on all their desktops, and it 'just works'
third party products integrate 'easily' with it (things like confrence calling apps)
and it's 'standard' for corporate mail servers
now as the company grows all of these things become false at some point (especially the maintinance issues), but it's easier to just add headcount (and servers) to the MIS group then to re-think how the companies communication should work (let alone getting everyone to change to a new system)
the fact that outlook/exchange don't play well with others just reinforces this. (my company initially used an IMAP server, with outlook. but managers whated to share calanders so a small exchange server was put in by to let them do this, outlook would periodicly reconfigure itself to ignore the IMAP/SMTP servers and only use exchange, causeing all the people not on exchange to not get the e-mail, and since the e-mail was from the managers this wasent to be tolorated. since the windows folks couldn't figure out how to make outlook/exchange behave, the fix was to move everyone to exchange)
Can open source messaging servers replace Microsoft Exchange? (Linux.com) Posted Oct 30, 2006 15:52 UTC (Mon) by Bynari (guest, #41391) [Link] I'm very glad that there is so much interest with Alternatives to Exchange. In terms of Hebrew language, we have added UTF-8 to provide support for Hebrew language. Our distributor, Ampersand, has provided us with Hebrew translation for our products. If something is not working, please let us know because we do support the Hebrew language.
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