You say "mail," but you mention "Exchange" and "Zimbra." If you're just
looking for mail, I'd recommend Postfix as your MTA, and Dovecot or
Cyrus as your IMAP, with a Roundcube web-based front end (and fat
clients available for thems that want 'em -- though Roundcube is really
pretty awesome: "I'm rinsing in it now."). But, alas, I don't believe
there are any full-fledged, viable, open-source solutions that supply
Outlook-compliant mail *and* calendaring. If Outlook isn't a
dealbreaker -- if you could *just* use it for mail, and use the web for
calendaring (and a webmail interface), say -- I'd investigate Horde, or
-- just maybe -- Chandler, though I think it's become moribund. Zimbra
and its other commercial, Linux-based ilk, have surprised me by not
being terribly cost competitive against Exhange. This is really
disappointing. There was one project that was well priced and a drop-in
replacement, Postpath, but it got acquired by Cisco some time ago, and
hasn't been heard from since.
$.02,
-Ken
P.S. Once you make a choice *which* direction you're going in,
investigate the options, and make the comparisons. Personally, for me,
the big win for open source is the lack of forced upgrades. If you want
support for Exchange 2003 -- good luck. Time to ante up $$$$ for that
upgrade, both hardware and software. OSS, on the other hand, so long as
you're up-to-date with your security patches (and backups), the word
"upgrade" should hold much less fear.
On 2013-12-10 08:57, Charles Marcus wrote:
Hello,
There has been some whispers about considering migrating our mail
systems to Exchange Server, and I want to try to nip this in the bud
if possible.
I would like to ask for some help with providing some kind of
comparison of mid to large(r) commercial companies use of email
systems... specifically, those using Microsoft Exchange Server, vs
those using open source Linux/Unix based systems (including even
commercial *nix groupware based systems like Zimbra, as well as plain
mail systems like dovecot, or cyrus or courier.
I know that many (if they are smart) Admins that do use Exchange
internally will use postfix (or something else *nix based) in front of
it as their relayhost (for both inbound and outbound), so just
counting the number of publicly accessible smtp servers won't be a
good gauge.
Does anyone know of any decent non-biased studies that have been
done, hopefully relatively recently (last few years), that provide
such a comparison?
--
Best regards,
_CHARLES_
