I recently interviewed at a software-related company with 4-500 employees, mostly in a central location but with a dozen small satellite offices around the globe. They currently have a single centralized mail server running Sendmail/POP behind a firewall and I believe a VPN also.
The IT manager is interested in email *replication*. In her ideal system, if the mail server goes down, people would be able to get their mail from an alternate location. She'd also like to see the foreign offices get their mail locally. And, she's also investigating Exchange server to allow mail and calendar functions to combine (they are currently using Meeting Maker which sucks in a number of ways.) So, both of my questions involve designing a new mail server infrastructure. First, what if anything allows for true mail replication? It's simple enough to set up satellite servers and sort mail to different locations, but I am not aware of anything that will let two or more mail servers stay *synchronized* with each other. Searching on the Net only gets me Lotus Notes links, and I don't see anything remotely like this on the Sendmail or Postfix sites. I am also wondering how this could work without being a huge load on the network - if it exists, if it is feasible outside of a tightly linked local cluster? Just using a highly redundant local machine would increase mail uptime but not be much good in the event of a network outage. Are there any solutions, and if so are there any that make sense for a shop of this size? Second, is there a good, accessible from multiple platforms, alternative to Exchange that will handle mail and calendar? I'm not so familiar with calendar software but would hate to move to the Microsoft mail model. I'm happy to agree that Meeting Maker sucks but are there any real Exchange-busters out there? Should these people really be running Lotus Notes? Domino Server seems to do a lot of what they want... thanks Betsy --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
