Scott- This is an outstanding response - better than I had hoped for. Now that I'm back out of bed (there's a rather unpleasant flu running around - I literally couldn't pull the brainpower together to post an intelligible message) I finally want to respond to it!
What I got out of this is that you really wanted to deploy a non-Windows solution, but, despite the fact that it's a real pain in the butt long-term to manage a Windows server, it's just impossibly hard to put together a system that will effectively replicate enough of Exchange's functionality to satisfy the users who "live" in Outlook. As I see it, you can look at this two ways. The first way is that we need to figure out how to build an open-source Exchange replacement. This has been attempted a few times, obviously without success (at least that I have heard about). I suspect that, as someone observed, if one were to successfully plumb outlook enough to provide the needed server functionality, MS would just change Outlook/Exchange/Active Directory and we'd be back to square 1. The second way is that we should think about evolving Evolution to be something that blows Outlook away, and then design a server solution that's open-source, free, and easier to install, manage, and use than Exchange. I really like the second way for a variety of reasons, the most important one being that it re-defines the game and takes away some of M$'s advantage. I'll defer the question of "what could possibly be better than Outlook?" for now, but ask that we think about that question in light of a world full of not just emails, calendars (individual and shared), contacts, and to-do lists, but also wikis, blogs, IMs, and lots of other stuff. The most important thing that your post does for me, however, is validate further the notion that the "first server" is really a collaboration server - it's something to plug Outlook into so everyone can work together effectively. I'm curious why just a generic LDAP server cannot provide the "shared contacts" capability, however, and I'd love to see a more detailed explanation. If you Google "exchange replacement" you are presented with paid links for Scalix, PostPath, and SofTalk, and regular links to a SourceForge project from 2003. Not encouraging. SofTalk runs on Windows, PostPath replicates the email and calendar functions, but requires an Active Directory domain, and Scalix prices by the equivalent of CALs. The other interesting and important thing about the M$ solution, however, as you pointed out, is that it is installed and managed as a single thing. You don't add users to the OS, and then to the email, and then to the calendar, etc. It just goes into Active Directory. Thanks again for this thoughtful post. -Bill Moffitt This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
