Rick Shepherd wrote: > 2. If I were to spend $600 for a copy of Microsoft Windows 2003 Sever > Small Business Edition I would have access to Microsoft Outlook Web > Access (OWA). Despite all the icky things listed on the last > sentence I do like the idea of OWA. Linux has things like > PHPGroupware and again, I just want the right answer here. It should > have a web interface (duh), send/receive mail (I will likely set the > server up as IMAP to make it easier) perform calendaring for > individuals and organization wide and the best thing in the world > would be if it could talk to existing MS desktops to get Outlook > contact and schedule data.
An easy solution would be to install an imap server, squirrelmail, mailscanner, spamassassin, & clamav. That gives you email accessible with any client like Outlook plus a very nice and fast (faster than Exchange's web mail) system for doing webmail. For the calendaring portion use calendar.yahoo.com. It allows shared calendars with invitations and all that stuff, plus you can sync your Palm with it. All of this would be free and reasonably easy to set up. Below are some messages pasted together about Exchange replacements from a different LUG I'm on. It seems like there are quite a few options there as well: > Could anyone recommend a good open-source equivalent of Microsoft > Exchange Server, for Linux? Suse's OpenExchnage is the closest I've seen. Non-opensource and non free, but cheaper than MS-Exchange Could try Bynari's system as an alternative. All the freeware stuff I've seen tends to use a html interface for part of the task and possible imap for the email at most. Mimerdesk.org and opengroupware are the closest I've seen to a replace for MS-EX, but mimerdesk doesn't do email (you'll need an imap based system and a webmail separately and it doesn't LDAP for authentication), and opengroupware is a complete sod to install and doesn't provide very good granularity of security once you're in.... I'm still looking, but will investiate Mimerdesk and opengroupware to start with.. ---- As far as I know there is no open source drop in replacement that does everything that the exchange server is capable of. There are several commercial products available which do run on linux however. Groupwise from Novell is one possibility. Samsung Contact (http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/) appears to be HP Openmail, but now owned by Samsung, which used to be advertised as a drop in replacement for Exchange which would run under linux. There are an assortment of groupware products, open source and otherwise out there which are in heavy development. Some options (commercial and open source): http://www.groupwise.com/ http://www.kroupware.org/ http://www.horde.org/ And there's Lotus of course.
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