MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?

[Anthony Atkielski]

Christian Tischler writes:

> Thanks for all the replies. I will take a look at the, more or less, 
> open  solutions. I never intended to use the MS exchange as my primary
> mail server. But its functionality for syncinig calenders, documents and
> so on, seemed to a "nice" "simple" way of dealing with my situation 
> here. I have to admit, that I never used a windows server, and thought
> it should be fairly easy. Now by looking at your submissions, and the 
> docs, which tend to give me headaches, I realize that an Free BSD 
> solution must be found to get the job done.

If you are running a large organization and you need the type of
functionality Exchange provides, Exchange is still likely to be the best
choice.  It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.  Conversely,
though, if you aren't going to use all the advanced features it
provides, you're throwing money out the window if you buy it.

The complexity also implies lots and lots of high-performance hardware
and a substantial load on sysadmins, too (actually, if you have
Exchange, you should have one or more dedicated mail administrators--the
workload tends to be too much for sysadmins, once you are using all the
product's features).

Note that Exchange is strongly contraindicated in networked environments
with low-speed connections between nodes (anything less than 1 Mbps
these days, I'd say). Even client connections need to be really fast if
the clients are using the full feature set.

-- 
Anthony