MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Sun Mar 20 01:29:28 PST 2005



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Jerry Bell
> Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:15 PM
> To: Mike Jeays
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?
>
>
> I'll second that the calendar/email functionality has become a utility
> service in many organizations.  Exchange/outlook, for all their
> shortcomings, have really changed the way companies work.
>
> At my day job, we have 9 exchange servers around the world, with about
> 1500 mailboxes, so not a huge install, but in the past 5 years,
> calendaring, email and public folders have become a critical
> component of
> the business, and any bit of unavailability isn't tolerated.
> Now, we are
> fortunate that we have several really good windows/exchange
> guys to keep
> things humming, but it is clear that the business demands of
> calendaring
> and email are outstripping the ability of MS to deliver.  We,
> along with
> many other organizations, are really looking at ways to achieve 99.999%
> uptime on exchange, but we're realy kidding ourselves.  Something like
> communigate pro, that can be clustered and run on a
> non-windows OS could
> move us closer to the mark, but still not really there.  The
> OS' and apps
> just aren't meant for that type of availability yet.
>

Jerry,

  I would strongly encourage you to look at the latest Horde framework,
which incorporates webmail, calendaring and many other goodies.
It also has a plugin to sync to handhelds, although that is not
as far along yet.

  The biggest hurdle of course is moving people off their calendaring
in their own private Outlook calendars.  The calendaring in Horde
is web-based.  But, you can easily continue using Outlook for the
front end for e-mail.  You can use it with pop3 or with IMAP, and
you can setup a centralized address book with an LDAP server that
Outlook will use quite nicely (as long as you format the LDAP data
properly)

  Horde lends itself to clustering it is very modular.  You can
setup a group of Horde servers that use a central mysql database
(which is where the calendaring and user settings are stored)
Or you can use sql servers on each Horde system and use your
own replication scheme between them.

  Horde is also multilingual, and includes support for the Asian
languages, extremely good support in fact.  Far better than
Outlook clients, some versions of which cannot even display
Kanji messages as you probably know.  I've had a user run it
on a Japanese localized verison of Windows and he raved about
it.

  At the ISP I work at I went to Horde/IMP a few years ago to
provide a webinterface for the mailserver.  I use it in a dual server
config, the mailserver is one box and it just runs sendmail and
IMAP, the Horde server is a separate box.  For grins I installed the
calendaring module in it.  I was pretty stunned last month when I
went to migrate it to the new version and found the
sql server stuffed with appointments and such.  Apparently most of
the users discovered the calendar and decided to use it.  This
greatly complicates my migration now since I now got to move all
their data. :-)

Ted



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