[Gllug] MS Exchange - groupware replacement

[GLLUG at getaroundtoit.co.uk]

Alain Williams wrote:
> I have not had a look at this area recently, I was wondering what the collected
> wisdom was on providing equvalent functionality. A customer is asking me,
> they are essentially green field: ie no MS exchange [they have mdaemon that would be replaced],
> but they use MS Outlook on the desktop. Most desktops are MS XP pro.
> 
> Wanted functionality
> 
> 1) Email
> 2) Groupware (mainly callendaring)
> 3) Integration with mobiles (eg blackberry)


Alain,
1 Email:
I have run a trial of Zimbra and will +1 Andy Millar's comments.

Also +1 his criticism, and yes the cost of Exchange license(s) may be 
less than the support charge for a Zimbra operation of a certain size - 
but then do M$ actually "support"?

I was impressed by the email (client) and calendaring integration. They 
also offer a Zimbra client, but whilst it does a neat desktop I doubt it 
(alone) would meet your groupware objectives.

Pretty much any server which goes beyond bread-and-butter email 
functions (and some that just do that) is going to demand resources. 
Zimbra is quite RAM hungry to my observation, and when it decides to do 
some of its periodic tasks concurrently a dashing CPU is needed else 
short delays will be noticeable.

An additional criticism if using Fetchmail (eg from a backup MX or an 
(R)POP mbx) is that Zimbra (pkg and client) will use the datestamp from 
the Fetchmail operation, cf the client-sender's transmit time per 
Thunderbird, et al. I was not the first one to raise this on the Zim 
forum but to no (noted) avail...


2 Groupware
Zimbra will do a lot of this for you. You also mentioned shared drives. 
If you want to get into the Content Management/Digital Asset Management 
side of the Exchange-Sharepoint integration, then I'll point you at 
Alfresco.


3 Integration
As above, per Andy.


Having similar questions to yourself, and mounting the first/Zimbra 
phase an evaluation project some months ago, unfortunately (for both of 
us) I cannot compare the above with OpenGroupware (as discussed by 
another contributor) - yet...


Another product which does a good job in this space (non-M$, 
integration, common communications InBox) but sadly is non-FOSS might be 
Communigate - some love, some hate, YMMV!


Regards,
=dn
(no affiliation to any product/organisation mentioned)
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