[Gloucs] Replacing an Exchange server

[Julian Regel]

Glyn,

My guess is that you are about 6 months too early in your request. At 
the moment there seems to be a fair amount going on in the collaboration 
/ groupware field. As someone else has commented, some of the KDE 
developers have been contracted to develop a free client and server 
solution currently going by the working name Kroupware (www.kroupware.org).

In addition to this, development is continuing on the Mozilla calendar 
project, the phpGroupware project is heading towards a 1.0 release and 
the OpenOffice.org groupware project is starting to get some firm ideas 
down. All are looking to use published standards where possible, and 
server implementations (such as KDE) are using open source software.

The only "complete" groupware solutions I am aware of are Lotus Domino 
(and the Notes client) and Suse OpenExchange. There is a demo of it at 
www.suse.co.uk which looks pretty good.

In about six months I reckon a lot of these projects will be reaching 
the point of being usable. You will then have a pretty wide choice of 
products at both the client and server end. Until then, if you plan on 
using IMAP for mail and shared folders, LDAP for a global address book, 
the iCal (calendaring) element is the only remaining component.

Replacing Outlook and Exchange is one of the biggest challenges that has 
faced the Linux community if it wants the desktop, and I don't see it 
happening immediately, but the pieces are coming together.

JR