This company has 200 users but is looking to expand to 400+ in the next few years.
Approximate budget: Small
Requires: A mail server that can cope with the company's intended growth.
Concerns: Cost -- the mail server needs to be inexpensive and easy to maintain.
The Scenario 1 winner is Novell's SuSE Linux based OpenExchange, closely followed by Sendmail. Novell's application is far easier to manage, but also costs $$$.
This large company has 30,000 staff spread across five geographic locations and requires a mail server.
Approximate budget: Open.
Requires: A mail server that is powerful and secure. Remote administration and Web access for travelling staff is a must.
Concerns: Cost isn't an issue, but reliability is very important.
The Scenario 2 winner is IBM Domino for its scalability, support, and mobile options. It also helped that cost wasn't an issue for the scenario company.
Interesting review, however, it misses in a nunber of areas.
1) At the low end of the market, the appropriate Microsoft product would be SBS2003. It is quite difficult to price the e-mail component as a number of products are bundled, however, I suspect the SBS2003 is a more appropriate product when compared with some of the lower end e-mail systems you have reviewed. Are you comparing apples with apples? or apples to oranges?
2) The the high-end of the market where clustering / high availability and a large number of users is concerned most of the reviewed packages couldn't deliver. Where is the indication of where these products sit in terms of number of users?
3) The most important criteria for purchasing an e-mail system has not even been considered, i.e. user understanding and productivity. Given the article asks the question about alternatives to Exchange, surely there needs to be some indication as to why customers continually purchase this product. And the answer is they understand how to use the client interface, i.e. Outlook, and individuals are productive. My feedback from people is they hate Notes (especially after using Outlook / Exchange) and they love the functionality and integration that Outlook / Exchange provides. An e-mail system is provided to enhance user/worker productivity and, essentially, they don't give a stuff about the e-mail server. They want functionality they can easily use on their client device and this is what IT Managers respond to.
4) I would suggest you have under-estimated Notes and Exchange for their back-end automation. Notes is a powerful database / workflow solution that provides much more than e-mail, so if you have such a requirement the other e-mail solutions look very ordinary. Likewise with Exchange, there is a huge amount automation / programming that can be achieved and an organisation with such requirements would seek a single solution rather than 2 separate systems.
Regards,
Russell Sumich