The last time we really had anything to do with Novell, apart from using it functionally as the University's e-mail system, was back in the dim dark days of 3.1 and 4.01. Things have certainly changed a fair bit since then.
Installation was straightforward, the Novell engineers who assisted the Lab with the installation suggested a large enterprise install and configure would take between five to eight hours. Management is excellent mostly being achieved remotely by Novell's centralised management tool called ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne can administer several Novell servers from the one administrative workstation.
For those interested in the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts there is still a purely text-based interface on the server which mostly allows engineers to monitor activity and log events. It is always good to know that when the GUI stops responding there is still a CLI to turn to before panicking. As one would expect, Novell uses its directory service for the majority of the user and group control.
Groupwise should easily scale up to 30,000 or even 40,000 users. An interesting feature is Novell's quickfinder technology which integrates a document management indexing and search facility into the users interface that is updated periodically (default is once every 20 hours) that allows authorised users to search through global or group document stores for keywords.
Overall a powerful package with perhaps not so many customisable options as Domino, but still worthy of evaluation if a large-scale mail server deployment is on the cards.
|
 Click to enlarge
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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