If a company has a requirement for a basic, easy-to-administer mailserver, then OpenExchange Server 4 must be on the shortlist for evaluation.
And before the Microsoft proponents out there start jumping up and down about us recommending Linux and its lack of formal support and how it has been mashed together by a rogue bunch of anarchistic hackers so it may not be around tomorrow, SuSE was bought last year by Novell.
So there should be plenty of support and future for this product, now it is the Linux community who can start ranting and raving about the coming of the end of the world through the commercialisation of some Linux distributions.
Installation and full configuration takes less than a couple of hours. Management is easily completed via a well-featured interface accessible through any Web browser. The underlying mail server used is called Postfix. In the basic, and even advanced, graphical configuration windows OpenExchange misses some more obscure and complex configuration options, however for all the diehards there is a page for manually changing the main.cf and master.cf postfix config files.
The menu system is well setup allowing for easy management of users and groups. Of particular note on the monitoring side of things is administrative access to a very impressive range of round robin database tool (RRDtool) graphs. For those familiar with multi router traffic grapher (MRTG) you will be familiar with the type of output Tobi Oetiker's applications produce. In the OpenExchange monitoring system RRDtool is used to show.
- System overview (CPU usage, system load, memory usage, processes, and swap-file)
- Disk I/O (I/O rates)
- Partitions (Free space)
- Network traffic (I/O etc)
If you are in the market for a basic mail server that is easy to use and monitor, then definitely look at Novell's SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server 4.
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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