Re: [OS:N:] Messaging system & support

[Hans Wolff <hwolff sunshineincnwo com>]

Our company recently went through the same bout with high level 
employees wanting shared calendars, contact lists, etc, etc, and we went 
as-so-far as "buying" the demo copy of SLOX.

My opinion on SLOX is, it's a great system in progress, but the Outlook 
clients are still very grim in terms of stability and features. Their 
method of thinking goes so far that any shared calendars you are 
subscribed to also show up in your main personal calendar, and there's 
no way around that (we have some employees that need to see room 
calendars but don't need to have them clutter their primary calendar). 
We also had multiple calendar events that didn't show up on one screen 
or another, and support, as opposed to other open source projects, has 
been in my opinion terrible for SLOX.

The server appears to be quite reliable, and the webmail for SLOX is 
great  as well. I would wait a bit longer, however, for the Outlook 
plugins to catch up before you consider it a viable alternative.

Which brings me to my next point.. price. SLOX used to be relatively 
affordable when you include the Outlook client, although after the 
Novell merger their pricing is on par with Groupwise and Domino/Notes. 
Yes, SLOX was recently open-sourced (www.open-xchange.com I believe), 
but that is for the server technology only and not their 
still-proprietary offline slox client (developed by Netline). We were 
very interested in using SLOX, but after considering pricing, support, 
and its questionable future and viability we had to turn it down.

That brought us to decide upon Groupwise, Domino, or Exchange. Being the 
Linux shop we are and past horrid experience with Exchange, it was my 
task to decide between Groupwise and Domino. Now, I do not know what 
type of company this company is for, but for a large non-profit with a 
non-existent technology budget, we ended up chosing Lotus.

If you just need basic calendaring, email, and shared contact lists, 
Lotus Domino/Notes Messaging Express has a competitive trade-up program 
right now from any competitor's email package (yes, including Sendmail!) 
for $47/user. The license includes Domino Server, Lotus Notes, Web 
access, and their Sametime/instant messaging server. We are currently 
testing the platform out on a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server with 10 
licenses before we begin rolling it out to everyone and begin formal 
training, and so far it appears to be the winner.

Groupwise, while a great package, was twice the price due to them not 
considering Sendmail a competitve upgrade, and as such we did not 
consider it any further due to cost.

I hope my experience helps you out a bit. If you have any more 
questions, don't be afraid to ask.

Hans Wolff
Network Systems Administrator
Sunshine Inc of NW Ohio

Robert Citek wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I got this message from a friend.
>
> On Thursday, Aug 12, 2004, at 10:06 US/Central, [a friend] wrote:
>
> > I'm managing a project here at [some company] to replace our email 
> > system from the current unix-based sendmail/smtp/pop3 setup with 
> > Eudora clients to something else--whatever that turns out to be.  We 
> > have people demanding built-in calendaring and while they could use 
> > Outlook as a client with our current server offerings, the 
> > calendaring won't be as nice as if we had an Exchange Server behind it.
> >
> > I have no problem finding people to install and support Exchange, but 
> > I'm trying to present alternatives as well.  The leader seems to be 
> > SuSE Linux's Openexchange Server (now owned by Novell).  But I don't 
> > know who could support us on that locally.
> >
> > Do you know of any companies that could give us really good support 
> > on whatever system we choose, even up to 24/7/365 if we want to pay 
> > for that?
>
>
> Any ideas?  Specifically:
>  - What other products offer built-in (or nearly built-in) Calendaring?
>  - Any opinions on SLOX?
>  - Is there any reason not to use Exchange?
>  - What other questions should my friend be asking?
>
> Regards,
> - Robert
>
>
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