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Exchanging Exchange

Posted on 20 Dec 2005 at 15:29

Simon Brock and Ian Wrigley try to find a drop-in open-source replacement for Exchange Server

Ready for Primetime?

As we researched these open-source groupware projects, we were hoping to find a 'one size fits all' drop-in replacement for Exchange Server, but sadly it doesn't look like such a thing exists, although if you know a product we've overlooked let us know. OpenGroupware.org probably comes closest, as it's a single installation and relatively easy to administer. However, it isn't perfect - installation can be tricky unless you have all the prerequisites already installed, and it does take some configuration before you're up and running. phpGroupWare looks promising, but its lack of recent development and rather stagnant user forums are worrisome.

Overall, if you're a hassled system administrator and you have the budget, we'd have to say that Exchange is probably going to be the easiest solution for you to implement. However, if you're willing to spend a little time researching other options and aren't afraid to get your hands dirty with a little more system configuration, there are most certainly open-source solutions available. And remember that, because it's open source, if it doesn't do quite what you want you can always modify it - or have it modified by someone else - to customise it to your precise requirements.

Running scared

If open-source software really isn't a threat to the large conventional software developers - think Microsoft and Oracle - why are they all so concerned about it? Microsoft, to name but one, is spending more and more time and money in funding surveys and reports that 'prove' unequivocally that Windows is more secure, faster, more user-friendly and makes the tea better than Linux. Meanwhile, despite such reports, Linux just keeps on gaining market share. Perhaps the most significant recent evidence that open source is worrying the big boys comes from the fact that both Microsoft and Oracle are offering free versions of their flagship relational database management systems (RDBMSs). Previously, these companies insisted that if their products were used in a commercial environment you had to pay for a commercial version, usually to the tune of many hundreds or thousands of pounds. But now the two companies are making versions of their software free whatever you want to do with it. You can run your entire company on SQL Server Express, for example, without paying a penny.

Of course, there are limitations. Oracle 10g Express Edition is limited to a single instance per system, a maximum of 1GB of working RAM, a single processor and 4GB of data. Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is identically restricted, and both have a subset of the features available in their bigger and not-for-free siblings. But for many people, these products will be perfectly adequate.

So why are Microsoft and Oracle effectively cannibalising at least some of their own sales? The simple answer is MySQL. Of course, they'll tell you it's to encourage people to try their products and to see what power they have to offer, so that when their needs scale up they'll be loyal and buy the more powerful versions. But we firmly believe that both companies have seen just how popular MySQL (and other free RDBMSs such as PostgreSQL) has been and they realise that without offering something similarly free their market share is going to drop significantly.

All of which is great for people like us. You now have a much wider choice when deciding which RDBMS to use, and that can only be good. The difference between truly free software and the Express editions, though, is this: when your needs scale up, the free software will scale with you while remaining free. Those Express editions, on the other hand...