From: John Kelly (john.kelly at domain havok.com)
Date: Mon 08 Jul 2002 - 16:40:57 IST
: Hi there,
:
: outlook for students email (web only access). I would like to
: explore other
: options for email and get rid of the exchange box forever,
: does anyone have
: any suggestions.....
I can sympathise completely. We have an exchange box on our network for the
management types. It's an absolute disaster zone, and so we've been looking
into the a couple of replacements. Our requirements were much the same as
your own, with the added restriction of shared calendar functionality.
So far we've been looking at two products, CorporateTime from Steltor[0] and
Samsung Contact[1]. Both of these products are related to the late HP
OpenMail product, a fantastic exchange replacement. Steltor provided the
Calendaring functionality for OpenMail, and are now selling it as a
standalone package. Samsung liked HP OpenMail so much, they bought the
rights for it, and are now selling it as their own product, with a couple of
tweaks (not many).
We've been testing them both out for a while now. They both cost roughly the
same (next to nothing, compared to Exchange licensing fees).
CorporateTime seems like an average product. As I said, it only provides the
calendaring functionality, so you have to go elsewhere for your
SMTP/POP3/IMAP and webmail. For a while, we were using Courier for the IMAP
and POP3 (with SASL around both), Sendmail for SMTP, and Squirrelmail for the
webmail interface. It does, however, require a plugin to trick Outlook into
thinking it's talking to a proper exchange server. The administration of
this was proving to be a bit of a nightmare, and automating it in any way was
looking to take up even more of our time, so we paused the eval.
We've moved onto testing Samsung Contact now. Because they've got the full
HP OpenMail product, almost everything is provided for you. However,
you do need Sendmail (SC just puts its own 'wrapper' around Sendmail), and
Apache (for the webmail/admin interface). The initial setup is done through
a swanky GUI (or by hand, if you're feeling masochistic), and once it's up
and running, all admin can be done through a web interface. It also provides
a couple of web interfaces. One of these is horrendous, an absolute
abomination of 'design' - people run amok with photoshop, and absolutely no
regard for usability whatsoever. However, I've been given a look at the new
version of the interface, soon to be released by Samsung, and this is _very_
nice[2]. Samsung Contact also provides a Wap interface.. which is nice, but
probably not going to be necessary for schools :D
It looks like we're probably going to be rolling with Samsung Contact, since
it's the more mature, complete of the two products. Unfortunately, you
missed the boat slightly - Samsung were offering a 90% discount on upgrades
from existing Exchange servers before 1st of July. But like I said, the
prices are still very cheap, compared to the price of Exchange licenses. I
believe Hegarty Computer Services[3] are the only reseller within Ireland, so
you should get in contact with them for more information.
However, if you don't need the calendaring functionality, you'd probably be
much better with a self-rolled system, which other people have already
mentioned.
jk
[0] http://www.steltor.com/index.cfm?flash=no
[1] http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/
[2] http://mail.hcs.ie/home username: demo, password: demouser
[3] http://www.hcs.ie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:17:44 GMT