Wed 8 Mar 2006
I just read an interesting article in the German magazine Computerwoche about Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. These solutions are an interesting option especially for smaller companies which are still using Exchange 5.5.
It is not usually easy to convince Outlook users to change to another email client. An Exchange alternative that supports Outlook should be the main consideration here.
The article discusses three collaboration suites: Zimbra, Scalix and Open Xchange. All three have free versions. However if you use each of them together with with Outlook, you have to pay for them: Zimbra costs $28/user a year, the OX 5 Small Business Server Edition costs $299 including 5 Outlook OXtender connectors. I didn’t find prices for Scalix online though. Keep in mind that you also have to purchase licenses for Outlook.
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Please note that with Scalix Community Edition, which is a free unlimited use version of Scalix, an organization is entitled to unlimited standard users and 25 free ‘premium users’ . The 25 premium users are able to use ScalixConnect for Outlook for free, which is a robust, native MAPI connector to Outlook, including group scheduling capabilities, public folders and more. For more about Community Edition and its free Outlook support, please visit the Scalix web site at http://www.scalix.com.
Thanks for the comment! I planned to test Zimbra, but now I think I will check out Scalix first.