[Dovecot] OT: Large corporate email systems - Exchange vs open source *nix based

[Charles Marcus]

Thanks for the feedback...

Have you had any experience with two separate companies 'merging' their 
separate Exchange instances?

The reason I ask is, it seems to me that in many cases, it might 
actually be easier to migrate a non Exchange system into an existing 
Exchange system, than merging two separate Exchange systems...

True or false? Or 'it depends'?

Thanks again

On 2013-12-10 9:49 AM, Dean <deano-dovecot at areyes.com> wrote:
> One of the issues you'll face is that Exchange is much more than just a
> mail server.  Once you've begun drinking the Micro$oft koolaid, it's
> hard to refuse the rest.  It does offer a large feature set, and tight
> integration with a lot of other "things".  That's both good and bad of
> course ...
>
> While I may sound like I'm touting Exchange, I think it definitely has
> it's place so long as that place is well defined.  If you have
> problems/issues that it will solve, then by all means, use it.  But
> don't let them cram it down your throat just "because it's industry
> standard" or that "we can always sue Micro$oft if it fails" or any other
> such nonsense.  Use the right tool for the job.
>
> Personally, I use Exim4/Dovecot/Spamassassin/Roundcube for my domains
> and ones that I support.  I have my own auto-installer that can spin up
> a fully-configured mail-server like that in about 15 minutes, bootable
> on bare-metal or on a cheap VPS.  And I also recommend Exim4 (or
> postfix) as the front-end just as you said ...
>
> On 12/10/2013 09:15 AM, Charles Marcus wrote:
>> There has been some whispers about considering migrating our mail
>> systems to Exchange Server. I want to try to nip this in the bud.
>>
>> I would like to ask for some help with providing some kind of
>> comparison of large(r) commercial companies use of email systems...
>> specifically, those using Microsoft Exchange Server, vs those using
>> open source Linux/Unix based systems, including even commercial *nix
>> groupware based systems like Zimbra, as well as plain mail systems
>> like dovecot, or cyrus or courier.
>>
>> I know that many (if they are smart) Admins that do use Exchange
>> internally will use postfix (or something else linux/unix based) in
>> front of it as their relayhost (for both inbound and outbound), so
>> just counting the number of publicly accessible smtp servers won't be
>> a good gauge.
>>
>> Does anyone know of any decent non-biased studies that have been done,
>> hopefully relatively recently (last few years) that provide such a
>> comparison?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>


-- 

Best regards,

*/Charles/*