a query

[Luis Motta Campos]

Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 02:52:21AM +0000, perl wrote:
>> My local council currently uses postfix to run their email system. (...)
[snip]
> Insufficient data.  If the current mail system costs just under £100,000
> per year then it's more than an Intel box running Red Hat, Postfix and
> Courier - unless there's a big support contract attached.  Anyway, it's
> impossible to compare the existing system to Exchange without knowing
> more about it.

I agree with Bruce so far. Knowing in advance how much users are we
talking about; and on which hardware/software is the current system
running is quite important to build a good argument against the change.

And, given this data, I believe it's possible to have a full-time
sysadmin and a couple of machines doing the hard work for less than 120K
BGP per year.

> If the existing system doesn't do meetings and calendars, which I would
> think a local council would have as much need for as any organisation,
> then any open source alternative to Exchange would have to be well
> researched and supported and even then you would have a fight.  Exchange
> is unquestionably a bloated resource hog with some odd habits but it
> offers integrated calendars and webmail and suits usually like it.

On this subject, I believe that it's possible to have a nice open-source
alternative to Exchange that works and does the job. I remember reading
something about a nice open-source exchange replacement being built...

http://www.scalix.com/community/

This is one alternative, and costed me exactly 30s of google. It seems
to implement calendar server support as part of the open-source
"community edition".

I would look for other alternatives, of course. One of them will
certainly fit your needs.

Good luck.
-- 
Luis Motta Campos (a.k.a. Monsieur Champs) is a software engineer,
Perl fanatic evangelist, and amateur {cook, photographer}