Has anyone migrated off of exchange?

[groovin]

has anyone migrated from exchange to some kind of open source mail system?

im thinking about going to postfix/sendmail, some kind of IMAP and LDAP.

but im not sure how i would get our existing mail off of the exchange server.

 

[spyordie007]

I've never done it before although migrating your mailboxes out of exchange should be possible, after all mailboxes are just folders with a bunch of .eml files on the exchange server. Exchange is much more than mailboxes though and YRMV for all the other stuff (calendar, contacts, etc...).

-Spy

 

[bozo1]

after all mailboxes are just folders with a bunch of .eml files on the exchange server

I think not.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: bozo1

after all mailboxes are just folders with a bunch of .eml files on the exchange server

I think not.

Okay well that's not exactly what they are

, but if all you want to do is get off the mail messages (and nothing else) you can pull those .eml files.

-Spy

 

[bozo1]

nm

 

[spyordie007]

hmmm, unless they are for OWA I'm lost could you explain exactly what I'm looking at in:
M:\DOMAIN\MBX\%user%\Inbox than?

-Spy

 

[bozo1]

Yea yea, I just saw that they changed things since I last played with it.

<crawling back under my rock>

 

[spyordie007]

dont feel too bad, the "M" drive is after all is pretty much just your exchange datastore mounted as a drive.

-Spy

 

[addragyn]

Are you looking for a mail server or groupware?

The mail server is easy.

Groupware is a whole other ball of twine.

 

[bozo1]

Don't know how big your organization is but it's not a pretty site trying to drag people away from Exchange's calendars, tasks, etc., especially if they are sharing them.

 

[groovin]

we have around 100 mail enabled users. no one uses any of the features like calendars, etc. all we do is send/recieve mail, shared address books, out of office assistant... although a calendar would be great.

any open source calendar progs out there?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I have ximian evolution working with ldap for address books, it was a PITA to set up but it works.

Can't say much about mail, and as far as the calendar, do you want it to work together with your contacts and whatnot? That's probably not going to be easy (actually I don't know), but if you just need a standalone calendar, there are lots of web-based ones you could use, check out freshmeat.net.

BTW, I definitely recommend postfix over sendmail. I used sendmail for a while just to learn it, but suffice to say that I don't miss it

 

[LuckyTaxi]

postfix does everything you want, but if you want groupware you may be out of luck.
though i think there's a product out there from suse that does this. im not sure

 

[addragyn]

I suspect a lot of small businesses don't fully use Exchange. Probably a lot of money there that could've been saved out there.

The OSS Exchange killer is supposed to be Kroupware it is still in beta. Interesting project with the backing of the German government.

This article lists the commercial stuff. There are tons of OSS solutons if you don't mind web based apps. Search "groupware" on freshmeat or Sourceforge. You could also look at Samsung Contact or Bynari Connector.

There are also shedloads of mail servers.

Obviously you'll need to do some research.

 

[addragyn]

Here's a phpGroupWare article/tutorial you may find helpful.

 

[Sunner]

We're evaluating OpenExchange, SuSE's Exchange competitor.
I've been fairly impressed so far, but unfortunately, due to...human intervention, that project has been set back for a little while.

It's got an Outlook connector that I haven't been able to test yet.

Of course it's not free, but it's cheaper than Exchange, and it's got other benefits as well.

 

[chsh1ca]

I personally would like to take the time to shamelessly plug the various software that is part of the Horde Project as a groupware solution. We use it here for IMAP-based email, shared calendars/address books, task management, and so forth. It is really sweet, and the beautiful part of it is that you can configure it as an access-anywhere solution since it is entirely web-based. I currently use it for the 45+ users here that need access to Mail, Address books, and Calendars. It's done up in PHP, and is very configurable, and has made leaps and bounds of improvements in the last year.

I'm using it with a Qmail + Courier-IMAP installation, but will be moving IMAP servers because Courier-IMAP isn't the fastest around, and with a lot of emails it tends to slow down.

One warning though: Because of the nature of the project, it is still largely under development, so there are a lot of features available in the CVS versions (which are, I've found, generally stable enough for production) that aren't in the release versions.

 

[groovin]

thanks again for all the replies, big help.

i was thinking about just getting some calendar creating program and sticking a simple html calendar on a shared folder and then having everone book mark it. All it needs to do is tell people who's sick, who's on vacation, and who is visiting what branch office, and who has a dentist appointment... u get the point. if it can be integrated into the mail/address book, great if not... no biggie.

what exaclty is groupware? ive never worked with it. all i know is our users like and want to stay on outlook so i have to find something that can connect to it well enough and offers web based email as well.