[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Josh Marshall]

I don't see anyone else chiming in so I'll give my 2cents...

If you're looking for a good backup system my favourite is backuppc 
(http://backuppc.sf.net) - it is only file based and will not back up your 
active directory / exchange data. It has a web admin tool that makes backing 
up and restoring a breeze. Definitely worth checking out.

I tried quite a few backup programs on an old NT server at a previous employer 
and found that for backing up the exchange data, nothing could beat the 
ntbackup that comes with the OS. It was easiest to use and the only one I 
could get to actually restore the data... maybe it was me with the other, 
more complicated setups.

I assume that you're wanting to use M$ Outlook to interface email / public 
folders / calendar? If that's the case you're limiting the possibilities 
server-end. There are plenty of good web-based (opensource) groupware apps 
(see http://moregroupware.sourceforge.net and http://phpgroupware.org )

There are exchange replacement servers that give you all the functions for a 
lesser price (and maybe meaning easier backups) http://www.bynari.net/ comes 
to mind.

I noticed that OpenOffice is also making a groupware system. See this at 
http://groupware.openoffice.org/

Otherwise you can look at individual systems to give the developers the 
groupware functions that have been used by the opensource developers across 
the globe, e.g. Email, News / Mailing list servers, IRC, CVS/Subversion etc

These would be set up as different services, would mostly be opensource and 
would be very easy to backup and restore (and even run on relatively 
low-powered machines)

I believe that if you started to dig, you'd find a lot of options available to 
you. Which direction you go is up to you.

Regards,
Josh.

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:32, Adrian Sutton wrote:
> a) email.  Nothing fancy - about 15 users and 9GB of email data.
> b) Storing email in public folders.
> c) pretty basic calendar functions.  Reminders that pop up on screen
> and grab your attention are a must here.