[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Harry Phillips]

Adrian Sutton wrote:
> Basically, we need a more robust system in the face of catastrophic 
> disaster - particularly something that isn't tightly coupled with Active 
> Directory.  All we really use Active Directory for is to run exchange 
> which is only used for:
> 
> 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.
> 

All of that can be done with the Bynari mail server.

> We don't use roaming profiles and can do without the central login 
> pretty easily.  We have a mix of windows, solaris and Mac clients though 
> accessing email and calendar is exclusively done from Windows atm.
> 

The Bynari server does POP3, IMAP and a web based interface for the 
hosts that can't run Outlook. If the non MW-Windows users don't 
need/want Calender then just use any mail client that can do POP3 or IMAP.

> We have a Sun e250 server sitting around doing pretty much nothing that 
> could be used or a linux or windows server could be set up.  There is no 
> knowledge in the company of server administration at all but a 
> particular fear of UNIX systems.

Check the Bynari web site (www.bynari.net) to see which distros they 
support. I use the Redhat RPM on a Mandrake server and it works perfectly.

> 
> Since there's a whole bunch of very talented sys admins around here that 
> mostly don't use exchange - what systems could we put in place?  Muchos 
> bonus points if it's free

It's not free, you can purchase the 'bundle' or get licences for each 
section separately. The sections are something like:

1. Mailboxes.
2. Bynari Connector (The Outlook plug-in)
3. Bynari AddressBook (allows LDAP address book in Outlook)
4. Web client's.

> - even more if you can come up with a way to 
> convince people that we can maintain it easily (there's no sysadmin in 
> this company, just a bunch of programmers).
> 

All administration is done via a web browser interface.

-- 
Regards,
Harry Phillips
--- Failure is not an option,
     it comes bundled with your Microsoft product.