Company email system, what are my options?

You have a few options: You could do it for free (assuming you have already registered you domain name) with Linux. Free but not easy but very customizable and capable of doing much more (web server and so on)

If you wanted a calendar server, mail server, wiki server, web server and streaming media server with unlimited client access licenses all wrapped up in an easy to use front end you could go for an Apple XServe (quiet down you lot) as these represent very good value for money (2k) and integrate into AD and at the edn of the year are getting full push mail and calendar and Exchange support.

Or you could play it safe and get Exchange. Nothing wrong with this and Exchnage 2007 is a very good product but it does tend to have a lot of associated costs.

Personally I'd avoid SBS as it has to many limits for a growing business and puts far to many eggs in one basket. If you want Exchange then please do it properly.
 
sparkey196 said:
Zimbra and Scalix are the two open-source alternatives to exchange but both are faily immature and not ready for production.
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I'd have to disagree. Running an email continuity system here based on Zimbra, allowing exchange users access to their mailboxes when exchange is down.
 
sparkey196 said:
Zimbra and Scalix are the two open-source alternatives to exchange but both are faily immature and not ready for production.
Click to expand...

What are you smoking? Scalix is a rebadged version HP OpenMail, one of the oldest, stablest and most used (before exchange came along) mail solutions around.

They've added a lot to it, but it's still very much HP OM under the hood.

As for Zimbra, it's a collection of very stable systems (OpenLDAP, Apache Tomcat, Postfix) glued together with some proprietary webmail and monitoring software. They've chosen a very smart route: take well proven in production software and bring it all together into a cohesive system.

I'm also sure that H&R Block, Comcast, UCLA and others would disagree that Zimbra isn't ready for production.

All the people recommending SBS have failed to see that you have a non-homogenous computing environment with some Macintoshes thrown into the mix. Without buying extra software for them to work with the collaborative features of Exchange you'll be SOL on those computers, whereas something a bit more open like Zimbra has a nice iSync plugin that'll allow them to use Mail.app and iCal.app for most of what Entourage does.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for SBS (or Server 2003 and Exchange) when it fits as a solution, but I don't think in your case it does.
 
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