Exchange Replacement

[The_KiD]

i think I havee asked about this before, but dont think I ever got to anything that suited the job.

We are in the market for a new mail server, but the price tag of exchange is ridiculous.

At the moment we only have a very basic pop3 based mail server and I would like something that has the following features:

- Shared mailboxes
- Shared calendar
- Global Address books
- Web access
- Allows users to set their own out of office replies.
- Handles multiple domains

Can anyone recomend anything or point me in the right direction?

 

[The_KiD]

Problem is for the amount of uses we have the price tag for exchange is £15,000

For the features it brings, the company is not willing to spend such a massive amount of money.

However I can the see the huge benefits shared mailboxes/calendars would bring to us

 

[The_KiD]

400 users and no you need a license for every mail box and we have approx 400 individual mail boxes.

 

[The_KiD]

Thanks for the advice guys, will take a look at Zimbra, Domino & Lotus Notes (cant believe I hadnt thought of Lotus Notes though).

The company is a rapidly growing company at the moment and they are still trying to adjust to being a big company and the price tags that come with things.

As for taking my experience elsewhere I have to look more at the position im in, which is IT manager of the largest independent car hire firm in the UK, 90 sites in UK, 1 US and 1 Aus and this is without any previous experience in management and even being a supervisor.

So I think it is better to stick with the company and slowly bring their way of thinking in to line with the rest of the world while at the same time softening the blow as much as possible.

...errr kinda wandered off there sorry

 

[The_KiD]

Wow thanks for the advice and all, but I am still going to look at alternatives


....woah dont shoot me just yet, but in my experience it doesnt hurt to have options when approaching the board for money.

Also I should have mentioned that email is not a business critical application for us, so clustering is not something I will be lookng at. We already have spare licenses for OpenView Storage mirroring too, so I could get 2 servers put the mail server software on one and have it replicate to the second for redundancy.

Excahneg may be all singing and all dancing, but MS are complete rip off merchants in terms of their licensing...sure I can have clustering...but it must be paid for....sure I can have this fetaure and that function...but they are all paid for. First you must pay for our software then you must pay to use our software and should our software break you must pay us to fix it.

£999 for 5 phone calls??? is it bill himself who answers?