On Thursday, May 8, 2003, at 03:23 PM, Nico van der Dussen wrote:
> In one of the articles the following is said:
>
> Unlike feature-rich commercial e-mail servers such as Lotus
> Domino and Microsoft Exchange, Pal said open source e-mail
> is more basic, and usually lacks collaboration software such as
> shared calendars.
>
> Is there a way of making Exim handle shared calenders for diary
> management etc?
>
> Just curious :-)
As Nigel says, exim is only a part of the puzzle.
Exchange, for instance, is a number of things.
- MTA
- IMAP Server
- POP Server
- MAPI Server
- LDAP Server
- a Database
It is also, depending on who you talk to, a MUA (Outlook
2000/XP/98/Whatever).
Exim is just one of those things. An MTA. On its own its very good at
talking to other mailservers and shifting around mail. It's arguably
better than Exchange at doing this one task, as well.
The other components that matter, such as POP and IMAP can be done with
other components. They are also generally better than, say, Exchange.
Courier-IMAP is my favourite POP3 and IMAP server package.
LDAP can be done with OpenLDAP.
But what about calendaring, you ask? That can also be done, on the
client side -
http://www.bynari.net/index.php?id=7
Bynari's Insight Connector is not free. I suspect (but I havn't
checked) that it is cheaper than buying a similarly priced number of
client access licenses for Exchange. I also suspect that someone out
there will see this void and decide they will fill it with a free
version of Bynari's connector.
So, I would counter the original statement with:
"Unlike commercial do-it-all solutions which are 'good enough' for the
jobs that they do, Open Source email products allow you to choose best
of breed components for each part of your mail server solution, at a
fraction of the cost. And you can do everything with Open Source that
you can do with commercial, closed source, solutions."
Of course, there are other solutions. One could argue that mail-based
calendaring is cumbersome, and things like the Horde project offer a
better solution:
http://www.horde.org/
Just my 2 yen.
--
Nathan Ollerenshaw - Systems Engineer - Shared Hosting
ValueCommerce Japan -
http://www.valuecommerce.ne.jp
"You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline -
it helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear
weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER." - Frank Zappa
