** Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com [2003-07-16 11:25]:
Here at work we are finally getting rid of lotus notes server/client for our mail. Hoorah! Hoorah! We are replacing it with, cough, MS Exchange and a front end of our choice. My brother wants to use a linux box with Opera for his mail, and I would do likewise or use exim-mutt type things. Does anyone have any experience with linux and ms exchange? Is it pop3 or imap? Does it keep its mail in weird format that Opera won't be able to read? etc etc.
This is a great opportunity to start running linux as a work desktop, as Notes and the odd word doc are all I need ms windows for now, and I don't intend to miss it!
** end quote [Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com]
I pity you here, I used to work at company that ditched an IBM mainframe system as part of the y2k issue and almost went to Notes. Thankfully they saw the light and went the Intranet route (the cost of Notes was the winner here!). We must have been one of the early Intranet setups back in 1995, but by no means the first.
The setup we chose was ideal for dropping a Linux client into - Netscape servers for web, mail, LDAP and calendar functions, mail and calendar being on old RS6000 boxes. After a few years with this, and when we looked at upgrading the Netscape software we found the licensing costs had changed, this lead to management considering goign the Microsoft route with Exchange - thankfully we managed to hold this off for a long while (till after I'd left) because to replace a single ageing RS6000 supporting around 1000 clients with around 3500 mail addresses (the joys of migrating companies and therefore mail domains!) we would have had to implement 4 Intel based Windows NT servers each running Exchange - way too expensive. I've heard they've gone the Exchange route now, but that's largely due to having reduced the size of the company to about 1/4 what it was, and the need to support some of the legacy mail addresses must have reduced too.
It could be worse though, I ended up moving to yet another company when half of the original was sold off (before I finally left) and in the process was witness to moving to IIS for web servers, ditching LDAP and calendar completely (although I did implement the Star Office calendaring server the new management didn't support the functionality provided by shared diaries!), and moving mail to MDaemon (spell check usually wants to change this to Madmen!). This MDaemon server was administered via a 33.6k direct dial modem link from my desk (UK) to the 'server' in Holland (running Windows 98 and dialling via ISDN to pull mail and then send it back out again) - nasty. Still this implementation was defined by a manager to insisted we switch to ethernet from token ring so that we could use TCP/IP to communicate with our AS/400 boxes, and who was faxed a virus hoax, typed it out and emailed it to me insisting that I emailed it on to all managers within the company (even though I explained it to him!). I was saved this embarassement by him not being able to give me email addresses for all the company managers! Anyone still wondering why I left?!