> On Wed, January 7, 2009 3:23 pm, Ed Westphal wrote: >> I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino >> as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of >> experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely >> handle all that you may want to throw at it. It does have some draw >> backs - what doesn't? IBM / Lotus can give your people a great deal of >> support while they get their legs underneath them. I'm not going to >> swear to it, but I think they can extend some pretty good terms to >> public schools. There are all kinds of specialized add-ons as well. >> Development tools are pretty robust as well. >> >> Ed Westphal >> _______________________________________________ If you want to see how far you can go with Open Source, you may have a look at what HEC (Hautes Études Commerciales) did here in Montreal: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7323 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7524 If you want paid software, then you may have a look at Communigate Pro which i use at a client's site. It's not too expansive, can easily do clustering, runs on many OSes (I run it on CentOS 5), has a MAPI plugin for Outlook, includes a SIP server, etc. I have 50 users with about 100 Gigs of mailboxes / Public folders and uses standards mbox / mdir as storage, doesn't need SQL, has a good WEB interface, etc. I run data storage off 4 x Seagate SAS 15K 73 Gigs and it screams (Adaptec 3405)! No %iowait at all. The system runs on a Dual Core Opteron 2214 with 4 Gigs RAM (Tyan Transport TA-26 (B3992-E)). It does many other tasks (Corporate FTP, Licence management server, SSH Gateway for road warriors, RSync Backup server for Winblows file servers, etc) and easily copes with the load. Backups $ restore are very easy. Upgrade and migration to another server is a breeze. All is contained in one directory. I'm in no way associated with Communigate or Tyan, it was just to share my experience.