[CentOS] Email/GroupWare Suite

Wed Jan 7 21:24:33 UTC 2009
Guy Boisvert <boisvert.guy at videotron.ca>

> 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.