Hi Jason,
first of all, thanks for your posting. Just for the record, since I've ben involved with these forums, outside obvious spam, I've taken a single post down and that was not because somebody had endorsed a competing product, but rather had thrown pretty bad insults at my colleagues trying to help him as well as other forum members. After all, this is our place, everyone is welcome as a guest and the only thing I'd expect is that people treat each other with mutual respect.
second, you'll probably find a number of quotes with me saying the same thing - Microsoft Exchange is a fine product, at least in it's last generations; early versions, 5.5 and even 2000 were really not that stable, had tons of issue and typically created a big mess. That's certainly no longer true for 2003 or 2007. And I'm pretty sure that when setting up a new system, people running Exchange will be more happy than with a good number of products out in the market, possibly including our own in a couple cases. Which is fine.
I'd, however, like to add that there are a couple of differences where people may prefer not to go down that route.
On the pricing side, Scalix and SBS compete head to head up to 75 users - List prices can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/pricing.aspx and depending on how you look at it, Scalix pricing over a 3 year period will save you 0-50% on total software cost. Over a longer period Scalix will win because Microsoft doesn't offer upgrades to future SBS version, so whenever 2011 or 2012 hits, you'll have to buy a new one and most likely new hardware with it. Also, if you need more than those 75, this is a hard stop and you have to go for all the enterprise stuff, which will be way more expensive. Therefore, your mileage will vary, depending on what user number range you're in and we've done the math a number of times, typically ending up in total software cost savings of anywhere between 30 and 70% for Scalix. If one product is right for you, then that's probably not the end of the world in all cases, but it's what we see.
Things get more dramatic, btw., if you have to classes of users. Production companies, for example, quite often would love to get their manufacturing workforce on email, just for internal communication. A full mailbox CAL license, however, is too expensive for them. This is where Scalix' Premium vs. Standard user model comes in - you get the more functional Premium user licenses for your knowledge workers and everyone else can get on the same system and actually for free in most cases.
What's more important is probably the question what environment you live in. If yours is a straightforward Microsoft shop and set to remain that way, there is little immediate reason not to subscribe to a single vendor in full, however if this is not the case - as is in many IT environments - you may want to give this second thought. Some examples:
- Say you're happily running your Novell e-Directory to manage your users and other things and say your Novell Netware (or Netware Services on Linux) work well for you and you don't want to change them. Now you're introducing a new mail system and you're looking at Exchange. Well, as everyone knows, Exchange requires Active Directory, no choice. So to run Exchange you end up having to setup ADS, and it's now sitting next to your eDirectory, with lots of manual synchronisation and administration work. To stop this from happening, all you can do is to fully replace your well-running eDirectory with ADS and your Novell servers with Windows servers, just to regain a single directory structure. Technically there is no reason for that, a mail server should be independent of a particular directory are there are sufficiently powerful open standards (say: LDAP) out there to allow for this. Practically, that's the case with some products, but not with others (Groupwise and Exchange in this case) and it's this kind of lock-in I personally don't believe in.
- Client-side 1: Surely, as a shop running Exchange, your Outlook users will be all-happy as this integration is really what both parts are made for. And that's the point. Microsoft is using Exchange and it's market share at this point to keep people from considering alternatives on the desktop. One example is Rich Internet Applications. While Scalix has customers who run Scalix Web Access exclusively as their primary client environments, you probably couldn't do the same thing. That's because if you look carefully at the functionality offered within OWA, you won't find things such as delegate access or full public folder modes - the reason, again, is very clear. OWA is not designed to be a primary email client, which Scalix Web Access is. In the Exchange world, one uses Outlook for primary desktop access exclusively, and OWA is meant for use in those cases when you're travelling and you want portal-type access to your mailbox. Not saying one is better, one is worse, just two very different product philosophies, some may like one, some may prefer the other. Talking about web access, even on Windows I do prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer, for a couple reasons; if I want to use OWA in full-featured mode, I no longer have the choice, will have to use IE while I'm using that app or will have to go with a much-downgraded user experience. I may want to add that Scalix is working on adding Safari/Chrome/Webkit support for SWA in Scalix 11.5.
- Client-side 2: Alternative Desktop clients. I know many companies these days that are looking at desktop alternatives for cost reasons. One particular hotbed are office applications. Open Office on Windows and Linux and now also on the Mac has reached a maturity level where it has become a true alternative for any commercial office application. It does not, however, include a counterpart to Outlook. Now that leaves you in a difficult situation if you're using Exchange. Either you have to license Outlook separately, which is almost as expensive as buying the whole of office, or you basically can't go Open Office. With Scalix in this situation you would have the choice of possibly running SWA as a primary client, or you could start using a Thunderbird/Lightning combination for eMail and calendaring (which is actually what the Open Office people are favoring) or else. You'd simply have the choice. If you consider running Linux-based desktops as a full alternative, you'd even have Evolution or Kontact to choose from, both connecting to Scalix either via open standards or via open-source based and freely available connectors.
- Being a Mac user, the next such thing happens - I am actually perfectly happy with Apple's built-in Mail and Calendaring applications, Mail and iCal. I'm also happy with Apple's iWork office suite, which goes for less than $100 per seat in singles. I am using Mail and iCal using open standards - IMAP and CalDAV - to talk to my Scalix server every day, happily. If we were using Exchange, my only true choice on the Mac would be to purchase the full version of Microsoft's office suite on the Mac at a $400 list price. This contains a client called 'Entourage' that works with Exchange. It's not as fully-functional as Outlook and it works based on a proprietary interface, but it does the job. It's simply, however, not the client that I want to use because I really prefer Mail and iCal for their UI, even outside of cost.
I could possibly add many more such anecdotes, but I think the point I'm making here is clear. What Scalix and other alternatives are trying to do is NOT to "steal" ideas from Microsoft - and that's the only statement in your post I'm taking some personal objections on. Our aim is to provide an alternative, to enable and allow for Freedom of Choice in backend ecosystem as well as on the client side, to follow and utilize open standards for maximum and non-proprietary interoperability (something I very strongly believe in) and to create industry and customer benefit through all of this.
I actually also believe that because such alternatives exist today, e.g. Linux as an operating system, Open Office as a desktop application alternative and things like Scalix for backend server applications, Microsoft has been forced to look at their products and improve them. They are strong offerings and I'll be the last to start bashing them on what they are. I disagree with a philosophy of stickiness and lock-in, however, and I hope the above explains why.
On the 'being ahead' part, that's very true if we would follow in the same footsteps; of course we aren't and especially in a field as rich as software, there's never a single solution to the same problem. And while Exchange does some things really well, I'd think that there are things in our - email, calendaring and collaboration - space that one could do very differently ("Think Different" was Apple's motto in the 90s or so and we see where it's taken them; I'd personally much prefer to have Apple's 5-10% of market share (and mindshare?
) over Microsofts 80-90%). So I think we're on a different path and there is no such thing as ahead or behind in direct comparison. Stay tuned.
WIth this being said, I'll also wish you all the best, you've made you're choice, we've made ours and everyone is invited to make theirs.
Cheers,
Florian