Best alternative Groupware Client (Outlook)

[PrisonMind]

hi,

we search a alternative to outlook on our windows terminal server.
it should be running on windows terminal server and linux (for later migration to linux).

what you think is better thunderbird or evolution?

[jaime.pinto]

Your question is a bit confusing to me, and seems to imply some sort of an answer already, for which you're looking for confirmation.

Let see if you can get us all back to your original ISSUE, for situational purposes.

1) Do you want to migrate your current windows based Groupware Enterprise mail system to linux based Scalix?

2) Are you looking for suggestions on this forum for how to go about it?

[PrisonMind]

sry my english is not so good...

we use already scalix enterprise with outook.
i ask to your experience with other client,
maybe you know better clients then outlook.

[jaime.pinto]

In our case, we separate the users/clients in 2 groups: Premium and Standard

For premium accounts on a Windows environment, Office 2003 Outlook is by far the preference. The reason is the integrated Calendar/contacts feature. On the linux environment Evolution is the first choice. They both require the scalix plugin.

For Standard users it does really matter. Any IMAP client works fine on any of the environments, but for this group the favorite client is Thunderbird, over OL-IMAP or evolution-IMAP.

We also have a group of users that only rely on SWA regardless.

[xtype]

what are your users need to do with outlook?

mostly the users do not need Outlook. The SWA do not need as much performance as outlook on WTS and the main Features normal users need as compose mail, use calender and public folder are build in in SWA.

So why not to use SWA?

[PrisonMind]

we use actual the scalix version 11.3, in this version the performance of swa is not so good like outook. this is the problem for us.

[xtype]

Which Outlook Version you use??

so we made performance tests with Outlook 2000/2002/2003 and all versions are not performant as SWA!

On which Hardware is your Scalix server running and how many users are using SWA at the same time?

[PrisonMind]

outlook 2003
1x sun server 2 × 2,4-GHz-AMD Opteron, 8gb ram, redhat enterprise 64bit...
the mails are all on a san.
not su much...so 200-300 user should work with the swa.
i think the hardware should enough for this...or not?

[xtype]

i think that shoud be enough ....
we're using 1x FSC RX200 S4 Dual Quad 4GB RAM with CEntos 5.2

On this Enviroment the SWA is much performant as Outlook ....

no idea why its isnt in your case!

[nvehommes]

Have a look at the release notes of 11.4. Among other nice things, SWA has become significantly faster, compared to 11.3.

[jplorier]

Hi there,

I'm running IBM with Opteron Dual core and 4 GB Ram and I can tell that though 11.4 increases a lot the speed of swa it still is no match for the clients. We have 200 accounts and most of the users prefeer a client than swa because swa is very dependent on the client computer and the main client computer core here are P4 with 512 RAM.
Other adventage for the mail clients is the cache they create even with IMAP so when they connect off the company they don't have to wait to download all their headers over a slow internet connection.
Though swa is great and gives groupware capabilities that are not present in an IMAP client, still speed is a difference.
Regards