Exchange Server Replacement for Mac OS X Server 10.4

weslebsackweslebsack
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hey everybody,

This is my first post on Appleinsider. I'm migrating an office of about 50 users to an xServe from a 15 year old Windows NT 4.0 server. I wanted to wait until October when Leopard Server is out with its Exchange Server calendar and address book support, but they aren't able to wait and need it by early September. Do any of you know of a way to implement an Exchange Server replacement on Tiger Server? I would rather have something easily manageable by their IT guy (GUI based) as opposed to something harder (CLI based).



Their clients are all running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 with Outlook 2003. This is why I need something to replace their Exchange Server now, that doesn't have a per-client license like Microsoft does.



Thanks for all of your help!



--Wes

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    First off, Apple has not said anything about being a direct Exchange replacement. The are using seperate mail servers (IMAP/POP3), calendering (CalDAV), and addressbook (LDAP). They have never indicated that they will be supporting MAPI (the proprietary format that Outlook/Exchange uses).



    Now you could use Zimbra, and that runs natively on MacOS X (I run the community edition for my home server), and supports MAPI (in the Professional version of the server). Unfortunately Zimbra Professional is on a yearly/per user basis, so this might not be what you want.



    Once 10.5 rolls out, you will be able to use Outlook with it for email, and probably for an addressbook, but without third-party plugins you will probably not be able to use the calendering.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    weslebsackweslebsack Posts: 2member
    Hi Karl, thanks for the reply. After posting, I found out that they won't need the email server (at least not yet) because their email is currently hosted off site. The only Exchange features they'll need is sharing calendars and an address book.



    Apple has said that they will have an iCal server built into Leopard, and I found the open source project online at:



    http://trac.calendarserver.org/projects/calendarserver



    And I could just use LDAP built into Tiger Server for the address book on the clients running Outlook 2003.



    Does anybody see a problem doing this?
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