Replacing Exchange with OSX Server would involve a lot more than just setting up OSX Server and migrating mailboxes, even in a small office like mine. The fax functionality, for example, would involve some kind of third-party hardware and software, plus some kind of glue software to integrate it into our mail environment. The difference between them is not like MS Office vs. Open Office. It’s more like MS Office vs. WordPad + Calculator.

Exchange’s web-based access, for example, is Outlook running in a web browser. Some stuff isn’t there – delegate control, folder permissions and folder actions, ect. But just about everything involving reading, responding to, and writing e-mail (and integrated calendering) is there. So you can (for example) create meeting requests and respond to incoming requests without needing anything but access to a web-enabled computer. As far as I can tell with Mail + iCal, I’d need to either build a web interface to iCal or purchase one, then manually copy meeting info from one to the other, or just wait until I got to my computer and do it from there. I don’t know how Mail + iCal deals with meeting changes in that scenario though. OWA or Exchange fires a request message to the organizer if the time is changed by one of the attendees. How does Mail + iCal deal with changes like that?

Delegation is what happens in the real world when you have a secretary or personal assistant. The PA manages your schedule and routine correspondence, and lets you know about things that need your personal attention. Exchange allows you to do that without having to give your PA full, unrestricted access to all your account information. You can assign roles so some people have read, some have read and write, and some have send-as (not the same as impersonation). The rights can be assigned folder-by-folder, so you can deligate one calendar and folder and block access to other ones. We use this internally in a variety of ways.

Public folders (which can be used as mailing lists) have the same kinds of access control, plus folder actions. So inbound messages that meet certain criteria can be routed in different ways. I use this (for example) with sub-dealers who don’t need accounts in our domain. You create a public folder (which has an e-mail address) and set it to forward mail to the external account your sub-dealer uses.

Distribution lists can also be used as mailing lists, but have a different feature set. The archive folder isn’t required, for example, and you can ‘burst’ the list address into individual addresses in a particular e-mail so you can remove some recipients.

Sever-side mail rules aren’t the same, unless Mail.app grows new functionality when it’s connected to a Leopard mail server. In Exchange, users create server-side rules automatically from within Outlook or Outlook web access. So say I join an external mailing list. I create a rule to file that mail into a folder, then close Outlook. When I check my mail later via Outlook Web Access (or my iPhone), the inbound list mail is in it’s folder without my having to create another rule, wait for any processing to occur, or get the server admin to implement anything.

Scheduling resources in other systems is usually done by giving the resource an account and having someone monitor that account. in Exchange you can do that, or you can manage that with delegates and folder actions. It extends to e-mail as well as calendaring, so no need to manage them with separate programs.

Exchange, in larger organizations, also allows for clustering, load balancing, and different roles. So you can have some servers managing mail boxes with others doing the send-and-receive part, while others are OWA gateways. Splitting out functionality and distributing it across other systems is where it really shines, but small companies don’t generally need to do that. SBS is more cost-effective for them. Lots cheaper, too.

Exchange is large enterprise groupware that can be adapted to fit the needs of smaller organizations with highly mobile workers. It’s overkill for most small groups that don’t need a lot of remote access. I selected it because, for our company, the office is somewhere we go when we don’t have anything else to do. OSX Server is a workgroup solution that can be extended to the large end of more typical small and medium businesses that don’t have a lot of work-at-home-or-wherever users. There is some overlap in the small busness sector, but not so much that Apple can be said to be competing with Exchange in any meaningful kind of way.

ActiveSynch on the iPhone (or the lack therof), the original article topic, wouldn’t push companies to switch server platforms regardless of the available functionality. RIM, for example, would not have been nearly as successful as they are if they required users to change messaging platforms or implement a different server architecture. Rather, RIM extends the existing messaging platform by adding a bit of software to the mail server that talks to the RIM systems that do the heavy lifting. Apple, by adding ActiveSynch, can get their phones into enterprise environments without even having to make the kinds of investments that RIM did. No need for a new Apple Messaging data center to route traffic to the handsets. No need to add software to any mail servers. No need for much of anything, really, since ActiveSynch is already platform-agnostic.

While I can’t speak for everyone, I know that – in my own case – my switching my family to Macs started with a 4GB Nano (1G) and the first Intel Mini. Now we’ve got two iPhones, four iPods, a 24″ iMac, and I’ve got one brother and one sister to get MacBooks. My wife’s gonna get a MacBook too, once her litte Gateway dies. Two or three (or ten) like me in a given enterprise is a lot better for Apple than an XServe or a Mini with OSX Server would be. Apple isn’t chasing the enterprise market, so a strategy that lets them extend the halo into enterprises with very little effort on their part (implementing something Microsoft already has packaged for cross-platform use by third-parties) is absolutely perfect for them.

In fact, if Apple does a better job of making ActiveSynch work than Microsoft does on Windows Mobile (not hard – Windows Mobile sucks swamp water), Apple’s iPhone could easily end up displacing Windows Mobile and making significant inroads on RIMs market share. That wouldn’t be possible if push email and live calendar and contact updating were limited to OSX Server implementations only. For IT folks, that’s too much like jumping off a cliff.

Apple’s strategy since the introduction of the iPod seems to be one of sneaking in through a window rather than barging in the front door. iPods brought some people to Macs, but not many. Making iPods windows-compatable got people who weren’t thinking ‘Mac’ to start thinking ‘Mac’, but the hardware differences (PowerPC vs intel) were still a real barrier. Once the hardware difference was gone and Boot Camp showed up, getting a Mac as your next computer wasn’t an all-or-nothing choice. Boot camp made escaping back to Windows something that wouldn’t cost too much. iPhones that work with Exchange is just the latest way Apple is using to coax people into Apple stores and onto OSX.

First, from the businesses I deal with I know that none of that is ‘needed’ because they don’t have it now. :)

Regarding your list.

While I haven’t directly set up Leopard yet, I believe all of that is available.

- Web based mail access – out of the box with Tiger and Leopard. No problem

- Web based calendar with the most (maybe all) of the details you list – out of the box with Leopard

- Server mail rules – don’t know if its out of the box with Leopard but was trivial to add to the Open Source mail viewer (Squirrel mail) provided as part of Tiger.

- Mail lists – out of the box with Tiger and I assume Leopard. We use them all the time, including with customers.

- Resources with calendars – Part of Calendar Server thats provided with Leopard and which I installed on Tiger – Free.

- Delegation – As we don’t use calendaring extensively I’ve never yet understood what this is but its listed as part of CalendarServer so out of the Box with Leopard.

So, I stand by my original assessment.

BTW why would you put an xserve? The iMac would make a great server (we use one as our backup). The server functions use almost no CPU in small user situations and the stability of OS X makes it no burden to have that running in the background on something like an iMac.

I don’t believe that group is as large as you might imagine, actually. Looking at an overview of OSX Server’s mail server, here are some things we do with Exchange that OSX Server dosn’t seem to be able to do:

- Web-based mail access. No mail client required, just a computer (any computer, any OS) with internet access and there you are.

- Web based calendar, fax, public folder, shared and private contacts, and distribution lists, too. Set up automaticly, but you can customize it if you want.

- Server-based mail rules. By subject, sender, receiver, headers, body text, ect. i.e. Mail that sorts itself into folders without needing a mail client.

- Distribution lists with server-based list archives. That also use server-based rules.

- Resource accounts (meeting rooms, equipment, ect) that can respond to meeting requests and e-mail.

- Delegation, with control over how much is delegated.

- Deleted item retention (in addition to backups).

I’m hardly an Exchange guru, by the way – all that stuff was set up automatically when I configured SBS via it’s wizard.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like OSX. The greatness of my Mini is surpassed only by that of my week-old iMac. I got my brother and my sister to get MacBooks, and I’m trying to get the rest of the family to get them too. I’m really digging my iPhone and will get everyone in my office using them as their contracts expire (I’m the IT guy, so I get to do that). I’m looking forward to getting another Mac in the office, too (3/4 of our software offerings run on OSX and Windows, and the rest run under Parallels just fine). I just can’t see how an Xserve would fit into that.

It always seems everyone talks about either A OR B – Exchange or ’something else’. I don’t believe this is point (or it shouldn’t be). Exchange provides a lot – much of which is not needed by a lot of people. I believe this group is large and they don’t have a reasonable alternative to Exchange for only what they need (without an IT staff to put it together from OS pieces). For example all we need as work are shared calendars, a common contact information source, and e-mail. None of the other features are required. Exchange is overkill. OTH the integration of CalendarServer, Open Directory, and e-mail on Leopard server is perfect for us. and significantly easier to administer, to me.

:-)

Gartner Analysts Warn That Windows Is Collapsing:

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/04/11/0413234.shtml

hylas

tundraboy:
“I can almost see Steve Jobs plotting just exactly how he will formally launch his full scale assault on enterprise computing after having surrounded it through the total saturation of the non-enterprise market. It will be the most seamless large-scale platform transition ever, made possible by Apple’s demonstrated expertise in managing platform switches and what I expect would be, by then, ubiquitous familiarity with Apple’s OS.”

That, my friends, has always been the plan.
Working software and hardware solutions that work seamlessly with all other platforms – you need not “give up” your choice of OS platform, or be nickeled and dimed to death.
It becomes your choice, and it’s now a very attractive one.

The ridiculousness of having to struggle with manufactured hurdles on server platforms

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=291473&cid=20523469

… to serve the needs of groups of people and reducing complexities of use, will, in the end arrive and converge at Apple (with OS X 10,5.x Server, UNIX) This is where Microsoft would/should have been with the rollout of NT 4 Server and then had another chance with the 2000 Server offering, back in the 90s, and would have been if they hadn’t been sidelined by greed and petty politics. Gates and crew, which I’ve witness personally in action, are insolent and rude – especially with underlings – and their culture of entitlement will be their undoing, and frankly, I can’t wait.

They’ve rode a wave of dumb luck and one fortunate opportunity, which led them to believe themselves genius. That ride is coming to an end, as everyone is wise to their ways.

hylas

I cannot overstate the importance of 3rd party apps in establishing the iphone as a major player. It has more developer interest than any other mobile platform, and by a wide margin. Email is only the tip of the iceberg.