Ron Anderson is Network Computing's lab director. Before joining the staff, he managed IT in various capacities at Syracuse University and for the Veteran's Administration. Write to him at [email protected].
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Exchange Server Replacements
What looks like Microsoft's Exchange Server, responds like Exchange Server, offers full-featured mail, calendaring, group scheduling and task management like Exchange Server, but isn't Exchange Server? We tested third-party Microsoft Exchange Server replacements that offer Outlook users mail, calendaring, group scheduling, task management and notes for a fraction of the price of Exchange.
Based on our conversations with a number of mail-server vendors, we think you'll see the Exchange Server replacement market take off over the next year, but for now the pickings are slim. SuSE promised an Outlook connector for its Openexchange Server (SLOX) but failed to deliver. Oracle, IBM-Lotus and The SCO Group describe products that sound like what we're looking for, but they chose not to participate in our tests, so we can't tell if they're blowing smoke.
One of the products we tested fills the bill: CommuniGate Pro from Stalker Software. CGPro fools Outlook into thinking it's talking with Exchange running on Windows, when it's really talking to an imposter running on one of the 28 platforms supported by Stalker. CGPro supports POP, IMAP and Web clients out of the box, and it costs as little as $22 per client.
While we were testing the shipping versions of Stalker's CGPro and SuSe's Openexchange Server, Stalker was at work on CGPro 4.1. We tested beta version 4.1b8 in our Real-World Labs® at Syracuse University as well as a beta "webskin," called EudoraLook, from one of CGPro's third-party developers, David Bakkers from Group Colleges in Sydney, Australia. The big news for this release is browser-based access to groupware features previously available only through the MAPI connector.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
