Scalix, a Xandros company 2.95 out of 5 RHEL 5 for 100 users, first year: $3,745; $5,935 including antispam and antivirus (not tested); Subsequent years: $1,000; $2,650 including antispam and antivirus.
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Out of the ashes of the e-mail server wars of the late 1990s, HP OpenMail was one of the premium, well-loved products without much market share and no hope of winning against Microsoft Exchange. The OpenMail technology was licensed to Scalix, where it became the core of Scalix Enterprise Edition (as well as the free Scalix Community Edition, a user-limited and function-limited version of the same technology).
While our testing showed that the core mailbox service (which can run on RHEL, SUSE, CentOS, Fedora) in Scalix is still rock-solid, we were less than impressed at how the Scalix team drew together other open source products and layered a management system on top of them in what is the current Scalix bundle. While Scalix may be of interest to very large enterprises that are seeking an alternative to Microsoft Exchange, the lack of integration in the Scalix product is frustrating to say the least. We were also disappointed that ActiveSync wasn’t out of beta test in time to be part of our testing.
If you’re looking for the best mail server in 2001, Scalix might well be it. The Enterprise Edition is certainly priced at a level reminiscent of 2001. But now that it’s eight years later, we deserve better integration, lower prices and a stronger feature set from a product with this distinguished of a history.
Exchange alternatives are good bet for mid-sized rollouts >
