What we looked for
Our main aim when examining the various products was to gauge how effective each would be as an Exchange alternative for companies looking to either ditch Microsoft's email/communication server or install from scratch. In particular, we wanted to know whether they were easier to set up and manage than Exchange, whether they offered the same kind of collaboration support and whether users would notice much difference compared to the real thing.
As well as evaluating server configuration and management we tested both web-based and Outlook clients, as well as checking the level of mobile support and how the product handled things like antivirus and anti-spam protection. We also noted the completeness of each product, and the availability of migration tools, archiving support and so on.
What we found
Interestingly, emulation of Exchange's collaboration features was uniformly high across all of the products. That was true both with web-based clients and when using Outlook, with a plug-in required for the latter in each case. Indeed, if you were to compare the products purely on their collaboration features, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a clear leader.
There were, however, big differences between the web clients in terms of look and feel, and customisation. There were also huge differences in management, mobile access, security and other options.
In the end our favourite proved to be Google Apps Premier Edition, which we found incredibly quick and easy to deploy and a delight to use. Outlook integration is more than acceptable, while the Gmail web client more than makes up for any deficiencies here with its labels, conversations and search facilities. Mobile access, security and archiving options are all available too, and there's a burgeoning market of add-ons to work with it. Small companies will love Google Apps Premier Edition, not least because it frees them from hosting their own hardware and software, and the need to employ expert staff to manage it.
Of course, we appreciate that a hosted solution won't suit every business — larger organisations, especially, may still want a server of their own. Here it's not so easy to say what's best, but for most buyers we'd recommend Kerio Connect 7 which delivers a balanced mix of functionality in a scalable, easy to manage and very complete package.
Editors' ratings
Talkback
You excluded Notes and GroupWise on what grounds exactly?
"because they're rarely seen as like-for-like replacements and we're more interested in products designed to do what Exchange does without making it evident that something else is at work on the server. "
What vague spurious nonsense this is. You could equally well say this meaningless phrase about any of the products you have reviewed. To exclude the market leading competitive products from this review is simply inexcusable and makes the whole article worthless.
My company is using successfully using the Zarafa solution. The table is not correct for this product.
- Freebusy times is default available, see online demo (http://demo.zarafa.com)
- Migrationtools are available for PST and Exchange. We migrated from Exchange 2000 to Zarafa
- Zarafa can be fully integrated and managed for any kind of LDAP directory server. We use the integration with Active Directory 2008.
For full compatible and stable Outlook support Zarafa is the best solution, because it's fully using the MAPI architecture of Exchange.
And I quote "Note: The following features will continue to be available in Outlook, but will not be synchronized by Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook in Google Apps: user
delegation, public folders, and syncing of notes, tasks, journals, and distribution lists."
This alone makes me wonder why Google Apps is the winner as a Exchange Server replacement. We use Kerio Connect and it does all that and does it well.
Thanks to everyone for pointing out the errors in the table, a few bugs did creep in which we are addressing and there have been some changes to the products which we're similalry incorporating.
As far Notes and GroupWise are concerned, although Exchnage competitors these really are quite different products in terms of how they're implemented and used. They're also much more high-end and if we had included them we really couldn't have done them justice within the scope of this test, plus it would have meant limiting what we could do with the less well known alternatives which suffer from not getting much coverage anyway. Far better to leave them out of this group test and, possibly, look at them in more depth later.
I accept the limitation of the Google Apps Sync plug-in for Outlook and, although I didn't encounter any during testing, am aware of other issues with Outlook integration in Google Apps. That's why I also recommended Kerio Connect. Despite which Google Apps is a great product which, if nothing else is making the others sit up and take notice.
Alan Stevens
late comment, but this article was written with google apps in mind, you should not have gone through this weak comparison and spent the time writing just to say well ...google.
Thanks for the interesting comparison. It's good to see what alternatives are available. While Exchange does dominate, I would be interested to know how these other solutions are from the maintenance side. Exchange requires a huge amount of resources and is buggy. Although, 2007 and 2010 aren't as buggy as 2003 and earlier versions were. It would also be interesting to see what other solutions are out there with open source replacements, including replacing Outlook on the desktop end. I've always been interested in seeing a complete open source solution, including the backend and clients, tied to LDAP (such as the Fedora Directory Server) to replace Exchange. But I haven't done the research to see what is out there to do this, if anything.