Chalk up another one for the good guys.

Could have been a lot worse...they could have switched to Lotus Notes/Domino!

We did the opposite in my organisation. We ditched an expensive Linux based email system (Netmanager) that had been set up by an external company and put Exchange in instead. We haven't regretted it for a second, we got loads more functionality, our users were much happier (they all hated it pretty much across the board) and it was actually cheaper to buy (even including the new server we bought) as the company that installed the old system insisted on an expensive support contract. So our long term TCO for email was cheaper with buying a server, Server 2003 & Exchange 2003 . I don't how that's possible given we have sold our souls to the evil MS empire. Chalk up one for the supposed bad guys, I think.

Looks to me as if your company was using a proprietary product that just happens to run on Linux, if it even did run on Linux as the only OS listed on that site is NetBSD. A lot of proprietary companies use it because they can make all the open technology they take from BSD into a proprietary product. The BSD license isn't like the GPL license in that respect.

So, it looks to me as if you guys just moved from one proprietary vendor to another is all, although it's really hard to tell from the paucity of information on that site. If their product is as skimpy on documentation as their site is it's no wonder you dumped it.

To be fair the company that put the solution into place didn't help themselves very much by having a poor support service. As far as I can tell they took an off the shelf solution and customised it a fair bit to their own ends. It was also our DNS server and proxy/firewall. After it started to crash and lock up on a regular basis we started to lose faith in it (as well as most people really disliking the webmail interface). The company supporting it only wanted to be helpful when we said we were cancelling our contract.

Given that we already ran a predominantly windows environment it made a lot of sense to go with exchange and we have been very pleased with it. Especially it's full AD integration which makes our job much easier. It also cost us very little since we are a school and we get MS licences at a fraction of the normal cost. I think a Windows Server 2003 std licence costs us about £10 or thereabouts.

Did you get Netmanager from Precedence or one of its partners? Precedence looks like it's about 5 or 6 people with one person doing support, at least according to what I can glean from their website. Almost every one of the officers in that company is also involved heavily in other companies or owns another company. Several of their business "partners" are in actuality companies owned by their own officers. That's more than a little deceptive if you ask me.

Yup, it was from Precedence, and no we wouldn't ever recommend them.

I just want to point out that this is a well-thoughtout and well researched discussion and I'm fairly impressed. Sometimes the Windows vs. Linux discussions tend to *ahem* "degrade" a bit. Just want to complement you on what I'm seeing. Cheers, fellows.