Microsoft Exchange is a great utility for collaboration based services, email, and calendaring. Its also a proprietary monolithic stand alone solution that only works well with Operating Systems of the same kind (Windows), and doesn’t play well with third party email clients or systems. Microsoft Exchange can also be very expensive to run and upgrade as well as perform maintenance on it as the entire structure is built up within a single database. While Microsoft has made strides to be more open and friendly with their Email server system, such as offering the ability to enable IMAPv4 features for user accounts, there is still a lot to be done.
This is where many third party solutions come into play. Whether you are looking to move to Kerio, Zimbra, or a variety of third party Cyrus or Dovecot based email server system, we can help make that happen. Through a well planned out migration strategy, we can help you realize your ability to break free of Exchange.
Zimbra and Kerio mail servers both do about the same in terms of usability, however Zimbra is targeted towards larger installations (250+) users, while Kerio has an approximate ceiling of 250 users. Both mail servers have licensed the Microsoft Active Sync connector which allows you to connect your iPhone or blackberry mobile device to receive calendar, email, and contact updates.
Migrating away from Microsoft Exchange mail servers to either of these systems could not be easier. Both systems come complete with a migration wizard that runs on a windows platform but can easily deposit email, calendars, and contacts in the proper location on a mail server running on either Windows, Mac OS X, or different variances of Linux distributions.
If you are looking to more to a more opened source email solution such as the included mail server running under Cyrus on Mac OS X Server, we can also help you migrate the bulk of data required to make your migration a success. Through many different manual based techniques, we can migrate the email via an open sourced CLI based application known as IMAP-Sync and contacts by importing the contacts into the central Directory.app in Mac OS X Servers Open Directory. Combined with this, we can help to implement the global contacts database through the included webmail interface powered by Squirrelmail in order to ensure that all the company wide contacts are available always at your fingertips.