Well well well... Buh-Bye Exchange.

I've finally found the answer to my prayers. eGroupWare has become somewhat mature and I think I'll be replacing Exchange with it in the next few weeks.

And before you scream 'Hey, what about my Outlook???' let me mention Funambol's free sync utility. Yeah. It actually works. For Outlook sync, I recommend the 'stable' version, as the beta 6.0 had some issues for me. I haven't tried PocketPC syncing yet, but that's my next step.

What is eGroupWare? Think Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Project, Sharepoint and several other programs all wrapped into one. Installing was easy using Ubuntu 7.04 - I just installed the packages, created a database in MySQL and then went to the configuration page on my server at http://myserver.example.com/egroupware/config/

So far I've made it pull e-mail from my exchange server when you use the web interface, and I used Funambol's sync utility to get all my calendar, contacts, notes and todo's into eGroupWare. All that's left to do is move the mail over to the new server and sync all the individual user's data. Thankfully I only have a handful of users.