Microsoft Exchange Alternative

[revelation]

As I have mentioned here before, I am now working in IT at a small company. Our email is currently being served by the company that hosts our web site. We are now looking into setting up an Exchange Server but the costs are way out of range for our small company. I have asked our web host if they would want to handle this for us but they use Linux servers and I don't think he would want to go to all of the expense. They are doing a great job for a great price but we are now to the point where we want to bring things up a notch.

Any suggestions on an alternative to Exchange for a small company?

[glc]

Why do you feel you need to upgrade? Are there specific reasons why standard POP/SMTP hosted mail is not adequate?

[revelation]

Yes, we would like to be able to have the calendar sharing functionality. Now, we can invite a group to a meeting but nothing tells you if everyone can attend or not. You must wait until someone hopefully notices a conflict on thier own calendar and then go back out and suggest another time for the meeting. In Exchange it looks at everyone's calendar and tells you right away if there is a conflict befor you send the invitation. Another thing is our Administrative Assistant sometimes needs to send an email as if it is coming from the CEO but she can't. To do that she would have to go to his machine and do it from there.

[glc]

There are reasonably priced 3rd party applications available to share Outlook calendars and other data without an Exchange server. Google outlook calendar sharing.

The admin assistant can simply add a profile to her Outlook with the CEO's email account and tell it to leave a copy of messages on the server.