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Exchange Server Replacements

What looks like Microsoft's Exchange Server, responds like Exchange Server, offers full-featured mail, calendaring, group scheduling and task management like Exchange Server, but isn't Exchange Server? We tested third-party Microsoft Exchange Server replacements that offer Outlook users mail, calendaring, group scheduling, task management and notes for a fraction of the price of Exchange.

Based on our conversations with a number of mail-server vendors, we think you'll see the Exchange Server replacement market take off over the next year, but for now the pickings are slim. SuSE promised an Outlook connector for its Openexchange Server (SLOX) but failed to deliver. Oracle, IBM-Lotus and The SCO Group describe products that sound like what we're looking for, but they chose not to participate in our tests, so we can't tell if they're blowing smoke.

One of the products we tested fills the bill: CommuniGate Pro from Stalker Software. CGPro fools Outlook into thinking it's talking with Exchange running on Windows, when it's really talking to an imposter running on one of the 28 platforms supported by Stalker. CGPro supports POP, IMAP and Web clients out of the box, and it costs as little as $22 per client.