Email.

You love it, hate it, or just use it. Most people just use it as it was designed, a tool to communicate. Some people just hate it. They may even have an account, but do do not use it all. Those people that love it, they are a growing bunch, and they can be fanatical about it. These people swear that if email is down, they cannot work at all. They preach fire and damnation in front of the helpdesk swearing about how they should just go home since they cannot work. The funny thing is that most of those people receive a light amount of business related email daily. Some important things are communicated via email, but it isn’t the core of their work.

Around Labor Day, a client called me up saying that they were having email troubles. And the problem was growing. By the time I arrived, 70% of the company couldn’t access email. Thinking back, I wish I could capture the looks of people’s faces as I entered the place. Some had looks of hope, some were smiling asking me how had I been, and some had that look. You know, the look that the world is ending, the look of fear caused by not knowing what the problem was, the look that it was entirely my fault!

Turns out, no one had email. It had been down since the night before. Only the email lovers experienced it first thing in the morning when they couldn’t get their fix in. Followed slowly by the people that just used it for work. I am sure that the people that hate it or didn’t care may have never known it was down.

This started a process where the COO said he wanted a new email solution. He didn’t care about the group scheduling, global contacts, and other things that Exchange brought to the table. Just pure email that works. No amount of talking by me, and I talked a lot, could change his mind. Ok, then. In short order, I had a pure email, monster of an administration solution ready and in place. COO was happy, the email haters were happy, and everyone else was fuming. What garbage had I unloaded upon them? What happened to this and that? What idiot had contracted me anyway? I relayed this to the COO and he just smiled.

This situation lead to me perusing around to find a solution. Easy email, that didn’t eat up resources, that was cheap, that could run great on the aging server, that satisfied those folks who loved email. Not an easy task. That same day, I ran into a friend who loves Linux…and nothing else. However, a new email server he was working on had him all hyped up. Scalix he said. Got home, downloaded, installed (after DLing Fedora first) and started the setup. Should have been easy, but Fedora and Scalix have different ways of doing things. Got it up and running the next day. I was impressed. Hard to tell the difference between this Ajax webmail and a fat client. I used fetchmail to pull in all my little odd accounts to see how that worked. Great! Spamassassin, was next, followed by ClamAV.

Microsoft watch out! Scalix is coming. I have installed over four installations of Scalix in the last 4 months. It is robust, it is not open source, and it has great features. The community edition is good enough for small companies. Its big brother is great for an office that is fully ingrained in Outlook. Users don’t care what is behind the scenes, as long as it works. My COO friend didn’t take much wooing. He was under fire daily for the axing of the Exchange server. He is much happier now.
After installing and using Scalix for so many clients, Spear Networks has officially made the change as well. Gone is POP3, hello IMAP! Not really. We consolidated our hosts email accounts into one. All of our mail, hits that one box, and then is sucked into Scalix. You can go here to see how that was done. Pretty cool! Did I mention I love Google! Group scheduling just got easier, and we didn’t have to have a major purchase to get Exchange running here.

If you are looking at a new group email and scheduling system, Give Scalix a try. If you are in Atlanta, call me, we do make office calls!