Saskaweb has recently commited to start offering alternatives to our hosted Microsoft services.  The second groupware software we’ll be checking out is from Bynari.

I’ve become more and more interested in their products as I browse their site and skim the manuals.  Here’s my lowdown of the Bynari Exchange alternative system:

• The Insight connector allows for calendar, task, and folder sharing from Outlook 2000-2007 to a range of open source IMAP servers.  It’s a commercial product but priced quite nicely and is certainly enticing enough to do a demo
• The Insight Addressbook provides contact sharing from Outlook with a compatible LDAP backend.  It’s VERY inexpensive.
• The Insight Server provides an easy-to-install and manage collection of opensource software:  Cyrus IMAP, openLDAP, Postfix, Apache… you can probably guess the rest.  There are some interesting plugins available for the server like Mobility for smartphones and an archiving addon

So it’s certainly interesting enough to warrant a trial setup which will hopefully happen within the next week.

Posted in Sysadmin Tales