For enterprise system administrators looking for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, but not the high costs associated with it, PostPath email and collaboration server could be a smart business investment.

Carla Schroder says she just "kind of wandered into" her current life as a free software advocate and well-known IT journalist. "I don't have much in the way of formal education. But I've always been mechanically inclined - your classic ripping things apart and figuring out how they work. I think that makes open source a natural fit for me."

Postfix is an attempt to provide an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP.

The messaging and groupware landscape has altered significantly in the last few years with, like it or loathe it, Microsoft’s Exchange Server now firmly ensconced as the number one solution regardless of customer size or industry sector. There are alternatives, of course, but rival developers have more or less given up on trying to beat Microsoft at (what’s now) it’s own game.

At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software. But the details provide some fascinating insights.

One obstacle some organizations face when trying to migrate from Microsoft Exchange to a free groupware server has been Outlook users who, for whatever reason, are not yet willing to switch to another client. Bynari, Inc. in collaboration with a number of server developers, including the Citadel project [http://www.citadel.org] has developed a new Outlook connector that uses open standard data formats and protocols to store groupware data. Users of legacy environments (i.e. Windows + Outlook) will now be fully interoperable on the same server with users of free software. This could potentially spell the permanent end of Exchange lock-in.

Scalix collaboration platform, with its latest release version 11.4, aims to be a good alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

A key expert on hosted Exchange Server and SaaS-centric companies has joined Open-Xchange. The move could help Open-Xchange to boost the popularity of its open source email platform. Here's why.

The Deutsche Borse Group manages the International Securities Exchange, an equity options exchange, in New York and the Eurex and Deutsche Borse's own Xetra cash exchange. The Xetra stock exchange platform is also used by the Irish Stock Exchange, the European Energy Exchange, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange among others. It's long used Linux as the basis of these high-speed stock exchanges.