Dangerous Ideas

I read Christine’s blog where she often writes about cool and upcoming things, and she wrote a post about some cool new things at DEMOfall 2006. One of them, PostPath, really got my attention for being a drop-in replacement for Exchange. At Colorful Expressions, we’re offering Zimbra hosting to our customers. It’s a great solution but migrating from Exchange wasn’t the easiest process since it requires a plug-in to support Outlook. PostPath, on the other hand, is a drop-in replacement for Exchange. Put it on the network and AD and existing Exchange servers think it’s just an Exchange server. So do Outlook clients. Migrating users is as easy as using moving users from one Exchange server to another, using all the tools familiar to Exchange admins (which generally suck, but that’s another story). They also built on top of Zimbra’s open source code (I assume this is for Zimbra’s vaunted Web mail interface, but it could be more than that). And they deal with the main problems of Exchange, which I’d characterize as being more a problem for admins than for users. From a user perspective, Exchange isn’t terrible; from an admin’s perspective, it’s either a nightmare or a source of employment for a long time to come. Or both. ;-) This goes back to my theory that Microsoft is part of a conspiracy to keep idle sysadmins off the streets. I’m not ready to replace Zimbra with PostPath, but I’m definitely going to keep an eye on the company.