Email System that Integrates with AD

S

Stinn

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 13, 2001
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In our school division we have staff that use exchange for their email however we don't want to pay for exchange licenses for all our students. So we are hoping to find a nice affordable software package that will use AD for the accounts and auth so we don't have to maintain two copies of that info.
We've used communigate in the past and are thinking of using it again I just want to see what other options are out there.
 
Fedora Core 4 + sendmail + samba + winbind.

It's homebrew, but it works flawlessly.
 
Open Exchange looks to be overkill, it might be a solution if we were looking to replace the system for everyone though.
 
About 500. I run a small webhosting company. Although I've been looking into it replacing my ageing Exchange 5.5 server at the office...
 
Just a side thought here -- but have you contacted a sales rep to see how much it would cost for a school? I know for a fact that schools typically get a substantial reduction in licensing cost just as the government does... might be worth checking out. You don't necessarily need to use outlook either, set up OWA.
 
Yeah we've gotten a quote for edu pricing and it's still more than we wanted to spend on a student email system(something like $6 a license x8000+ = $$$$$).

I've got smartermail installed but can't seem to get the AD integration to work well, it'll pull everyone under the default Users OU but we don't store our users under that(please don't ask me why as it seems obvious to me that we would however we don't...). Once I get over that hurdle I think this software might work great. Have you got the Declude software too?
 
Stinn said:
Yeah we've gotten a quote for edu pricing and it's still more than we wanted to spend on a student email system(something like $6 a license x8000+ = $$$$$).
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Someone else correct me if I am wrong, but as an EDU, you need CALs for employee access only. For students you'd use an external connector license which grants unlimited use for *non-employees* and is a one time license fee.
 
SJConsultant said:
Someone else correct me if I am wrong, but as an EDU, you need CALs for employee access only. For students you'd use an external connector license which grants unlimited use for *non-employees* and is a one time license fee.
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I did some digging, and it looks like you're correct.

Microsoft said:
External Connector licenses allow an unlimited number of non-employees—such as parents, community members, alumni, prospective students, and current students—to access a given copy of the server software. An External Connector license is required for each copy of the server software for which you want to provide access. The External Connector does not cover employees, independent contractors, agents, service providers, or other persons providing services to, or on behalf of, your organization.
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Taken from...
http://www.microsoft.com/Education/SA3Overview.mspx
 
That's true but as far as I can see the external connector license is 25000+...unless I'm missing something obvious here.
 
Stinn said:
That's true but as far as I can see the external connector license is 25000+...unless I'm missing something obvious here.
Click to expand...

Stinn said:
Yeah we've gotten a quote for edu pricing and it's still more than we wanted to spend on a student email system(something like $6 a license x8000+ = $$$$$).
Click to expand...

Unless I am miscalculating, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than $6 X 8000 = $48000 ;)
 
Stinn said:
I've got smartermail installed but can't seem to get the AD integration to work well, it'll pull everyone under the default Users OU but we don't store our users under that(please don't ask me why as it seems obvious to me that we would however we don't...). Once I get over that hurdle I think this software might work great. Have you got the Declude software too?
Click to expand...

The default Users location is not an OU. Its a container, BIG difference. You can't apply GPOs to a container. If at all possible you always want to move everything out of the default users and computers containers.

If it really wants the users there, what about using ADAM to present it with the format it wants instead of worrying about your actual AD layout.

We ended up having to leave our users in the users container because of an old badly written app that management HAD to deploy about a month after we took AD live, but that was in pre ADAM days. We would need to recode 5 apps now to fix it. Sigh...
 
Unless I am miscalculating, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than $6 X 8000 = $48000
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Very very true, however vs $8000 for communigate or a couple thousand for this smartermail it's still too much

nessus said:
The default Users location is not an OU. Its a container, BIG difference. You can't apply GPOs to a container. If at all possible you always want to move everything out of the default users and computers containers.

If it really wants the users there, what about using ADAM to present it with the format it wants instead of worrying about your actual AD layout.

We ended up having to leave our users in the users container because of an old badly written app that management HAD to deploy about a month after we took AD live, but that was in pre ADAM days. We would need to recode 5 apps now to fix it. Sigh...
Click to expand...
That's over my head, I'm not an AD guy at all(as you could tell from the OU/Container slip up), but I'll toss this at our microsoft man.
 
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