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Communication and collaboration are key ingredients of success in today's networked economy. Email has become a habit for many people and more and more are being hooked to it. Implementing a reliable messaging system is crucial for any organization simply because email is going to be the most used services on your network.
Let us find out how Linux can provide answers to corporate messaging requirements.
ABC Company has a website and offices at various locations in the world. They want to implement an enterprise wide email system.
All branches should provide internal email access to all the employees. Not all the employees will be given external email access though. Only the top level employees will have an address like name.surname@abccompany.com, others should be internal addresses and should not be addressable by outside world.
Each location will have an Internet connection to fetch and dispatch mails. The connection could be dial-up or ISDN or leased line. The two offices in Mumbai should be interconnected and there should be no latency in email delivery within them.
Employees should be able to access their email using standard mail clients as well as a web based interface from anywhere. They should also be able to setup auto responders and forwarders.
The email system must have anti virus protection. Administrator should be able to send an email to all the employees. It will be appreciated if we can work out an internal instant messaging system to save on phone usage.
All the heavy duty email transfers on the Internet are done mostly via Unix/Linux based software.
The email server running Linux needs no extra software to be installed and requires no license fees no matter what is the number of clients.
GNU/Linux can be very effectively used as a reliable mail server. In fact, most of the organizations have started their Linux implementations with a mail server.
Advantages of a Linux solution
Commercial mail software vendors promote value added features which may not be standards compliant. Standard adherence is the first thing an organization wants in current inter connected world. GNU/Linux based solutions may not provide you so many features, but they will adhere to open standards.
With Linux solutions, ABC Company will not have to pay per user or per domain license. On top of all this, a Linux mail server will be reliable - another must for a critical application like email. Linux gives you the freedom to "fire and forget"!!
Hardware Setup
MagNet suggests a distributed cum centralized approach for the hardware setup. ABC Company should have a mail server at every branch (or city) and a main server on the Internet. The mail servers can be plain vanilla computers without high configuration.
Email Server Software
We recommend Qmail or Postfix for all the email servers. Both are secure, reliable, highly configurable, scalable and high speed servers that can be used for the current business scenario.
Email Routing
Most of the corporate email traffic is highly local in nature, and the local email server will deliver it immediately. External mail (accounts that do not exist on a particular server) will be queued and dispatched to the Internet server when the Internet connection becomes available.
All mails coming from domains other than abccompany.com will come to the Internet email server (the mail exchanger) similarly.
Web users can access their emails directly from the Internet server. We can configure some mails to be downloaded to local server and dispatched internally. Internal users will seamlessly access their emails from the local server using any email client.
Anti virus and Anti spam
We will implement Clam anti virus at each incoming and outgoing route to protect the organization from viruses and worms. Clam is open source and free, it also keeps its virus definitions up-to-date and detects polymorphic viruses. Spam is possibly worse than viruses. Spam Assassin is very suitable for ABC Company.
More?
Jabber is a platform to implement an organization wide instant messaging system. We can setup Jabber servers on the mail server, the clients can be anywhere!
There are many mailing list solutions and we can implement one based on the exact requirements. If you are setting up an intranet with Linux, the possibilities are endless. You can have groupware, project management systems, document / content management systems - you name it and it can be done!
How much does this cost?
All software mentioned here is free! You can setup unlimited users and domains and there are no costs! ABC Company may invest in new hardware, but they can also utilize any old computers for the email servers. There will be some expenditure on the Internet mail server, Internet connectivity, consultancy and setup.
Linux-based corporate messaging solutions are simple to setup, tend to cost much less than proprietary solutions yet offer all the core services that are required by their users. You will also benefit from the famous robustness and stability of Linux.
You also get complete control of the implementation and can customize each and every aspect - starting from authentication to logging. Linux will also be the right choice to implement an intranet server running various other messaging / collaboration services.
What can MagNet do?
MagNet has provided different messaging solutions to clients around the world. Starting from a few accounts to multi location, multi protocol large scale systems.
We can help you implement the entire messaging solution. This will include analysis of your business situation; proposal and implementation of a solution and ongoing training and support.
This is the right time to go the Linux way! Let us know if you are wondering how Linux can help your business.
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