1. About This White Paper
This white paper is sponsored by Gecad Technologies, the developer of AXIGEN, an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. While Exchange is a solid and robust email platform that has roughly 150 million users in its installed base, it has a higher TCO than AXIGEN and does not support a variety of server operating system or client access modes. It is important to note that the goal of this white paper is simply to compare the features and benefits of both Exchange and AXIGEN, not to denigrate the many features and capabilities of Exchange.
2. What Should a Mail Server Do?
Email Is Critical to Users and Organizations. Virtually anyone who uses email at work understands how important this capability to getting his or her work done. For example, an Osterman Research survey conducted during March 2009 found that the typical user spends 152 minutes each day working in email. Based on an average workday of nine hours nine minutes discovered in that survey, the typical user spends 28% of his or her day doing something in their email client. Interestingly, we found virtually identical results for both smaller and larger organizations with a difference of only one minute in the average time spent using email on a typical day.
In addition to spending more than one-quarter of their day in email, most users also check work-related email from home on weekdays after hours and on weekends. Further, a large proportion of users access their work email while on vacation.
3. Deployment Scenarios
While there is some commonality of system requirements across small organizations, large organizations and carriers that provide hosted email services, there are differences in the requirements that each type of organization has for its email capabilities.
Low-end Enterprise Environments
In order to address the needs of small and medium businesses, an email server needs to have a variety of key features. These include the basic features and functions needed to satisfy generalist email requirements, including: - It must be easy to install, configure and manage, particularly for organizations or satellite offices of larger organizations that may not have dedicated IT staff.
- It must require as little additional expertise and infrastructure as possible.
- It must have a low cost of acquisition and management.
- It must provide robust security and filtering capabilities to protect against the growing variety of spam and malware traversing the Internet.
While Exchange can satisfy the email requirements for smaller organizations, it has a much higher total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to AXIGEN. At the same time, installing and managing the server can be quite a time-consuming task for an inexperienced administrator. In turn, this adds either additional support costs, or it requires official training on top of the solution’s base price. This is an important decision factor for most mid-sized organizations, particularly during the current economic downturn.
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