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.

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

Microsoft Exchange may be one of the most used groupware products on the market but there are also many open source alternatives available.

Open source Exchange rival Zarafa has added native support for Blackberry Enterprise Server to a roster of collaboration features that already includes Outlook interoperability, and integration with open source tools such as SugarCRM, OpenERP and Alfresco.

Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You'll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange's functionality.

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.

Open-Xchange, the open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange is recognized in the first annual Enterprise Open Source Readers Choice Awards.

PostPath is a drop-in Microsoft Exchange alternative based on the open source Postfix MTA. PostPath director of product management Sina Miri calls PostPath the "only" drop-in Exchange replacement, and he says that ability is the reason why his company makes PostPath available only with a proprietary license, despite its open source roots.

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.