In my article on 'Selling Mobile Email' (http://blog.brightpointuk.co.uk/selling-mobile-email) I explained the differences between the different protocols available for email retrieval and how they fit into the remote email marketplace and are supported by the different PDA devices available on the market today.

For those businesses who require remote access to email, but do not require the trappings of 'push' or additional device management features, and don't want to splash out on a 64-bit Exchange 2007 server there are open source solutions available. One of those solutions is Scalix...

Scalix (www.scalix.com) is open source software providing users access to email, contact, calendar and task information and is designed to be a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

Running on Linux, supported platforms include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 / 5
• Centos 4 / 5
• SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 / 10
• OpenSuSE 11
• Fedora 9

Users can access their email via a web browser using Scalix Web Access, any POP or IMAP client, or (and this is perhaps the key selling point) Microsoft Outlook with the installation of a small plug-in.

Scalix comes in two flavours: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is free to download and use with up to 10 “Premium” users and an unlimited number of standard users, if you require any more than 10 premium users then you need to purchase a license. A Premium user account can access email from Microsoft Outlook, a Standard user account cannot. Premium users can also access public folders and shared mailboxes whereas standard users cannot: so Scalix would only be completely free for a very small deployment, but would suit a branch office-type scenario as there is no reason why Scalix could not be deployed within an existing Exchange organisation.
There is also a Small Business Edition which is capped at 250 premium users.

The full list of features (lifted from the accompanying documentation) includes:

• Calendaring
• Scheduling (with real-time free/busy lookup)
• Contact Management
• Task Management
• Public Folders
• Access of email in a web browser and popular email applications
• Resource booking

Scalix also features an LDAP directory service providing contact search functionality.

The server installation itself is modular, allowing for different components to be housed on different physical machines – so you can house the mailbox database on the LAN and have the Internet-facing web site located in a DMZ environment, similar to an Exchange ‘front-end / back-end’ deployment. Scalix also supports clustering.

Installation

I used the free Linux distribution CentOS 4 for my installation (http://www.centos.org). According to the Scalix web site this platform is only supported for evaluation installations and should not be used for a production system.

Install CentOS selecting the following packages during the installation:

• Web Server
• PostgreSQL Server
• Sendmail

Once installed, download and install the elinks package using yum:

yum install elinks

Also download and install the compat-libstdc++-296 package, available from:

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3?stat=26&dist=56&size=180343&name=compat-...

The /etc/hosts file will need to be edited, by default it will probably look like this:

127.0.01 scalix.domain.com scalix localhost.localdomain localhost

Edit it so that it looks like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.34 scalix.domain.com scalix

(where 192.168.0.34 is the IP address of the Scalix server)

You are now ready to install Scalix. The installation package is a self-extracting BIN package available for download from the Scalix web site.
Once downloaded, make the file executable:

chmod 755 scalix-x.x.x.bin

Then run it:

./scalix-x.x.x.bin

It is possible to install Scalix graphically (which requires that the X windowing component be installed on the server), but it is just as easy at the command line.

You will be prompted to read and agree to the terms of the license agreement.
Enter the name and domain of the server.
Specify your desired ‘Display Name’ format (ie, “James Liddiard” or “Liddiard, James”, etc)
Specify your desired email address format (ie James.Liddiard@domain.com, jamesl@domain.com, etc)
Enter a username and password for the default Scalix administrator account.
You will be prompted to enter a license key, or type in “None” to use the software without one.
Enter a password for the PostgreSQL server database.
Scalix will then install its own required components, including Tomcat and Java.

The installation is then complete.

Verify installation

Provided that everything has worked, you can verify the installation by browsing to the name or IP address of the Scalix server from a web browser. There are two web sites:

http://(scalix_server)/webmail displays the login screen to user webmail access:

NOTE – you will need to enable pop-ups from the web site.

You can log in using the details you specified for the administrator account (by default the username is ‘sxadmin’), the main webmail interface looks like this:

Users can read, forward, reply to and delete email messages, access calendar, contact and task folders, access public folders, manage their out of office status and all that good stuff.

http://(scalix_server)/sac displays the administrator console:

Administration

Within the administration console you can create, edit and delete users and groups and assign mailbox permissions.
The default naming and email address format can be changed.
Mailbox storage limits can be defined as can the warning thresholds.
The user password policy can be defined.
Additional domains can be added to the recipient policy.
Resources can be defined (such as meeting rooms) and if required mail-enabled.

Server resources and mail queues can be monitored and plugins can be enabled or disabled (such as anti-virus). Log files can also be viewed.

It is beyond the scope of this post to give a full run down of the administration process, for more information read the product documentation available from the Scalix web site.

Client Configuration

Microsoft Outlook

In order to use Microsoft Outlook with Scalix, firstly you need to have a Premium user account on the server. You also need to download and install the Outlook plugin available for download from the Scalix web site.

Outlook 2000 or later is required and Outlook 2007 is supported.

Installing the plugin is simply a matter of running an executable:

Once installed, when creating a new Email Account within the Outlook Startup wizard, Scalix will be listed as an option in the Other type of email account:

You will be prompted to enter the name of the Scalix server, your username and password:

NOTE - the name rather than the IP address of the Scalix server is required, so ensure either that DNS is configured correctly on the network or that the Windows client has an entry in its hosts file for the server.

Provided that the client can contact the server and the login credentials are accepted, your account will be set up:

Outlook will then need to be restarted, once re-launched you will be connected to the Scalix server:

The account can be configured within the Tools menu, where a new entry will be added for 'Scalix Properties':

Additional mailboxes can be added:

Out Of Office rules can be configured within the Tools menu by selecting 'Scalix Out Of Office':

Opening a new mail and selecting the To button will display the Scalix address book:

In short then, for the small business Scalix is a viable alternative to Exchange: for less than 10 users it can be installed free - and even for greater than 10 users, without the need for a Microsoft Server license, CALs, etc it would still be cheaper than the corresponding cost for an Exchange installation.
However, having said that, it is still a fairly "no-frills" solution: Exchange costs what it does because of the additional features it provides; Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP), Server ActiveSync, Unified Messaging, etc - none of this is available in Scalix...yet!