(Sorry to CC you, but I'm coming to this pary late, and I didn't want you to miss this.) On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 10:57, Jason Joines wrote:

At the moment the predominant faculty/staff mail system is Lotus Domino on windows 2k and the predominant system for students is Sun Internet Mail Server on Solaris. He intends to replace these with ms exchange on windows 2k. There is a small chance he will listen to suggestions to consider non-exchange options.

I just looked at all of this for my (large-ish) church. We need calendaring. Badly. The commercial options and their respective _minimum_ costs that I saw are: Exchange ($2200), Oracle Collaboration Server ($5000), Notes ($3000), Sun One Web App ($7500). The Sun product, for which they have a free addon to sync both Palms and Pocket PC's, was perfect for us. Now, obviously, a 50,000 user setup is going to be a WHOLE LOT more expensive than this. However, this is where it gets interesting. Sun offers an educational discount program. It's so good, that should my church have qualified, the cost of the product would have dropped from $7,500 to a mere $1,000! You should really look into this. It just might save you all kinds of money. (I'm sure the other companies have educational discounts, if not above board, then below, and this info -- at the very least -- give you leverage in dealing on price with other vendors.) http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/calendar_srvr/home_calendar.html http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/scholar/ The other thing that might be of interest to this list is where I ended up. When I asked my pastor's wife how much it was worth to get a calendaring program (at the time, I thought the Sun product might even come in at less than $1,000), she just laughed. So I kept looking. Freshmeat came up with a couple of entries, but something else has just appeared on the scene: OpenGroupware.org. http://www.opengroupware.org http://www.skyrix.com/en/support/index.xhtml A company called Skyrix just "opened" their commercial product last month. An OpenOffice-like effort is underway to get it into a useable open source project. I have now installed this on my church's server, and initial tests are just blowing me away. I love it. The install is daunting, more because they're still working on documentation, but also because I chose the "source" route instead of RPM's. If you're used to compiling open source programs, it should be no real sweat. I doubt this will scale to 50,000 users. Then again, it might. An operation like yours may want to buy support contracts from Skyrix, and keep the product free. It would be AWESOME to see some 50,000 seat installation go open source for their collaboration stuff, and push their improvements back into the stream. I just thought that both options would be interesting to different people on the list. Good luck, dk