Chris Puttick wrote:

Firstly, good gracious! An LEA that doesn't allow the schools to make their own IT decisions? They want to look carefully at who has legal responsibility for such things (board of governors for reference!).

Sorry, that must have come as a shock! ;)

Back on topic...

SLOX is very neat and doesn't require any more understanding of mail essentials than MS Exchange (and rather less about security...). The web interface is more than enough for *any* user and doesn't cause the issues of Outlook e.g. it ain't virus and worm prone! There's an ability to sync Palm based PDAs and plenty of good admin functionality in the web interface.

That all sounds fairly good. I've played with the demo site, and it certainly seems easy enough as a user. The admin side isn't available as a demo, however.

Be careful looking at a SATA as these are mostly not supported in older kernels. Look at DNUK or (oddly) HP as they both actively support Linux server solutions.

That's a good point about SATA. OpenExchange 4.1 is bundled with an underlying distribution - any idea what kernel and hardware support this distro has?

All security patches are via http(s).

Need anything else? Price is so good it's worth trying just to see...

Yes, I was pleasantly surprised at the educational pricing vs the business pricing. I certainly wouldn't have considered buying it at the latter.... Cheers, Tony