email for students

[Marsh]

Hi, I've just been given the job of setting students up with email access.
We're looking at something webmail based with filtering for inbound and outbound mails. Anything that the filters flag as unsuitable being sent to an admin mailbox etc.
Has anyone done anything similar?

Thanks

[webman]

Zimbra? Free and open-source.

Exchange costs a bomb, has lots of niggly problems and has less features on its own than Zimbra.

[CyberNerd]

yes, Zimbra will do what you want - you'll need to do a slight modification to allow content filtering for swear words etc but it's pretty easy - ours has now been live for over a year - no complaints and it integrates perfectly with AD/Exchange and outlook (payed version for outlook integration)

[zag]

Personally I would use exchange, its industry standard for a reason

[j17sparky]

10 points for well thought out reasoning

[Geoff]

Gets expensive with those CALs though.

[webman]

Gets expensive with those CALs though.

And when you need to buy those third-party apps and add-ons to fill in the gaps in its featureset.

[zag]

Again this is all personal preference but I couldn't think of anything more important in a school than its email system. It did not cost us a huge amount for 1000 users.

Some of the advantages I have found of Exchange are:

Support - virtually every problem is 1 google click away from solving(some stupid ones like IE7 + OWA edit pane) but there are always others with the same problem
Disaster recovery - Very easy to plan for and do. Just back up the SQL database
AD integration - Setting up new users is as simple as right clicking on 100 users in AD
Scalability - Just add a new server
Upgrades - Loads of info/white papers on doing an upgrade.
Outlook Web access - Simply the best email web client out there imo, even better in schools as its locked down perfectly for student access by default. Again works with LDAP so no need to type in seperate user name and pass each time.

[CyberNerd]

Some of the advantages I have found of Exchange are:

Support - virtually every problem is 1 google click away from solving(some stupid ones like IE7 + OWA edit pane) but there are always others with the same problem

Disaster recovery - Very easy to plan for and do. Just back up the SQL database
AD integration - Setting up new users is as simple as right clicking on 100 users in AD
Scalability - Just add a new server
Upgrades - Loads of info/white papers on doing an upgrade.
Outlook Web access - Simply the best email web client out there imo, even better in schools as its locked down perfectly for student access by default. Again works with LDAP so no need to type in seperate user name and pass each time.

You get all those features with zimbra too -except the right click on AD - we don't do that because Zimbra queries our AD through a script and creates the users automatically. And really OWA is shockingly featureless compared to Zimbra webclient (I've not tried 2007 yet so MS may have caught up). So what are the advantages of running exchange? brand loyalty maybe ?

oh yes, you already said that

Again this is all personal preference

[tech_guy]

Zimbra? Free and open-source.

Exchange costs a bomb, has lots of niggly problems and has less features on its own than Zimbra.

Do you get updates/upgrades with the free open source version?

[webman]

@tech_guy: In the form of downloading the latest open source version's release yourself, I believe.

[Marsh]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I'm going to look into both options. Going to be cost vs lack of linux knowledge.

Cheers!