From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat Aug 21  6:29:37 1999
Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Received: from mail.rdc1.md.home.com (ha1.rdc1.md.home.com [24.2.2.66])
	by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17D7914DC9
	for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Sat, 21 Aug 1999 06:29:30 -0700 (PDT)
	(envelope-from paksao@home.com)
Received: from home.com ([24.6.131.170]) by mail.rdc1.md.home.com
          (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with ESMTP
          id <19990821132850.FOKP20194.mail.rdc1.md.home.com@home.com>
          for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>;
          Sat, 21 Aug 1999 06:28:50 -0700
Message-ID: <37BEA75F.5875AB0C@home.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 09:19:27 -0400
From: paksao <paksao@home.com>
Organization: @Home Network
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en]C-AtHome0405  (Win95; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: outlook alternative for freeBSD ?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk
X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG

I've been playing with freeBsd for a while now at work and I like it and
I'm just starting to get to the point where I understand how it works
but I am facing a crisis and I don't have time to search out the
solution from the man pages and my friends who use BSD don't know the
answer. 

A new manager has come in and he likes MS outlook he thinks it is the
way the company should go with email and inter-office communications and
email. he also likes NT( He never administered it but he considers
himself an expert). After using it as a (fileserver/PDC for 3 yrs I
don't though it may be a function of my not having configured it
correctly. My heart hasn't been in it though I have done a lot of
reading and brought a lot of books.) I have plans to switch over to a
freeBSD 3.2 server, with Samba as a PDC and Run our main database on a
Linux box using Oracle 8.

But In order to keep from being saddled with another NT server( when I
want to get rid of the one I have now.) I need to provide an alternative
to the Outlook proposal and hopefully a cost effective one.

I think I have enough pull to get a freebsd proposal accepted but I need
some help figuring out how to implement it or even if it is possible
within a reasonable timeframe.

additional background
-company has 35 employees will expand to 65 in the next year.
- I am the IS department 
- my users don't know Unix,bsd and are only reasonable competent in 
windows.
-for email we use Eudora 3.0 and Netscape 4.5 on the workstations but
if  the have to learn outlook they can learn to use something else
though  they are going to need to have a GUI
-office 97 is the current office suite mostly word, exceland access
- I've done 3 installs ( 2 2.2.8 with xwindows,KDE,samba and 1 3.2 that 
is as yet unconfigured)
-the users are using windows NT ws,windows 95 and windows 98
-workstations are shared forthe most part and the user should be able
to  access their files email and hte internet from any work station

So my questions are:

Has anybody done this? (Used freebsd to provide an effective alternative
to NT/Outlook.)

How would you suggest I go about it? The field is preetty much wide open
since I would be starting from scratch ( I would need to buy hardware
and software.)

Is there commercial or opensource workgroup software for freebsd?

I probably left some important details out so feel free to contact me
for clarifiction.

TIA


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message