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A feature-rich drop-in-replacement for Microsoft Exchange

Exchanging Exchange

Article from ADMIN 83/2024

By Markus Feilner

Grommunio is a completely open source and fully compatible drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange that uncouples your company from Microsoft's cloud strategy and its severe security and data protection issues.

Microsoft's Exchange Team published a blog post on August 8, 2024, about decommissioning Exchange Server 2016. Although the intention was definitely not to make people switch to an open source groupware, the announcement was enlightening:

Exchange 2016 is approaching the end of extended support and will be out of support on October 14th, 2025. If you are using Exchange Server 2019, you will be able to in-place upgrade to the next version, Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE), so Exchange Server 2016 will need to be decommissioned at some point. If you plan to stay on-premises, we recommend moving to Exchange 2019 as soon as possible. [1]

A long list of todos and caveats follows, including reboots after upgrade. No wonder Microsoft's general strategy toward its cloud (Microsoft 365 and Azure) is worrying users, including many groupware administrators who are currently looking for other options. Not so long ago, Australian vendor Atlassian took a similar approach, attempting to force their customers – users of Confluence, Trello, and Jira – into the vendor-owned cloud. Like Atlassian customers, now more and more Exchange administrators are checking the market, and vendors of open source alternatives are reporting growing numbers of customers.

However, what's equally stirring up the groupware market is security and data protection. Over the past few years, several severe issues popped up in or around Microsoft Exchange or its Azure Cloud. After Chinese hackers stole a master key to Microsoft's Azure cloud, the US government did not spare harsh words, calling out Microsoft for "shoddy security, insincerity" and "cascades of security failures" [2].