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Microsoft Exchange replacement

Top Dog in Sight

Article from ADMIN 69/2022

By Markus Feilner

Grommunio is setting itself up as an open source drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange.

For decades, Microsoft Exchange has dominated the enterprise groupware market. Whether as a desktop, mobile, or plain vanilla web application, no competitor has been able to assert itself permanently against Microsoft Exchange. Possible alternatives have proved too clumsy and often lacked comparable features and scalability. Yet the market leader's product has many weaknesses, which opens a huge market opportunity.

A new player appeared on the market in 2021 with the launch of grommunio [1], which advertises itself as a largely complete replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Moreover, the startup promises features such as support for the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI)-over-HTTP protocol, file synchronization (ownCloud), chat (Mattermost), and video conferencing with its own Jitsi fork (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Video, chat, notes, tasks: Grommunio's original name derives from the claim "groupware and much, much more." © grommunio.com

Exchange Exasperation

Administrators with mixed feelings about Exchange are reticent to use it, and Microsoft is feeling growing resentment among some users. Reasons include vendor lock-in,

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