On 4/27/19 7:07 PM, Rob Echlin wrote: > Anyone here have experience with non-MS mail servers and totally > non-MS software in an office? Yes... about 19 years' worth. > Is it reasonable for a company that has sales people in it, and > marketing types, all the usual staff? Yes, absolutely. I ran Roaring Penguin Software from 1999 through 2018 and we never used any MS software for anything. This includes our sales and marketing staff. Our software stack looked like this: Desktops: Debian Linux with LibreOffice, Firefox, Chrome and user's choice of email client, typically Thunderbird or Claws Mail. Technical people could run whatever desktop they like; one person used Slackware and that was fine just so long as I didn't have to fix it if it broke. :) Mail Server: Sendmail as the MTA with Dovecot as the IMAP server. CRM Tool: SugarCRM PBX: Asterisk Ticketing tool: Request Tracker (RT) Accounting: LedgerSMB. OK, this was painful, but it got the job done and we really only used it for invoicing. Tax preparation and payroll were outsourced. Chat: While all the Cool Kids (tm) use Slack, we used bog-standard IRC on an internal server. I'm frankly baffled by the popularity of Slack as well as it's absurd valuation. Sharepoint replacement: Subversion. We just kept all our shared docs in Subversion. The tech people used Git, but I felt Git concepts were too complicated for sales/marketing types, so compromised on SVN. We also had quite a lot of integration software that we developed internally, such as integration between the phone system, the CRM and RT. It was pretty neat; when a support call came in, you could set things up to open the customer's SugarCRM page and also a summary of their most recent tickets as soon as you answered the call. Our office functioned very smoothly and the non-technical types had no trouble adjusting or getting their work done. I'd say the weakest link was the calendaring piece; SugarCRM does have a calendar module but it's sadly not as good as MS Outlook's calendar. However, it wasn't bad enough that we were motivated to switch away. I don't know exactly how much we saved in software license fees over the years, but it has to be around the $50K-$100K mark at least, if not considerably more. Regards, Dianne. To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org