Hacker News Reader

Comment by lousken | Hacker News Reader

For MS teams, many other alternatives like Element.io exists.

For 365 that's a lot harder, mostly because nobody has come close to what Outlook and Exchange can do in large orgs. Word, Excel, PP are somewhat replaceable and 80% of ppl in those orgs would probably be ok with the alternatives. It is the 20% that uses more niche features that may or may not work as expected in competing products.

View on HN

What is it that Outlook and Exchange can do? I'm surprised that it's this and not word/excel that would be the blocker. Open source seems well-established within the email ecosystem...

I am trying for years to replace Outlook - Exchange is no Problem- but everybody wants the Look and feeling of Outlook. If you have a viable alternative working on Linux, Mac and Windows, please tell me! I am using Evolution right now.

Isn’t Gmail widespread enough to be appreciated?

If your plan is to move away from O365 frying pan them jumping into Google's fire is definitely not the way to go.

If your worry is violating Schrems 2 https://iapp.org/news/a/the-schrems-ii-decision-eu-us-data-t... why would you choose Gmail?

Try searching for Linagora. They have solutions that are open source and caters to this particular problem.

At least it is able to move almost all my e-mails to spam folder (where they are deleted after a month), without any way to disable this "feature" except by slowly whitelisting senders.

Another great "feature" is that if you have accounts on two different organizations, it seems to be impossible to logon to the other account even after signing out from the first account, unless you use private mode on the browser.

> unless you use private mode on the browser.

Check out Multi-Account Containers if you're using Firefox. They solve this exact problem.

Modify your Firefox shortcut to:

firefox -ProfileManager or firefox.exe -ProfileManager

All your problems solved, and even others you didn't expect you could ;)

Mailbox/retention policies can be tweaked, as well as mail flow ones by your administrator. With that said, depending on the combination of other antimalware/antispam apps that your company uses and Microsoft being quite pushy about their antispam for some reason, even that may not be a perfect solution.

Group Calendar and Email in a corporate setting with hundreds of people.

I guess gmail/google calendar can play in this space, but are there any open source options?

We're quite happy with what Linagora [1] offered a few years back. It's a French company so they work within EU framework of law. Their products are all open source, they only sell support services.

[1] : https://www.linagora.com/en/

They do fully integrated enterprise commications:

* Mail (often with proprietary additions, also shared mailboxes)

* Calendar (appointments, mostly: plan with others’ free/busy times, invitations, invitation replies, integration with resource booking, …)

* Global Address Book

* Tasks (To-do list, can also be mailed)

I don’t know any non-proprietary solutions that integrate all this in a decently user-friendly way. Google certainly does, but then you might as well stay with Microsoft. It’s not just about the service capabilities either: The client (be it a web or a desktop application) has to be good as well.

Element/matrix having private homeserver hosting options + controls over federating are some of THE killer features IMO. Allows admins quite a lot of control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com