Email sharing for small office

[Tannin]

I have a customer who runs about 5 or 6 main computers, plus various accessory machines. They are in a light light engineering trade.

Fileserver: Athlon XP 2500, Windows 2000
Workstation, reception: someting old that ain't broke yet so we ain't fixing it. Win98. Will be replaced soon.
Drawing office: Athlon XP 2500, Win XP Pro
Drawing office: Pentium M 2.0 laptop, Win XP Pro
CEO: Pentium M 2.0 laptop, Win XP Pro
Accounts: Athlon 1700ish, W2K.

Plus there is a dedicated print server for the non-network capable plotter (just an old K6-2), and a Smoothwall to secure the network and act as a DHCP server.

The staff is small and they work closely together, often each doing different parts of the same project at different times. More and more of the workflow is email-based. Reasonably large attachments (~3 to 5MB) need to be sent around the office from one worker to another maybe 3 or 5 times a day. ("Hey, Steve, can you have a look at the compressor housing we have planned for the Mercy Hospital job - here is the drawing" might be an example.)

Currently the firm operates off a single email address, and staff have to manually drop files of interest in a shared folder on the server if they need someone else to look at them. They need a better system.

Internal email is probably the simplest and best way to do this. They are all comfortable with Thunderbird and/or Microsoft Outlook, and like the idea of just emailing each other with appropriate files. But sending this stuf via an email server in Califormia just to get to the next office seems stupid.

They plan to setup a company web site shortly (well, OK, I plan to set it up for them) and as part of that they will all have individual email addreses. The actual web server (and the mail server) will be the same shared host package that I'm already using for 5 or 6 other sites, including my own. Good, reliable hosting company.

In a nutshell, we need either:

a: Ability to say "this email belongs in Steve's inbasket instead of mine - drag and drop it there and tell Steve what I've done. This has to be easy.

or:

b: An application which will avoid all the complexities of email and email servers, and just let them send internal messages with attached files.

They don't have any in-house IT person, and I'm on the other side of town, so while I like working with them, I don't want to have start supporting Windows server and Microsoft Exchange or any high-cost, high maintenence crap. I don't have the time to do that.

In short, I need some options that are simple and easy to both use and administer. Any bright ideas, people?

 

[Tannin]

I just had a quick search for Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, which seems to be the cheapest way to do it wijh Microsoft products. Not impressed. It seems to offer the functionality we need (plus a whole lot of other stuff that is not needed) but has obvious drawbacks:

* At $1099 starting price plus extra licences for >5 seats, it costs more than seems justifiable
* Microsoft. Server. What's the deal with security? I don't trust it.
* I don't have the time to secure it or administer it. They don't have the time either Or the skills.
* I think we need a small app to share stuff around with, not a whole network replacement. We already have a working network, that is simple and practical and requires practically no administration. Once in a while they order a new computer or some other bit of gear. I go out (or send the Soup Nazi) and plug the new unit into the network, share a few folders, add a printer. While I'm there I take a little while to run some virus and spyware scans on the other machines, apply some applicatiopn updates, dust out a few cooling fans, and drink a cup of tea. By the time the tea is cold, the network is humming along and I'm on my way back to the office. Simple is good.

 

[LiamC]

Offhand, pick one of the major Linux distros, they all have email servers. If it's a 100Mb network, then any old box from the last 5 or 6 years will be able to saturate the network link.

If the email server is set up, then they should be able to email to their hearts content. Solution is cheap, and if any of the Linux boxes I've set up are any indication, they will quietly go about their job 'til something catastrophic happens.

I'm sure one of the guys with more Linux experience will be able to help. Think of it as a Smoothy email experience.

 

[Tannin]

It starts to look as if I need an IMAP server. But I'm still reading.

I imagine, however, that I'll set it (or something else) up on their existing W2K system that currently is just a plain vanilla file server. It's a system I understand much better than I understand *nix, and it's not exactly working hard.

I'm not mad keen on getting support phone calls for a *nix system. Might cost me a lot of time. (Might teach me some new stuff too, but time is such a problem these days.)

 

[Buck]

Tony, you might want to contact http://www.ipswitch.com and check out their Instant Messaging software. Although they don't show it on their website, I wouldn't be surprised if they sold that bit of software separately.

 

[Mercutio]

Install an imap server. Seriously. You can create public folders the guys can access and everything. You can put it on the smoothie.

 

[Buck]

You may also want to look at something from Eudora.

 

[Tannin]

Thanks for the help so far, people. I'm nowhere near figuring this out, but I'm further along and have a clearer idea of what we need, I think. A couple of questions:

What's the go with domain names? The way I want to set this up is:

* myclient.com.au This will be an orthodox website, hosted by my usual hosting company in California.

* no particular address: the internal network.

In other words, I don't want the company network to be a part of the company's domain. Web hosting remains where it belongs: with my hosting company.

Email from the outside world should go to the ordinary POP server provided by the hosting company. The local mail server then downloads mail from the POP server every now and then, and distributes it to the appropriate inboxes. Users do whatever they want with the messages (edit, share, share calendars and address books, etc). IMAP seems to be good for this. When the user sends a message *outside* the local network, the local mail server sends it to the remote hosting company's POP server, and from there it goes out to the addressee.

Make sense? Seems like the obvious way to do things to me.

But a great deal of the documentation I've read simply assumes that the actual LAN wil have a real domain name - which is a bad idea, as it throws me into a whole new complexity level, and serves no useful purpose so far as I can tell.

Does any of this make sense?

 

[Tannin]

My customer likes the look of WorkgroupShare from http://www.softalkltd.com I think they will also need WorkgroupMail from the same vendor, which wil push the cost up a bit, but the two programs look to be pretty much exactly what they are looking for - and in the end, if it does the job well and doesn't need buggerising about with, then it saves money in the long run.

One thing worries me: it is designed to run exclusively as an add-in to Outlook. Most of them are using Outlook already, so that seems OK, but what about junk mail filtering? The WorkgroupMail spam filtering is, from my reading of their website, nowhere near as good as the filter built into Thunderbird. This could prove a problem in the longer run.

 

[mangyDOG]

Do they need an internal e-mail system or would a workgroup instant messaging software program like http://www.inbit.com/inbitmessenger.html be a more productive application for their needs?

Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[Tannin]

Might be a possibility. Thanks, Doggy One. We did actually discuss that and they said that a messaging app would be OK. But they all use Outlook and/or Thunderbird already and the MD and I are both leaning towards the simplicity of having everything available from the same application. (Simplicity of use, that is, not of setup - that's my headache!)

Any idea what that messaging app costs? I'm very suspicious of any prodct where they won't tell you the price up front.

 

[blakerwry]

Tannin, DNS allows you to specify your mail servers (mx record) separately from your website (A and C records).


You can have the site hosted with the hosting company and have e-mail hosted localy.

This is probably the direction I would go.

IMAP stores files on the server, POP usually has the messages stored on the client machine... While IMAP allows shared folders and some other niceties, I don't think it would be necessary for what you are looking to accomplish.


The other option that I agree would work well is a p2p IM client that can operate without problem on their internal network.