OpenSource eMail - A customer perspective
Though I am a great fan of Open Source, it poses challenges for enterprises without a complete development and support team.
I relate this statement to my experience with a large media house designing a eMail system based on Open Source. The customer was creating a Web 2.0 platform for the collaboration project that they had planned. Without going into the feature details of the Web 2.0 platform, I was dragged into a long conversation on eMail Messaging Platform that they were building on Open Source.
The prime interest in customizing the open source messaging was to provide an quick summary (similar to Outlook) of the eMails on the web browser. With lots of fuzzy logic built for creating summaries from eMail subjects, bodies etc. The Message store was designed with the Messages in an open-source relational database in storage subsystem with the eMail indexes in-memory of the servers. The deployment was planned for multi million user-base. The customer realized on deploying the platform that few of the aspects critical for production ready eMailing system were not considered. The mechanism to maintain state persistence for Message access, redundancy within the stack were not planned and showed up immediately on production. Moreover, the Open Source developers who had built the platform, were now employed with their competitor.
After spending millions on developing the platform, the customer realized the services have to wait for a long time before launching the services.
My customer experience with Open Source left me to the following inferences:
- Open Source is a great way to get technical people hook on to specific technology
- Open Source is not for enterprises without a strong Engineering and Development team to support the solution
- Open Source is not a solution to fix all IT application issues.
- Most of all, Open Source is NOT FREE
Posted at 10:10PM May 09, 2007 by gotcha in General | Comments[2]