This fascinates me. What does Exchange do that standard protocols don't? (In terms of email, I mean. I suppose Exchange also has calendaring and some workflow, right?)
It's often extended in various ways server-side with custom logic, but the real advantages are in terms of ease of admin and, client-side, excellent and basically unrivalled collaborative calendaring.
There are better mail clients, but I've never, ever seen anyone doing collab-calendaring better than Outlook. (oh and google doesn't apply, most serious companies simply cannot use it for all sorts of legal or strategic reasons)
Sure, you can't outsource your confidential data - that makes perfect sense to me. I was just wondering what would be involved in an Exchange replacement, because, you know, mail serving is pretty much a solved problem. Calendaring, though, seems like it could be pretty hard to get right.
