Having been involved in the first local installation of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Brian Cooper, sales director at Netsurit, is adamant that Microsoft is the best option for those in the market.
"From a standardisation point of view, in the market that we serve, Microsoft is the standard and no other products are as good as those that Microsoft has on offer," he says.
While Netsurit provides support for Unix, Novell and Linux environments, the company only advises the development of Microsoft infrastructures. "Although we provide support for all those operating systems, we would never advise that anyone develop further along those lines," says Cooper.
However, Anton van den Berg, BisArts director, disagrees. "We have implemented Open Groupware, a Linux-based solution, for two of our clients, as well as for ourselves, and were astonished at how well it worked."
As one of its clients was a listed company, the installation rationale had to be transparent to shareholders. "They needed something quick and fast that made sense to their shareholders," says Van den Berg. "The total implementation costs of Open Groupware were less than the costs of the licensing fees for the Microsoft products."
Having installed older Small Business Server versions for some of the company`s other clients, Van den Berg says BisArts was able to compare the processes. "Open Groupware just works, where you could typically easily lose a day on getting the licences and things sorted out on the Microsoft side," he says. "Losing a day is unacceptable in high-pressure implementations."
He does acknowledge that once installed, Microsoft Small Business Server is reasonably stable, but prone to greater incidences of hacking attacks. "In terms of security, we`ve never got a Microsoft server to be close to what we`ve managed on a Linux server. We definitely prefer to use Linux," he says.
Stephan Cock, director at BisArts, explains why the company prefers Linux from a technical point of view: "What I like about Open Groupware is that it`s open platform and can be used by Mac, Windows and Linux," he says. "It compares favourably in terms of price. Security-wise, what I like is that the end-user never gets to talk to the server directly, but uses a proxy server - Apache. It uses PostgreSQL, one of the best database servers, and on the POP3 side, they`ve used Cyrus, a mail server that will scale to thousands of users with ease."
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