FICCL : QMail and Exchange Co-Existence

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

An innovative way of cutting down the Exchange licensing cost by providing an OpenSource alternative to the users who don't need Exchange Features. Fullerton was using MS-Exchange as their messaging platform for 12,000+ users. The organization was going in for a major expansion and was working to increase the number of users to 40,000. A messaging solution which was scalable and feature-rich was the need of the hour. Deploying exchange for 40,000 users was becoming a huge investment and, it was also found by the FIC team through an internal survey that 80% of the users were using limited features of Exchange. So the concept of a hybrid solution was conceived which would keep the user experience same by providing exchange features to only those who are going to use it while redirecting others to a simple open source mail server.

The challenges that the team anticipated in building an effective heterogeneous messaging platform were: Unchanged user experience seamlessly integrated between exchange and Q-mail and scalable with minimal latency.

In order to cater to this requirement, Fullerton invited all major messaging solution vendors. During the POC phase, they found that Logix solution (Linux Based Mail Server) was the best for their requirements.

The Implementation
The setup had essentially been designed by tweaking the MTA settings of both mail servers. The Linux MTA was tweaked to look up to the Active Directory and handle mail deliveries accordingly. Similarly, Exchange was also configured to deliver mails for users to be relayed to Linux Mail server (Please see the architecture diagram for more details).

Kailash Kandalkar, Manager - IT Infrastructure Q What were the challenges and business problems that led to implement this project? Fullerton was using MS-Exchange as their messaging platform for 12,000+ users. The organization was going in for a major expansion and planning to increase the number of users to 40,000 within a period of 2 years. So, a messaging solution which was scalable, feature- rich and earning the best ROI was desired. Q What according to you is the USP of the project? It is only one of its kind hybrid enterprise class messaging solution which privodes us the following benifits: 1) Cost effective solution 2) Hybrid messaging environment 3) High performance and stable system 4) Tightly integrated with existing setup 5) Easy User migration between two different mailing platforms.

The major components which were deployed in this project were Windows 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise 5 as Operating systems, Windows Active directory as authentication mechanism and MS-Exchange and Q-mail for mailing. For centralized authentication with Windows Active Directory via Q-mail application they extended Windows AD schemas for maintaining additional attributes.

For mass migration of live users from MS-Exchange to Q-mail with their existing mail boxes, Logix designed user migration scripts that used the IMAP protocol. Within two days FIC and Logix team have migrated 9,000+ users on the Q-mail system without any down time on working system using help of Windows AD Logon script facility. All migrated users client configuration got changed on the next working day at first logon.

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