True, Microsoft is the leading messaging and collaboration vendor, which means it's leading the field in terms of new sales. And new sales are tough because most everyone already has e-mail -- and the Fortune X000 generally has very mature and entrenched e-mail systems. Talking those customers into a new e-mail product means not only taking them away from someplace like IBM or Novell; it means talking them into an e-mail-migration process. And that's almost never pretty (a lesson Jamie Bernstein and I learned last year conducting InfoWorld's Exchange migration challenge).

But with this sales success on the enterprise side also comes a cost: a less attractive price point to the SMB (especially the SB) set. For smaller customers looking for reliable messaging and a decent set of collaboration tools, there are better deals out there than Exchange.

I had a chance to talk with Justin Graf, CIO of Empro Manufacturing in Indianapolis, Ind. He's been managing a user network of 50 to 100 for several years and moved from Exchange to competitor Gordano about two years ago.

"We moved mainly because Exchange kept jumping in cost," Graf says. Microsoft kept adding features and raising the price, yet mostly these were features that Empro employees didn't need. "We found Gordano, which not only gave us all the e-mail functionality, but also included anti-virus, anti-spam -- and it cost about US$3,500 with an annual support fee of about $800. All the updates and tech support service is free." And, it requires no client access licenses to connect to the server.

Considering that Exchange server can cost more than this entire package without even getting into CALs, the price advantage is clear -- and Gordano isn't even the least expensive solution out there. "We're getting everything we got with Exchange," Graf continues. "E-mail, scheduling, shared folders, Webmail, even instant messaging and the ability to use Outlook on the desktop."