<somewhat offtopic>Well, I hate to be classified as an "anti-microsoft zealot" simply for having a difference in opinion, especially since I am not, but so be it. I'd advise you to ignore the previous post (jwenting's) as he posted inaccurately about several things as well as not bothering to supply supporting facts for his suppositions.
I understand that MS SQL Server is a requirement, but I want to respond to the previous poster's flamage.
In many applications MySQL can be a perfectly suitable replacement for MS SQLServer. The same can be said about any of the Open Source alternatives that have been listed. It all depends on what applications your company is currently running and what dependancies they have, both from a features standpoint and a capabilities standpoint.
If your currently running MS SQL Server with no stored procedures and not using the replication functionality and so on, than MySQL could probably replace it quite easily. Another option that might do an even better job is PostgreSQL. Either of these can be connected to existing things like ASP pages with minimal changes.
Suggesting the MySQL is only good for "a personal website or ... Slashdot" is really a point in it's favor considering that means it can scale from a negligible number of hits to an extremely high load (I don't know exact numbers, but the sheer load of users clicking on articles posted to Slashdot is commonly known to crash other web servers, some enterprise level corporations or media sources). Now I don't know that Slashdot really uses MySQl as it's backend, but if that is true then I think that is definately some good points in it's favor towards load handling requirements.
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Sendmail is a real pain to set up, I think nearly everyone who doesn't do that 24 hours a day is going to agree there. However, once it is setup you have a lot of options for email clients, spam filtering, backups, etc that aren't available with an Exchange system. The upside of Exchange is that a lot more tools come built into it to begin with, requiring less configuration on your end. I haven't seen numbers for capabilities so I can't compare Sendmail's 250,000 to 500,000+ emails.hour to Exchange, but i think you would agree that it definately isn't a tiny mail server.
And lets not get into licensing fees:
Here is sendmail:
Now, as to the allegation that it is hell to set up and administer (etc, so on). Yes it can be a real pain to set up a Sendmail server. yes it can be a real pain to administer a Sendmail server if you set it up badly. But then, what isn't a real pain to administer if you set it up badly? How about SQL Server with a default blank password up to a year ago?
However, if you get it set up right, administration is fairly easy and downtime is negligable. Another advantage here is that you don't have to reboot your servers to restart your email server. Even if you did just install a bunch of add-ons.
Webservers are available built-in to Windows (IIS) or as free downloads (Apache). Your only limitation is if you choose Linux you can't run IIS. Apache will run on either.
File/Print sharing has been covered I think. Personally I think setting up a domain and file sharing services is easier from a Linux box then a Windows box, but that could just be me.
Backing up with Linux should be fairly simple, everything in Linux is an accessible file, so to backup all you have to do is make a copy of those files, then tar them into an archive. This could probably be handled with a simple bash script run on a schedule as a cron job.
Email Accessibility: this is not dependant on your OS, it is dependant on how you configure your Mail Server and how you configure your firewall(s).
Remote Working: Terminal Services will work for Windows, as Will half a dozen other products. I think I saw a terminal services client for Linux somewhere at one point. VNC is useable from just about any OS, tunnelled through SSH it would probably be more secure then most.
Centralized, Easy Management: Depends on what you plan on managing. Webmin for Linux will let you manage all the services on a server through a web browser on a non-standard port (using SSH and user/pass authentication for security). You can manage specific services, even down to rebooting the box (which you shouldn't ever need to do).
Anyways, as I said it all depends on what your hard and fast requirements from the software and systems are. One advantage tat I didn't se anyone else bring up isthat the hardware requirements for Linux are generally a lot better than the ones for Windows. Plus you can minimize running tasks and installed applications that you wouldn't normally need, allowing you to stretch your RAM, CPU, and HDD's a lot farther.
I have a small home firewall, mail server, file server, etc set up on an old Gateway 733 Celeron. Granted it's not enterprise level by any stretch of the imagination, but everything runs fairly smoothly. Windows Me took over 10 minutes just to get to the desktop, 2000 croaked during install. I didn't bother trying XP because that machine has less then half the minimum requirements for memory. But it keeps humming right along running the latest linux kernel.
-T
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Help, the rampaging, spear-waving, rabid network gnomes are after me!
