Happy Birthday you old fart! (j/k (about the old fart part(I have no idea how old you are)):)
I beg the differ ;-)
You CAN an exchange equivalent server in Linux in 6 or less hours.
Just check out one of the followings:
Novell GroupWise
OpenXchange
and a bunch of other worthy replacements that I can't remember their name at the moment ;-)
I'm 30 today. I bet *someone* thinks that's old.
Oh, and now I totally forgot, congrats!
Hey I did exactly that yesterday, it's a real pain in the butt I agree.
You wouldn't have to do this in Linux. Why should you have to install a massive piece of software just to keep a few simple bits of data synchronized? Take off the blinders, you don't need a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Repeat after me: Ten. Minutes. It would take you more time to decide among the available alternatives than to implement one of them. There's more than one way to do it.