Hopefully someone can help or this can go onto a wishlist of some description:

When setting up OpenERP for a company we would like to replace many legacy systems (and hopefully Exchange). In terms of corporate governance, we would like to keep all the data on a single system with audit capabilities. So in theory we can replace all with OpenERP. There are some serious problems with the email/calendar/communication structure that OpenERP has to offer. The twitter-style feed is great from an audit trail perspective and that you get a snapshot of the communication trail within OpenERP.

One would assume that getting started with muliple users there are 2 routes to go:

1. Move all the email accounts per user onto OpenERP and hence configure IMAP/SMTP per user - this would be very time consuming. Also this creates issues with OpenERP scheduler, in that it does not run each fetch or it will send only from the first send mail adress.
2. Create a catchall account and let OpenERP assign the aliases per user - in theory this should allow for greater control

So starting with email - we created a catchall account and then the user account - aliases are automatically assigned - great so far. Then comes the first problem - SMTP. Unless you use sendmail (on an Ubuntu server) all your ourgoing mail will come from catachall@yourdomain - not great!

Secondly without and individual email account's IMAP/Pop3/SMTP settings, how do we configure users mobile devices? Version 6 had a CalDAV/WebDAV module - so that works fine. Newer versions have google synch, but that is no good for the following reasons:

1. Information leakage from the enterprise
2. Email not being sent from an enterprise email (Again google has the option to send from another account, but this cannot be configured with a catachall account).

In addition to this, OpenERP cannot interpret incoming meeting requests generated outside of OpenERP. The message is tranformed into a text format in the inbox, so the user cannot automatically add it to the calendar.

Is there something we are missing, or do we have to hang onto Exchange?