Thursday, June 19, 2014

Moving from Windows Live Admin Center to Axigen

A few months ago, it was announced that Microsoft will be phasing out Windows Live Admin Center (WLAC) in favor for their premium Office 365 product. A few weeks ago (probably a month or so, really) Microsoft was sending out emails to affected users. From that point forward, I wrote a post about the change, and I even reached out asking for everyone's advice. I was leaning towards a free (but proprietary) solution called Axigen.

Turns out, that's exactly what I went with.

Setting up Axigen

Axigen is actually a company, besides a product. Really, when I say Axigen, I mean the Axigen Mail Server. They offer paid licenses for bigger entities, but for the needs of me (and by extension, Techman's World), the free license works just fine.

If you download Axigen and install it without a license, you are automatically given a free 30 day trial, where you can evaluate the product with just about everything unlimited. If you sign up before you download Axigen (the correct way), you will be emailed a free license key that is renewed every year. It does have some limitations, which are explained on their website.

Installing Axigen

Installing Axigen is quite easy (in my opinion). Their downloads page offers binaries/packages for Windows Server, and most Linux distributions. I specifically used their .deb 64 bit package, because I was installing this on a VPS with Debian 7 (64 bit). The same package can be used on a few Ubuntu releases, as well as Debian6 (at the time of this post). Really, chances are that whatever server OS you are running, Axigen has support for it.

Installing Axigen using their Debian package was straightforward. You have to install their package as root, so running sudo sh <axigen file name> will start the installer. The first thing you will see is the prompt to read the license agreement. You can go ahead and read the entire agreement (I always recommend you do), but if you wish you can press ENTER to just see the first chunk of the license, and then press "q" to quit the license viewer. Type "yes" in the prompt asking if you agree to the license, and you'll be on you way.

After accepting the license, you'll see a few options while installing. You can go ahead and install Axigen, or you can view documentation etc. If all is good, installation will be rather quick and afterwards you'll have instructions on how to configure Axigen for the first time, and how to start the Axigen mail daemon when done configuring.

More to come...

I'll write more about Axigen once I get to use it a bit more in depth. In the mean time, I'll just send some emails :P. If you want to send me a message, hit me up.