I have used VPOP3 for several years, since my email arrangements stopped being plain and simple. I run it at home and in the practice, and installed and maintain it in the Devon LMCs Secretariat.
It is a mail transfer agent, which allows an organisation to run many email accounts for many people without needing a permanent connection to the Internet, and is a nice piece of British software, with an excellent manual written in English of the English variety.
It is particularly suitable for General Practices and groups of Practices, Local Medical Committees and the like, if they choose to base their networks on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
VPOP3 is produced by Paul Smith Computer Services PSCS who are steadily developing it very closely responsive to their users' wishes.
I am happy to consult on making use of VPOP3 in similar contexts. There is a sufficient network of supporters and resellers throughout the UK who are also on the approved distributor list. VPOP3 is first class British software and although everything it does can be done with various Open Source programs on Linux, BSD or other grown-up operating systems, VPOP3 is a good approach for an organisation that needs to run some email, with perhaps a mailing list or two, an internal LDAP directory of shared contacts and a few other functions. An effective anti-spam add-in is available, and it integrates well with the SOPHOS anti-virus system, and without undue difficulty with any other anti-virus running on the same machine.
For an LMC its list-handling offers a good way of providing each member with an address like surname@thislmc.org which can be pointed to wherever their main email account is handled.
My preference for general use runs in the order: VPOP3, Sendmail etc on Linux, MS Exchange, with the latter not appropriate for General Practices.
I recommend running VPOP3 on Windows 2000 Workstation with SOPHOS antivirus, but NT4 and XP are also compatible. They are merely too old and too new respectively.
The OpenOffice office software suite is a very obvious best choice for most small organisations and many large ones. OpenOffice will use an LDAP directory for an address book. Brief notes on setting it up to use the VPOP3 LDAP server are below
In the dialogue for an addressbook select "new". The only unobvious field is the Query Base. Commonly this would be something like "CN=GB" but in the case of VPOP3 fill it in not with a blank, but with a blank string, "" , in order for OpenOffice to accept it.
Map the fields across as you would expect - notes is equivalent to comment.
Then, in OpenOffice Writer, you can insert mail-merge fields, picked from the LDAP server.
The Enterprise version of VPOP3 offers various ways of integrating its LDAP service into a company reference system, whereas the standard version depends on typing the addresses in at the VPOP3 console. Either way, it is a useful convenience for a central addressbook, but if you have a lot of changes of address, use the Enterprise version.