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Maybe it will work in our favor. MS changed the licensing for Windows Server 2016, and that OS has some major advances in it (Storage Spaces Direct, shielded VMs) that are not common now. It would be interesting seeing someone make a device driver that can take disks from a number of machines and present them as one volume, similar to how an Isilon can have 3+ nodes, and disk I/O can be easily be shunted over the Infiniband bus to the nodes which actually have the data. I would love to see open source alternatives to AD and Exchange that can scale, replicate, delegate, and expand not just up, but out. [...].

You can actually do all this at the file system, logical volume, and service levels with clustered Samba-4. CLVM(if you want to) +GFS2+CTDB+Samba-4. Bob's your uncle. There are more powerful and complex solutions, but this is pretty standard. Ref: http://www.golinuxhub.com/2014...

If you're feeling froggy, drop in OpenChange on top of Samba-4 for all your Exchange server/protocol needs. Ref: http://www.openchange.org/cook...

If you think the exchange protocols are better, why not use OpenChange ?:
http://www.openchange.org/

Run Exchange Server 2013 which integrates into the email platform the business has chosen

i've heard this before and it has been shot down many times... have a look at http://www.openchange.org/ for starters. there are others though.

Run Sharepoint Server which integrates into the wordprocessor & spreadsheet the business has chosen.

sharepoint is just a cms (and not a very good one at that). displaying excel and word files in a browser window is more related to the browser than the server.

Active Directory which integrates into the desktop OS the business has chosen

activedirectory is just a domain controller, and a shit one. i've even had the personal displeasure of babysitting a sbs with activedirectory. never again.

Now good luck convincing not only the PHBs in your company, but in all of the companies that supply the hardware & software your company uses to make its product

windows works for many businesses and i would never try to convince them to make the switch, but there is a certain point in a company's growth where linux is easily justified (and oddly enough it is usually around the point when servers become critical infrastructure rather than just a central file server).

I expect most people here are running their own servers at home, or even at work. Just use OpenChange. http://openchange.org/

Citadel doesn't speak like Exchange, which is what this story is about. Thank you, please drive through.

OpenChange is an actual FLOSS project without a "community edition" and a $$$ "server edition". It integrates with Samba and implements the MAPI protocol.

Looking at their subversion repository, I don't think OpenChange is dead. They just don't seem to give news updates very often. http://websvn.openchange.org/log.php?repname=OpenChange&path=/trunk/&isdir=1&

A proper MAPI connector will be here soon (hopefully next gnome release)
    http://www.openchange.org/
    http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider

From the list of packages in Jaunty's repository, I'm guessing you can dump the evolution-exchange package in favor of evolution-mapi.

"A provider for Evolution that can connect to Exchange 2007 servers and also to Exchange 2003, 2000 and 5.5."

More info here:
http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider/vsOWA
http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider
http://www.openchange.org/

It's not a question of "speaking" the proprietary stuff, but also of interpreting it correctly and making sure the software acts on the data in a useful way. Calendaring is a difficult problem and not really interesting to the "typical OSS hacker".
There's progress being made though, see http://www.openchange.org/

There really aren't very many more "killer apps" to be invented. This is completely opinion, but I think SharePoint is going to be Microsoft's last hurrah. It is their last chance to get organizations tied into a single, unified respository for all of their content. SharePoint is like a Wiki on steroids, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a proprietary Microsoft technology. They have the benefit of being able to easily integrate their Office Suite with SharePoint. As a proprietary vendor, they have the benefit of being able to issue edicts to their developers and align a lot of resources toward a common goal. Accomplishing the same thing in OSS land would take a lot of coordination and would probably require an outfit like IBM or the like to develop a competing project.

Competing OSS products already abound.

Alfresco is probably the pick of them.

http://www.alfresco.com/

Does everything that Sharepoint does, but does it for free, with no CALs, and so that you can run Windows, Mac or Linux as desktop clients. OpenOffice has extensions for using it with Alfresco.

Linux application support is getting better every day. Just take a look at Zimbra. Now, I'm not about to scrap MY Exchange servers and migrate my users to Zimbra. But if I were a small business owner and I needed email for my company, I wouldn't even be looking at the cost of Exchange licenses.

OpenChange also is on its way.

http://www.openchange.org/

There is also Citadel to consider.

http://www.citadel.org/doku.php

Samba 4 will support Active Directory and, of course, be a capable file server.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/273515/active_directory_comes_linux_samba_4

All free (no cost) and Free (freedom) as well. All of these OSS solutions will support Windows, Mac or Linux desktop clients, or any mixture of them. There is absolutely no need to pay any more for server software or server access licenses.

Enjoy. Prosper.

It's being worked on. See http://www.openchange.org/.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install openchangeclient
sudo apt-get install openchangeserver

or just:

sudo apt-get install libmapi

Either way, according to the OpenChange site, it's in Intrepid.

There is a connector for Evolution / Exchange 2007 integration available here: http://www.openchange.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=74

http://www.openchange.org/

OpenChange is an open source MAPI client that supports all versions of Exchange up to and including 2007, it is native MAPI and thus does everything you would expect an Exchange client to do, and it does it a reasonable speed.

http://www.openchange.org/

There is already an Evolution plug-in that will be mainlined into GNOME 2.24. However, you can currently get it for Fedora 10 and other platforms.

The current Evolution plug-in uses OWA web page scrapping and is really lame, and it most likely broke from web interface changes in 2007.

Evolution works with exchange, as does MS's Outlook Web Access.

Dear Jim R. Wilson,

Contact openchange. Give them money. That is all.

http://www.bedework.org/bedework/

Like http://www.openchange.org/ ?

Yes,

But I believe the issue here is a resource issue. TB is a stable mail client software but it sits within its own world.

What it needs is more integration to third parties. I would suggest:

- compatibility with system address book (e.g. on Mac OS X)
- ability to natively synchronize with mobiles phones in regards with contacts and appointment
- ability to send / receive SMS and MMS from TB
- compatibility with calandar, task back end from major CRM softwares (SugarOS).

I would aso suggest the partnership with an open source calendaring and task management server to propose a complete package. Finally, Exchange compatibilty could be addressed by building an extension based OpenChange http://www.openchange.org/

So again, the same question arises : who will have time, dedidication and money to do all this.

Emmanuel

Openchange is the project you are looking for.

And there was me thinking the problem was the shit that is the Exchange Jet storage engine is the biggest pile of dino turd going. We know from PostPath that Exchange really is a pile of junk. That gets five times the throughput on *IDENTICAL* hardware, talking the same binary protocol down the wire. I remember back when Exchange first came out everyone said it just chewed through CPU cycles and IO bandwidth compared to other solutions. Now we know it that it really is down to rubbish programming on behalf of Microsoft.

As for support calls, I can well believe that. A large university will have lots of competent IT people out in the departments that are usually the first port of call, and they generally don't need to ring central IT.

Finally, Evolution has talked to Exchange for years now, and the OpenChange libmapi library talks native binary Exchange protocols if you don't have OWA enabled on the server.

Mr. Shuttleworth is to be applauded for not bending to Microsoft. Bending to Microsoft is capitulating to the FUD climate and ultimately does more harm to Linux than good. Interoperability is a good thing, but at what cost? Have software patents and measly threats turned us all into scared little rabbits? I am not much of a Linux fan, instead favoring BSD, but I have to give credit for Mark Shuttleworth challenging Microsoft to put its money where its mouth is. These thinly veiled threats by Microsoft represent nothing more than a company in the beginning of its death throes. Microsoft is loosing its ability to innovate. Open source may actually save Microsoft and its own executives see it as nothing more than a cancer. Once Samba releases version 4 and the Open Change Project makes its first release, Microsoft will have a serious threat to its Active Directory and Exchange dominance. Face it, MS SQL server isn't as irreplaceable as Microsoft would have you think, Share Point Server is purely redundant, and Apache is the web server Howitzer. Microsoft has an excellent chance to open source its protocols, streamline its business model, and take advantage of all the free community development to work out the myriad of bugs and problems. Microsoft does not have the problem of market penetration so, by open sourcing its protocols and using its marketing machine, there is no serious threat to long term profitability. Conversely, its products would be made that much better.

There is a group working on an open source clone of Exchange using a reverse engineered version of MAPI. This is still pre-alpha, but it is interesting. The project is called Openchange.

Is OSER still active? The last release was 18 months ago, and the SF forums haven't had any signifigant activity since 2003.

It seems like the developers might be focusing on OpenChange for the time-being?

Look at openchange for this.