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I believe Skyrix (of opengroupware.org fame) is doing the same. Yes, they have freed their code, yes you can try out the web-based version for free, however that's not how the project (OGo) is promoted: as a free alternative to MS Exchange. It simply isn't. In order for Outlook clients to connect with OGo you need a plugin from Skyrix, who sells licenses to use them. A recent post on their mailinglist reiterates this. Not sure what the story is now with the Ximian (nah, Novell) Evo/Exchange connector being GPL'ed.

Now I don't mind if Skyrix tries this scheme to make an extra buck or two from their dead and burried project. What annoys me is the way they promote OGo: "Why by a groupware server as a black-box when you can get an open one for free?". Sure, the server itself is free. But if you want to replace your Exchange server it's gonna cost ya. Read their mission statement: "to integrate with [...] all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms". Carefully worded to cover up the fact that Skyrix still wants to see some cash.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't complain and instead pick up where Skyrix has stranded OGo. Could also use a rewrite from Obj-C to Python or saner. Anyone up for a new project this summer? :)

Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side

Ximian Connector

Q: Your screenshot of OGo with Evolution as a native client talks about "Connector". As far as I am aware, the Exchange Connector from Ximian is not-free not-open-source proprietary software. Is that incorrect?

A: No, this is correct. ZideStore implements required parts of the Exchange 2000 WebDAV API to allow access to the OGo database from Evolution (with the Ximian Connector). Unfortunatly the Connector is closed source (Why?). We are certainly seeking for ways to connect Evolution without additional license costs. Any contributors ? ;-)
PS: ZideStore currently only works with Ximian Connector 1.2, the new 1.4 version isn't supported yet (it will be in the next weeks when the initial OGo setup phase is over).
Update: OGo got an email from the Evolution project manager: "We would love to see native OpenGroupware plugins for Evolution being written." :-)

Now we have both a back-end and a client system available.

And if you are looking to test OG.o to see if it meets your needs, a live Knoppix CD of it is available here. Although the project (OG.o) is fairly new, it (like OO.o) is based in a well developed, stable, ,commercial product that has been opened up, namely SKYRiX Groupware Server.

When will there be a viable challenger to Exchange Server?

Now.

This is great news for OpenGroupware. It's a full featured calendar, email and groupware server.

Previously, the only end to end open source solution you could set up with OpenGroupware was using Mozilla Calendar, another iCalendar app, or by using the built in web client. The Mozilla/iCalendar support is good, but "provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental".

There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq

OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.

This is great news for OpenGroupware. It's a full featured calendar, email and groupware server.

Previously, the only end to end open source solution you could set up with OpenGroupware was using Mozilla Calendar, another iCalendar app, or by using the built in web client. The Mozilla/iCalendar support is good, but "provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental".

There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq

OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.

This is great news for OpenGroupware. It's a full featured calendar, email and groupware server.

Previously, the only end to end open source solution you could set up with OpenGroupware was using Mozilla Calendar, another iCalendar app, or by using the built in web client. The Mozilla/iCalendar support is good, but "provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental".

There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq

OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.

This is great news for OpenGroupware. It's a full featured calendar, email and groupware server.

Previously, the only end to end open source solution you could set up with OpenGroupware was using Mozilla Calendar, another iCalendar app, or by using the built in web client. The Mozilla/iCalendar support is good, but "provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental".

There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq

OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.

http://www.opengroupware.org/ ?

It looks like the was the missing piece that kept Evolution from connecting to OpenGroupWare. Now that looks to be solved. OGW provides Contacts and Calandar services (an can be integrated with a mail server like Cyrus to provide mail)

is this useless now?

IIRC - This was the one of the "missing pieces" that OpenGroupware needs to make it an Exchange replacement. I think this is all Evolution needs to connect to the OpenGroupWare server.

Apparently though, Outlook itself will still require the "ZideLook" plug in to connect to the OGW server. But that is still a small price to pay in lieu of Exchange & MS-Win Server CALs.

Also this might be of interest

OpenGroupWare.org is a great open source project tackling this effort.

I'd like to run linux on it too. Basically I don't want to pay for a bulky Zaurus or iPAQ. People always say that linux isn't good on PDAs. Well PalmOS isn't that great either. One poorly written app and you can kiss all your data goodbye.

Linux would be interesting because you'd have access to plenty of apps. You could host the compiler on the device (if you had a big memory card). You can get keyboards for these PDAs so if you really must try out some neat idea for an algorithm while you are on the road, you can.

You could use CVS, Intermezzo or rsync to sync to a desktop. If you had it use iCalendar file format (RFC2445 you can easily integrate with MS Exchange, Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar, OpenGroupware, or various free web calendars you can find around.

What you say, Linux doesn't do database type files in a natural way like PalmOS or WinCE? Take a look at SQLite. It's a very fast and lightweight SQL engine with some interesting extensions. It is also Public Domain, so you don't have to worry about GPL if you have some political problems with that license.

People say Linux sucks on PDAs, but honestly if you look at the work for libraries, applications and kernel features geared towards embedded Linux products it's pretty obvious that Linux would do quite nicely on a PDA. Take the AgendaVR3, Zaurus or iPAQ for example. They all do a decent job with Linux.

I don't think it's that easy: http://opengroupware.org/en/users/faq/index.html

How does OGo compare to SuSE OpenExchange?

A: SuSE OpenExchange is actually two things: an OpenSource messaging server based on Cyrus and OpenLDAP and a closed source, proprietary web groupware server (ComFire).

OGo is very similiar to the groupware server part and indeed you can install OGo as the groupware component on an OpenExchange server to save the ComFire license costs and use a solution wholly composed of OpenSource software.

I was testing a knoppix Live CD with OpenGroupWare [1] and that project really surprise me... for projects groupware is a nice and complete web solution.
Have you try it?
[1] http://www.opengroupware.org/en/knoppix/index.html

OpenGroupware already does all that. Download a PDF presentation to read up some more on it. It will even integerate with dirty Outlook if you purchase a commerical plugin at the same time it will provide you with a decent web interface for free.

OpenGroupware already does all that. Download a PDF presentation to read up some more on it. It will even integerate with dirty Outlook if you purchase a commerical plugin at the same time it will provide you with a decent web interface for free.

Doesn't OpenGroupware have pretty extensive Palm sync?

Nope. There's a port in the works, see this page. But, it's not in a useable form yet. We've been looking for a solution for our small-med size company ( LitigationDynamicsInc.com ) but have yet to find a single solution that be used to track our customer base and let the sales guys on windows see the same calendaring and customer data that the production (mac/pc) folks need to see. Everything seems close but no one project has everything yet. Ideally there'd be something that worked with ical, outlook, web, and palm and ran on macosx. Opengroupware is that product, but it's not quite there yet from the standpoint of running on X. I was able to play with it on a linux box, but it kept losing a connection to the database :P PHPprojekt is close also and does run on 10.2+ but the developers are staunch in their refusal to support US-format date and time entry which is a deal-breaker for us.

You might want to peek at OpenGroupware. My colleagues and I have skimmed though what was available and it seems to be the most impressive for at least the customer management side. Though the look of the web interface will not amaze your artist friends, it seems to work well. You can interoperate with Evolution, Mozilla Calendar and some other programs - even Outlook should you want to buy the driver.

I'd strongly suggest not to be impressed by eGroupWare's feature list and cute themes (I know WE've been fooled). Seems like these guys, though talented, are not really working towards stabilizing the tree, so you see frightening changelogs - like code rewrites between 1.0RC2 and 1.0RC3. They forked from phpGroupWare lately but I can't tell if it's a more serious project.

One of my friends is completely sold to the Horde Project so you might want to try it.

All of these will not solve all your issues but no application does and as these three above are open source, you can do the linking as you like.

As already mentioned, the Ximian Connector for Exchange allows you to connect to Exchange servers. But that still requires you to pay inordinate amounts of money for the Exchange licenses, right?

Yeah, the Linux community is working on that, too.

Just go check it out.

Another option, available since 01/10/2003, is to use the OpenGroupware server and the SKYRiX ZideStore(TM) server and the SKYRiX ZideLook plugin to let Outlook clients communicate directly with the OpenGroupware server.

The SKYRiX products are not free, though. They charge from ~$300 for 5 users. How much is Exchange?

OpenGroupware's had some good reviews, at opengroupware.org.

Personal favorite, though, is Meetingmaker.

It's undeniable that people that don't like having to learn new things and certainly don't like to have to enter root passwords and get their hands dirty. I mean hell, the joke about getting your 7 year old kids to teach adults how to program the VCR is funny purely because so many people can relate to it.

While the workings of consumer electronics can be made transparent to end users, computers are a different entity all together.

My original point is based on the problem that a lot of IT decisions are made by non-technically minded management based on the effect it will have on the company accounts in the current financial year. How many IT people have put educated, well developed ideas forward and had them shot down not for technical reasons but because there's no money. At the same time, the CEO's getting a $/3 million bonus and a new Mercedes. How do you accurately calculate TCO? How much to include for the cost of having to pull in IT staff, on overtime, over the weekend in order to carry out disaster recovery when the latest virus wreaks havoc. What if a virus as prolific as SoBig.F started overwriting hard disk sectors that store drive geometry info forcing whole corporations to fix or replace every HDD in the company. Imagine the chaos. Is it luck that this hasn't happened? Is it on the cards? Who knows, but if it does happen I know the shit will really hit the fan.

All I'm saying is that if you can integrate other OS's into a business it would be a good insurance policy to do so. OK if you use AutoCAD you're more or less stuck with Windows on the desktop because as good as LinuxCAD or others may be there's too much built around AutoCAD for many people to use it as a drop in replacemnt.
On the other hand if your servers are sharing files and printers, delivering e-mail and not a lot else, why the hell are you running Windows. Now that Opengroupware is out even Exchange (the holy grail) may be replaceable and there are Linux server solutions that will fulfill all the requirements of an awful lot of offices. In exchange you get a mail server that is immune to Windows viruses, loads of extra odds and sods that'd cost a fortune on Windows and an extra degree of seperation in the event of an attack.

Support will develop as Linux usage expands. Or why not use a MAC? Known company, good reputation and it ain't Windows giving you many of the benefits of Linux with Apple paid support. BSD, whatever, it's not the OS you use that makes the difference it's removing the uniformity of weaknesses that a network of 100% identical machines on a network gives you.

There really is enough room for more than one OS in the world and at the end of the day, how many SoBIG.F's will it take to cost business the price of supporting it.

OpenGroupware.org is working on an Exchange replacement that will integrate with various applications, including OpenOffice.org . Also, OpenOffice.org does have document review functions, and in most distributions it uses fontconfig like everything else. Check out the Ximian patches at ooo.ximian.com

Ugh... hate to say it... Outlook client using exchange.

Outlook? You could use Evolution or Moz Mail + Moz Calender (soon to be Moz Thunderbird + Moz Sunbird).

Exchange? You could use Exchange4Linux or Apache James + JiCal or OpenGroupware.

There are decent Exchange replacements out there, quite a number of them. We just don't seem to be able to generate the same kind of awareness that we can for other office components.

Just an aside, but you might want to check out the new OpenGroupware.org. It's a recently open-sourced collaboration application. I downloaded TUTOS, but while reading up on all the commercial and non-commercial options, I stumbled upon it. The setup isn't for beginners, but it's working really good now that I've got it running.

Umm... Both Kolab and OpenGroupWare.org are suitable for this purpose. They are freely available, work with quite a number of clients and offer a complete alternative to Exchange (including groupware calendaring features).

Now I admit that there is an investment required for them to be usable with Outlook and, by extension, Evolution, however this is minimal compared with the cost of licensing Exchange.

The biggest expense is time. They are not 'trivial' to set up just yet and do require a decent time investment in doing so. However, they are most definitely built on open standards and free/opensource software.

I'm sure there are plenty of others that'd do it to, but those are the ones most recently making waves and thus the ones that stand out in my head at the moment.

The EU wants Microsoft to disclose more code to its competitors, to allow them to make sure their systems can work together with Microsoft's rather than being disadvantaged by Microsoft's dominant market position.

This is great news as I have eagerly awaited the 1.0 version of Kolab since its announcement last October. But in the months that have transpired others have also toiled to produce similar Exchange "killers". Today, we have three relatively new candidates that all claim to be Exchange killers. They are Kolab, SuSE OpenExchange, and the recently announced OpenGroupware.

So, the Open Source world has gone from a complete derth of groupware servers to a seeming abundance of groupware servers and all in just six to nine months. Or has it? How do these different groupware systems compare with each other with respect to features, performance, scalability, ease of use and ease of integration? More importantly, how do these same packages compare with Exchange itself with respect to the same metrics? It would be very nice to see an article that thoroughly reviews and benchmarks these for groupware systems. One final note, to those that may take on the challenge of doing such a review, Exchange is now at version 2003. A review that compares these systems with Exchange 5.5 will be worthless.

Outlook is a shithole of bugs, incompatibilities, dangerous security flaws and second rate patches which obfuscate its vulnerabilities instead of repair them.

The quicker Evolution lives up to its name, and departs from an Outlook-style UI model, the better. There are real performance issues they need to work on as well. Big IMAP stores are slow.

Anybody really interested in moving AWAY from outlook/exchange should dig Open Groupware, forked from a stable commercial implementation that uses Cyrus, Postgres and OpenLDAP. They even have a ready-to-run Knoppix CD-ROM image, for evaluation testing:
"The OGo Knoppix is the fastest way to get a running OGo demo, as it requires no installation - just boot from it and you get a working system, including a Cyrus IMAP4 server."

I guess you've been living partly under a rock then. Commercial alternatives to Exchange already exists and open source versions are under development and will soon be available. Take a look at http://kroupware.org/ and http://opengroupware.org/

I use OOO at home, but the lack of an Outlook-compatible PIM is the killer for businesses. I suppose that means we need an open-source clone of Exchange too.

The main contributors to this project have been Objective C supporters for a long time, and it shows! Looking at the tree on the Build It section of the site, the server depends on libFoundation and some GNUstep libraries.

I'm glad to see Objective C being put to good use outside of Mac OS X user interfaces... It's a good language, and it deserves better. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised... the sponsors, SKYRiX, have contributed a lot of good code for the free software ObjC community.

I hope this encourages more people to learn Objective C...

It looks like their WebUI feature takes care of your web access question. From the screenshots it looks like it does calendars, but the rest is my guess.

The only free client so far is the web client. There is "experimental" support for viewing your calendar with Mozilla Calendar. Check out the User FAQ

- for build instructions, go to the developer section on
http://www.opengroupware.org/

But the (apparently) relevant page on their site is just a walkthrough of the major system components, with a note saying

Note that OpenGroupware.org packages are different to SKYRiX ones and do not contain any autoconfiguration, so you need to do some steps on your own.

We are going to improve that section over the next days, stay tuned.

Which means that, apparently, the old ./configure && make && make test && sudo make install is unlikely to work here.

So -- has anyone tried this yet? Has anyone tried it on a non-Linux machine?

There are two definitions of groupware in the industry. The Microsoft one: groupware consists of email with some additional productivity: Calendar, Mail, and basic forms(which are hardly ever used). And the IBM Lotus one: groupware consists of database forms for routing and document management and email.

Competing with the Outlook definition:
OS foundations Chandler (Calendar focused)
Mozilla Mail (+calendar proj)
Evolution
Open Groupware
kmail/KGroupware


And from the Lotus Perspective:
www.phpgroupware.org
zope
OpenACS
And Lotus Domino which runs on Linux. The client works fine in wine or crossover - but is not officially supported.

If you notice, the screenies of Outlook are using a plugin called Zidelook. They dont mention whether this is requisite to get full compatibility (i.e. drop-in replacement for exchange), but they DO mention that OpenGroupware base is not compatible with Zidelook.

To use Zidelook, you must use SKYRiX, and "enterprise distribution" of OpenGroupware. I.e. it's a commercial plug-in.

Of course, I could be wrong, but that's just how it reads.

Great job and kudos to the OpenGroupware folks and their sponsors.

Looking at this it looks as though Outlook requires a plugin in order to access the server. However as that plugin is also Open Source, I don't see a major problem with this. The users can't tell the difference.