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Here's two: Citadel and Kolab

Among other things, Kolab is a product of a series of contracts for the federal office for Security in the Information Technology in the German Government, though both are quite secure.

Then there are two more: OpenGroupware and Zimbra. Module options are out there. If you're not finding them, then it's because you are not looking.

i love linux as much as everyone else but in reality there isn't a product yet out side of exchange that gives the amount of seemless intgration that exchange gives.

So what's wrong with the following products?
http://www.egroupware.org/
http://www.group-office.com/
http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/
http://www.scalix.com/
http://www.kolab.org/
http://www.opengroupware.org/
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.openconnector.org/
Non-free alternatives:
http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/
http://bynari.net/index.php?id=7
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/
http://www.officecalendar.com/
http://www.samsungcontact.com/
http://www.zarafa.com/
http://www.postpath.com/

I look forward to reading your reply.

I had a conversation with one of the openchange developers a few months ago to talk about some of the architecture being built here, and was pleased to find out that they're aiming to do something useful. They do want OpenChange to be useful as a standalone server. That gets you something Outlook can talk to. But they're also going to expose all of the right API's and stuff so that OpenChange can be integrated with an existing store or server. That means that with the right amount of glue code, we'll be able to integrate it with existing open source groupware servers like Citadel or Kolab or OpenGroupware. All of these servers currently have Outlook compatibility, but you need to add a plugin to Outlook in order to make it work. With any luck, OpenChange will allow Outlook to talk to all of these excellent FOSS groupware platforms as if they were Exchange servers.

(Not that I'm knocking the plugins, mind you ... some of them are excellent. I'm particularly fond of Bynari's connector which is totally seamless, works with open source groupware servers, and costs far less than Exchange licenses. But a connector-free option will be nice too.)

Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?

Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.

Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.

• Kolab — http://www.kolab.org/
• Citadel — http://www.citadel.org/
• Dingo Calendar Server — http://andrew.triumf.ca/dingo/
• Darwin CalendarServer — http://trac.calendarserver.org/
• Bedework — http://www.bedework.org/
• Zimbra — http://www.zimbra.com/
• OpenGroupware — http://www.opengroupware.org/

If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.

• simta — http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/simta/
• Dovecot — http://www.dovecot.org/
• Postfix — http://www.postfix.org/
• Exim — http://www.exim.org/
• Sendmail — http://www.sendmail.org/
• qmail — http://www.qmail.org/

However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...

Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?

Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.

Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.

• Kolab — http://www.kolab.org/
• Citadel — http://www.citadel.org/
• Dingo Calendar Server — http://andrew.triumf.ca/dingo/
• Darwin CalendarServer — http://trac.calendarserver.org/
• Bedework — http://www.bedework.org/
• Zimbra — http://www.zimbra.com/
• OpenGroupware — http://www.opengroupware.org/

If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.

• simta — http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/simta/
• Dovecot — http://www.dovecot.org/
• Postfix — http://www.postfix.org/
• Exim — http://www.exim.org/
• Sendmail — http://www.sendmail.org/
• qmail — http://www.qmail.org/

However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...

Exchange and SharePoint are huge money-suckers. There are plenty of open source alternatives, such as Citadel and Kolab and OpenGroupware. Give them a try and get that migration started.

But if you want a CalDAV / GroupDAV server then why would you go with Exchange instead of something free, which provides both a web interface and a thick-client interface to mail, address books, and calendaring?

That's a nice long explanatory answer... for the first question! ;). Do you have an answer for the 2nd?

I might even add... do you have suggestions?

I have already checked out a few of 'em (not necessarily OSS):

• Zimbra
• Scalix
• eGroupware
• PHP Groupware
• Communigate Pro
• Citadel
• Kolab
• Open Groupware
• Open xChange

...of which many of them have a great potential, but I always end up having some trouble somewhere or find 'em not user-friendly/admin-friendly enough.

"Actually, they are robbing the rich and the poor, with their lock-in monopoly. And then they pass a fraction of their loot back down to the poor and say "look how good we are" after which they invest the rest of the loot in more anti-competitive practices, here and in third world countries."

How is microsoft a lock-in monopoly?

1) You can use open-office to view nearly all MS-office formats
2) many distros of linux are now available in retail stores
3)don't like exchange? go here http://opengroupware.org/ (this is one example..there are many)
4) apache/php/mysql competes with iis/asp/MSSQL

The open source community needs to stop bitching about Microsoft and start writing better software.

Rather than Zimbra, I am more interested in the approach that the SoGo project is taking.

They use Thunderbird as the basic email client and then extend it using extra plugins. Very nice!

Also, SoGo does not modify the OSS components they use. AFAIK Zimbra has added patches to postfix and Cyrus that makes it hard to integrate it using normal distribution packages.

Some 6 months ago someone mentioned another project that merged Thunderbird and Firefox into a tabbed kind of email browser, but I cannot find the URL anymore. That is also a very interesting project.

If you're looking for an Exchange / Outlook replacement you might be interested in Scalable OpenGroupware.org.

>How about this:
>1. It needs to have a client/server architecture (for mobile clients who don't
>have always-on connectivity). Pure web-based calendars don't do this.

Agree 100%. That is why we use OpenGroupware. Support for common protocols as well as a great API - http://code.google.com/p/zogi/ - we've integrated OGo into our company Intranet for scheduling & workflow as well as built a very effective CRM tool which sits on top of the excellent groupware engine provided by OGo for universal access to all the data, one calendar, one task list, etc... Fabulous.

Want screenshots?
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_14zrg6zm&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_12gqn63p&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_8c225bq&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_4dpzjmz&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_0sb385m&hl=en

I'm also working on a .NET fat client - Consonance
http://code.google.com/p/consonance/
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceLogin/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceTaskWindow/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceScreenshotContacts/image_view

There is NO other *truly* Open Source groupware server than can do what OpenGroupware can do.

> 2. It needs to have Windows and Linux clients.

Ok

> 3. Outlook plug-ins don't work. This is a limitation of Outlook. The plug-in
> can't be the default calendar, and Outlook will only pop up reminders for the
> default calendar. Also, my experience of OpenGroupware's plug-in is that it is unstable.

Sorry to hear that, it has worked pretty well for us. Although we only have a few users. I work with another shop that has lots of users, and they've been successful. Have you contacted Skyrix support? You very much need to keep the connector up to date as Outlook and the MAPI tags it uses evolve at Microsoft's discretion.

If you aren't willing to use a plugin (and ZideLook is a MAPI provider, many plugins are just miserable PST sync things) then I'm afraid you have to abandon Outlook or use Exchange.

ZideOne, an alternative Outlook provider, is scheduled for release at the end of Q4 2007. http://www.zideone.com/
ZideOne will provide access to any CalDAV / GroupDAV server.

Alternatively to that you can use Thunderbird / Lightning with OpenGroupware using the GroupDAV connectors provided from the SOGo project.
http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/sogo_connector.html
That should also work, I believe, with the Citadel groupware server.

> 4. It needs to have a means for one person to schedule an event on
> someone-else's calendar (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

> 5. It needs to have a way for people to view the details of other
> people's calendars (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

>Free/Busy information is not enough i

>How about this:
>1. It needs to have a client/server architecture (for mobile clients who don't
>have always-on connectivity). Pure web-based calendars don't do this.

Agree 100%. That is why we use OpenGroupware. Support for common protocols as well as a great API - http://code.google.com/p/zogi/ - we've integrated OGo into our company Intranet for scheduling & workflow as well as built a very effective CRM tool which sits on top of the excellent groupware engine provided by OGo for universal access to all the data, one calendar, one task list, etc... Fabulous.

Want screenshots?
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_14zrg6zm&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_12gqn63p&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_8c225bq&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_4dpzjmz&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_0sb385m&hl=en

I'm also working on a .NET fat client - Consonance
http://code.google.com/p/consonance/
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceLogin/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceTaskWindow/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceScreenshotContacts/image_view

There is NO other *truly* Open Source groupware server than can do what OpenGroupware can do.

> 2. It needs to have Windows and Linux clients.

Ok

> 3. Outlook plug-ins don't work. This is a limitation of Outlook. The plug-in
> can't be the default calendar, and Outlook will only pop up reminders for the
> default calendar. Also, my experience of OpenGroupware's plug-in is that it is unstable.

Sorry to hear that, it has worked pretty well for us. Although we only have a few users. I work with another shop that has lots of users, and they've been successful. Have you contacted Skyrix support? You very much need to keep the connector up to date as Outlook and the MAPI tags it uses evolve at Microsoft's discretion.

If you aren't willing to use a plugin (and ZideLook is a MAPI provider, many plugins are just miserable PST sync things) then I'm afraid you have to abandon Outlook or use Exchange.

ZideOne, an alternative Outlook provider, is scheduled for release at the end of Q4 2007. http://www.zideone.com/
ZideOne will provide access to any CalDAV / GroupDAV server.

Alternatively to that you can use Thunderbird / Lightning with OpenGroupware using the GroupDAV connectors provided from the SOGo project.
http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/sogo_connector.html
That should also work, I believe, with the Citadel groupware server.

> 4. It needs to have a means for one person to schedule an event on
> someone-else's calendar (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

> 5. It needs to have a way for people to view the details of other
> people's calendars (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

>Free/Busy information is not enough i

>How about this:
>1. It needs to have a client/server architecture (for mobile clients who don't
>have always-on connectivity). Pure web-based calendars don't do this.

Agree 100%. That is why we use OpenGroupware. Support for common protocols as well as a great API - http://code.google.com/p/zogi/ - we've integrated OGo into our company Intranet for scheduling & workflow as well as built a very effective CRM tool which sits on top of the excellent groupware engine provided by OGo for universal access to all the data, one calendar, one task list, etc... Fabulous.

Want screenshots?
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_14zrg6zm&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_12gqn63p&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_8c225bq&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_4dpzjmz&hl=en
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=ddv5htgd_0sb385m&hl=en

I'm also working on a .NET fat client - Consonance
http://code.google.com/p/consonance/
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceLogin/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceTaskWindow/image_view
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/consonance/ConsonanceScreenshotContacts/image_view

There is NO other *truly* Open Source groupware server than can do what OpenGroupware can do.

> 2. It needs to have Windows and Linux clients.

Ok

> 3. Outlook plug-ins don't work. This is a limitation of Outlook. The plug-in
> can't be the default calendar, and Outlook will only pop up reminders for the
> default calendar. Also, my experience of OpenGroupware's plug-in is that it is unstable.

Sorry to hear that, it has worked pretty well for us. Although we only have a few users. I work with another shop that has lots of users, and they've been successful. Have you contacted Skyrix support? You very much need to keep the connector up to date as Outlook and the MAPI tags it uses evolve at Microsoft's discretion.

If you aren't willing to use a plugin (and ZideLook is a MAPI provider, many plugins are just miserable PST sync things) then I'm afraid you have to abandon Outlook or use Exchange.

ZideOne, an alternative Outlook provider, is scheduled for release at the end of Q4 2007. http://www.zideone.com/
ZideOne will provide access to any CalDAV / GroupDAV server.

Alternatively to that you can use Thunderbird / Lightning with OpenGroupware using the GroupDAV connectors provided from the SOGo project.
http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/sogo_connector.html
That should also work, I believe, with the Citadel groupware server.

> 4. It needs to have a means for one person to schedule an event on
> someone-else's calendar (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

> 5. It needs to have a way for people to view the details of other
> people's calendars (if the appropriate permissions are given).

OpenGroupware does that.

>Free/Busy information is not enough i

>All we need is a groupware suite thats GPL/BSD, is stable,

http://www.opengroupware.org/

> offers the basics like calendar sharing, addressbooks, appointments and

Yep

> integrates with things like Funambol.

Yep

> Integrating with Outlook clients isn't such a big deal anymore,

There is a commercial MAPI plugin (a real plugin, not some sync thing)

Other than the Outlook plugin it is completely free and Open Source, no gimmicks.

No *nix desktop runs Exchange + Outlook, nor runs Word.

Not true. You can, in fact, get Office to run on a *nix desktop. You'd just be much better off retraining people for OpenOffice or KOffice.

Word should be trivial to replace, but it isn't. It is hard to make people change, and most managers aren't willing to listen to complains just to save a few thousand (yet most should).

Put that few thousand into a training program. Done.

It would be a much more valid argument if there were still really critical features that either office suite doesn't have, but the reality is, for 99% of what you need to do with an office suite, KOffice is fine. Then, for maybe .9%, OpenOffice will cover you. That leaves .01% that you need Office for, so just make one XP machine and turn RDP on, for those very rare cases.

Exchange + Outlook is even harder, because it not only has a calendar system but also make it available to the network

Gosh, that's never been done before.

Now, if only we had a way to share them...

Trust me, Exchange + Outlook is a solved problem. If anything, the irony here is that I haven't been able to implement any of these at work, as there's not really any other good groupware clients for Windows, other than Outlook -- although most of the open servers can probably talk to Outlook. But if you can get them on Linux, I'd suggest Kontact and probably Kolab as the server.

It's even possible that KDE will be ported to Windows wholesale at some point, from what I've been reading. If that happens, just standardize on Kontact.

Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS.

Have you seen this one? And there's at least one other FOSS groupware server, but I can't remember what it's called at the moment.

> Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same,
> or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?

OpenGroupware.Org - http://www.opengroupware.org/
PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/

And that is why I was looking at OpenGroupWare, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem and has a (non-free) Outlook connector. I haven't tried it yet, though.

Does anyone have experience with OGW?

> All I want is read and write access to one or more calendars, the ability to selectively
> 1. Share with everyone (read - write)
> 2. Share with everyone (read only)
> 3. Selectively share read-write with a number of other users
> 4. Share only availability information

http://www.opengroupware.org/ - Yes, all the above.

> I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into
> project management and work time >allocation. None of the packages on the market
> at the moment does.

Yes, they do. http://www.opengroupware.org/ - has a very nice project and task application integrated with the traditional schedular and addressbook.

> Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of
> how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime
> and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game

You can track time in tasks; projects report percentages of spent time in various tasks. But to go much beyond that you really need an ERP package.

Try OpenGroupware - http://www.opengroupware.org/ - it has a simple web interface that works in every browser, is fast, and extremely feature complete.

Been using it since 2003; fast, stable, and feature complete.

http://www.opengroupware.org/

It supports GroupDAV [ http://www.groupdav.org/ ] which is an up-and-coming collaboration standard; there is already and Evolution plugin and a Thunderbird address book plugin. Mobile devices can be sync'd via the Fumanbol GroupDAV connector. And there is a commerical M$-Outlook connector (ZideLook), which is a real MAPI connector, not some weird sync-thing; ZideLook costs about $35 a seat. The OpenGroupware server is completely free.

>Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites

OpenGroupware is not a PHP script; it is written in Objective-C [fast!]. But it supports an XML-RPC so integrating with customized applications is very easy. We have a sophisticated CRM application, written in PHP, built around OpenGroupware.

You can also access the contacts, project files, and project notes, via WebDAV. Mounting your groupware server via fuse/wdfs or NetDrive is pretty cool.

>Since when has Exchange+Outlook been the business standard? It isn't a standard of anything,
>not even a de facto one. As much as it hurts to say, both Novell Groupwise and IBM Lotus
>Notes are far superior groupware applications.

Not to mention there are real Open Source alternatives for groupware.

http://www.opengroupware.org/

And you can continue to use Thunderbird - http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thunde rbird_groupdav_plugin.html

Ever tried opengroupware?

It has shared calendar, resource scheduling, email&contacts etc, it even syncs with your palm.

But if you need something more professional, just take out your wallet and go for groupwise

Linux works just fine in corporate networks. It's exchange, outlook and their nonstandard quirks which are causing the problems.
Just replace those and you're golden.

I suggest that you look at OpenGroupware.org, in particular you may want to look at SOGo, which is Scalable OpenGroupware.org http://sogo.opengroupware.org/. Unfortunately the SOGo specific bits aren't yet under the GPL/LGPL as the rest of the OGo stack is. However you can license it from Skyrix is my understanding.

Even though us geeks tend to see little value in having a calendar bolted to an email program, there are lots of people out there who just can't seem to live without it. So this is a good first step.

But don't go looking for the one big server app that's going to be the "Exchange Killer" that goes with it. That's not how the open source world is answering that challenge. Exchange will not be a Goliath felled by David, it will be more like a Gulliver restrained by multiple Lilliputians. This is because programs like Lightning aren't being written to work with a single server -- they're using Webcal (iCalendar publish/subscribe over HTTP, made popular by Apple of course) and can talk to groupware servers like Citadel and OpenGroupware today. Further on down the line, connectors will become available for the emerging standard GroupDAV protocol. For more complex server-side logic, eventually CalDAV will come out of draft as well.

It's going to be a great world. Finally, after all these years of delay, group calendaring and scheduling will be as open, interoperable, and non-dominated-by-one-player as email is today.

Outlook supports integration with CRM tools (like Salesforce) that geeks hate but salespeople use very frequently. Because geeks lash out against CRM instead of creating open alternatives, Outlook wins by default.

Outlook also connects to an Exchange server to do file and calendar sharing more readily than Evolution does. Evolution's Exchange connector, when last I checked, uses an interface which mimics a web browser clicking through Outlook Web Access. Outlook uses the proprietary Exchange protocol and so is faster. Unfortunately, because geeks get all huffy about "groupware," work on an open alternative to Exchange proceeds at a glacial pace.

Outlook is seriously flawed in all the ways that you describe, but frankly I haven't found an open solution that is mature or feature-rich enough to replace it yet.

I have installed it on a couple of networks. The biggest probelm seems to be that there is no reliable calendar client that will work with it (other than aoutlook through the connector). Sunbird and other calendar clients crash or don't properly create appointments.

Oh, and it does not provide an MTA, but there are plenty of good solutions for this.

I would like to add http://www.opengroupware.org/ to your list.

I was searching something similar like the person asking. I just needed a little bit more (Palm). For me OGo is the best solution.

There's Novell-backed OpenExchange

There's Germany-backed Kolab

There's RedHat-backed eGroupWare

There's all-open OpenGroupware

And that's just the tip of it. There are also commercial products.

Seriously - if you think there are not alternatives to Exchange out there, then either you have not done your homework or are seriously misinformed, or both.

Open Groupware seems to be a good alternative, these days - especially if you have your own mail server, as they don't supply one!

...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based functionality for PIM (Personal Information Management) software. Yes, people really do want a replacement for Outlook, and the open source community would do well to offer complete, end-to-end solutions. Combine the Lightning client with standards-based servers and you've got a good shot at finally getting people to dump Outlook and Exchange.

Here's the thing, though: everyone seems to assume that we need an "Outlook Killer" and an "Exchange Killer." This is, in fact, not true. "One size fits all" only works for Microsoft because Microsoft forces that model. In an ideal world, everyone will select the products that fit them best, and those products will all work together. That means some folks might choose Lightning, some might choose Aethera instead, and they'd still be able to interact with each other's calendars. On the server side, the dozen or so open source groupware servers such as Kolab, OGo, Citadel, and PHPgroupware would all be able to speak common protocols with Lightning and other clients. Users would choose based on other features; for example, one organization might want strong support for forms-based workflow, another might want rich real-time communications, another might want a large selection of third-party plugins. The idea is to allow people to choose their software based on the feature set, rather than by being locked into one choice because, for example, only Exchange supports all the features of Outlook.

It's going to take a lot of cooperation but we'll get there.

Anyways, let us examine the different components and see how far OSS can take us. Maybe it can't go the whole journey, but if it can do some, then a hybrid solution will work.

Open Groupware, SuSE's Open Exchange and OSER will handle the Exchange part, including support for all those MS Exchange clients, such as Outlook.

That just leaves the Active Directories part. ISC's DHCP supports Dynamic DNS. However, you may want to add in DHCP2LDAP to get a good link between DHCP and BIND. OpenLDAP provides the LDAP implementation part. Kerberos and DNS are easy (although some may quibble with my choice of Kerberos version!)

Provided you're not planning on having both MS Active Directory and the above amalgam running, you should then be set to go with a comprehensive Active Directory lookalike which will interact with client systems in the same way Microsoft's software will.

The problem I found is that there's almost no way of getting from a Linux solution -to- Active Directory. If AD is present, it must be a root server, which Linux CAN pull from.

Do I recommend this kind of a setup? Probably not. The Exchange and Groupware stuff should be fine, but the Active Directory stuff isn't as coherent as it could be and I've heard of nobody who has completely replace AD with an Open Source solution, even though from a purely technical perspective it should be possible.

It may be a good idea to check out OpenGroupware.org. IIRC, it integrates with Outlook and they are also heavily working on OpenOffice.org and Mozilla integration. This is awesome if you want to transition your backend first. Once you get the back office off of Exchange, you can move the front office to OOo and Mozilla, followed by a switch out of the OS from Windows to Linux or BSD.

Objective C has never caught on.

http://developer.apple.com/ http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.opengroupware.org/ for starters...but anyway, what you may have meant was Objective-C didn't catch on outside the NeXT community, which didn't really matter as NeXT were kindof most interested in its use inside the NeXT community.

The original version's magneto-optical drive was a total disaster (completely unreliable and dog slow), as was the lack of floppy disk (which was important way back in 1990 when it was released, at least in the University segment, where I encountered NeXTs).

And as you say, the original version - meaning there was a rev in which that was fixed (BTW you can fit a floppy drive on an original cube - I should know, I've got four). Actually the ultimate in cubey goodness was to install the OS on a MO disk and install a small hard drive for the swap directory - that way you still got to take your environment around with you in your pocket, but could use some nice fast swapspace. Or just buy dozens of the slabs and leave them all over the place.

Perhaps the biggest problem was the price. At $9,999 it was just too expensive for the consumer

Again, a problem with an early rev - the slabs were cheaper than that. The NeXT was superior in almost every respect to the equivalent from Sun, and the OS and development environments are still superior to many other offerings available today. Given a choice between developing a bespoke app for NeXTOpenCocoaYellowGNUBoxStep or Qt/.NET/Java/GTK+/wxWidgets, I know which side my bread's buttered.

EOF -- an object relational mapper, providing isolation from the database and from the database model -- in particular is very, very nice. Not the final answer to everything, but still quite cool :-)

The sad thing with Apple's current WebObjects is that it's only java (it's even a J2EE environment), while originally (at NeXT) it was Objective-C based (plus WebScript, an ObjC-like script language). They dropped the Objective-C bit with WebObjects 5, sadly (4.5 had ObjC and Java). Well, ok, beeing a J2EE env has its own advantages, but still...

The documentation of WO 4.5 is here, the documentation for the current WO is here.

There is a free software implementation of WebObjects 4.5 from the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, which work well. OpenGroupware.org also has its own WO 4.5 implementation, NGObjWeb, which works very well too (it's the foundation of SOPE). I wrote an article showing how to do simple (html) components, but it's in french ;-)

Though, if you want to discover a really interesting project, have a look to Seaside. It's inspired by WebObjects, with an excellent component model, but is even better (support of continuations, etc). And it's completely dynamic, letting you change things at runtime easily (Smalltalk rulez ;-). It's one of the best thing I know :-)

EOF -- an object relational mapper, providing isolation from the database and from the database model -- in particular is very, very nice. Not the final answer to everything, but still quite cool :-)

The sad thing with Apple's current WebObjects is that it's only java (it's even a J2EE environment), while originally (at NeXT) it was Objective-C based (plus WebScript, an ObjC-like script language). They dropped the Objective-C bit with WebObjects 5, sadly (4.5 had ObjC and Java). Well, ok, beeing a J2EE env has its own advantages, but still...

The documentation of WO 4.5 is here, the documentation for the current WO is here.

There is a free software implementation of WebObjects 4.5 from the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, which work well. OpenGroupware.org also has its own WO 4.5 implementation, NGObjWeb, which works very well too (it's the foundation of SOPE). I wrote an article showing how to do simple (html) components, but it's in french ;-)

Though, if you want to discover a really interesting project, have a look to Seaside. It's inspired by WebObjects, with an excellent component model, but is even better (support of continuations, etc). And it's completely dynamic, letting you change things at runtime easily (Smalltalk rulez ;-). It's one of the best thing I know :-)

There is actually a port to windows, I don't know if it's ready yet.
Here's some info on evolution and some screenshots.

But why not switch to linux altogether? ;-)

Ever tried installing it? It's *incredibly difficult*. It's not an open source package that a sys admin can simply decide to try out quickly. Installing it involves loads of time and all sorts of system-specific tweaks. Our organization investigated moving to that platform but abandoned it when realizing how large of an undertaking it would be (in both time and skills) to even get it running.

I've heard that the 1.0 release's main focus is making installation easier, however, it can't even be installed on RHEL I really don't see the installation improving at all if they continue to ignore one of the most popular platforms out there.

-Fatty

your question is widely answered at this link.

to summarize... yes: there are at least two alternatives: opengroupware + cyrus and suse's opengroupware (cyrus + openldap + comfire). for client side: kontact (korganizer) is desktop ready. it is difficult to enable (and has many flaws at my advice) for workgroup environment, but is a very good for everyday scheduling, overall if integrated with palm (via kpilot).

There is two free implementations of WebObjects -- one done by the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, and another that's done by OpenGroupware.org (they use it as their base for SOPE), called NGObjWeb.. both implements WebObjects 4.5 (ie, the version before java) and are used commercially.

Both works quite well, but they lack a scripting language (although the OGo guys works on a WebScript-like language, and the GNUstepWeb guys works on integrating StepTalk).

About EOF, the GNUstep project have an implementation named GDL2 (GNUstep Database 2) which implements EOF 4.5 -- but sadly we are missing an EOModeller (even if somebody is working on one). Here an article from Ludovic Marcotte about GDL2.

There is two free implementations of WebObjects -- one done by the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, and another that's done by OpenGroupware.org (they use it as their base for SOPE), called NGObjWeb.. both implements WebObjects 4.5 (ie, the version before java) and are used commercially.

Both works quite well, but they lack a scripting language (although the OGo guys works on a WebScript-like language, and the GNUstepWeb guys works on integrating StepTalk).

About EOF, the GNUstep project have an implementation named GDL2 (GNUstep Database 2) which implements EOF 4.5 -- but sadly we are missing an EOModeller (even if somebody is working on one). Here an article from Ludovic Marcotte about GDL2.

You'll find that Evolution provides connectivity to OpenGroupware.org, Groupwise, OpenX-Change, and yes, Microsoft Exchange. This in fact makes it remarkably vendor-neutral, in my opinion. Cheers, Michael

Funnily enough, one is called OpenGroupware
Then there's PHP groupware
And Amphora

Finally, always check Freshmeat. It happens to return 76 results for "groupware".

Do you mean like opengroupware.org?

But mainly I was referring to the network management portion.

It misses Knowledge Management (but has already a bugzilla request) and forum. OX's KM module wasn't very useful though compared with OGO's request.

The only drawback we saw for OGO it's the language - Objective C, but it has a nice way to use xml-rpc requests so we can add java or php functionality over it (forum, if needed). OX it's a mix of Java, perl and C.

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? :)