Slashdot Mirror
HP's OpenMail: I'm Not Dead Yet
Jon Hill writes "It looks as if HP's OpenMail system is not dead yet and development of the project has been assumed by Samsung's software division. This is great news considering OpenMail was the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange. Now if only it was strongly marketed and made well known, enterprise administrators such as myself could embrace it." For those of not familiar, essentially OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise, despite that people should know better.
give users the ability to run arbitrary shell commands
I've never used Exchange, so I'm seriously interested in what people like about it. Why do companies feel it's better than a standard IMAP/LDAP setup?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The downside to this is the they wont be open sourcing it. The upside I suppose is that it will be actively developed and will retain its corporate marketshare.
How many people are there going to bethat are so ingrained with Microsoft products that they insist on using Outlook despite its many many flaws, yet they are willing to choose anything other than exchange?
It would be great it we could get some choices in this market. I only worry that not enough people will become aware of their options. That, however, would collide with the attitude among the higher ups in my company: When there is only one option, you can't make a wrong decision. As more options become available in the marketplace I think we'll see a shakeout of bad IT managers as their inability to make good decisions becomes more evident. I think there's a lot of cost cutting to be done in a lot of IT departments. Email would be a great place to start.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Sigh. 'less-than' gets parsed as html.
... delivery in under 30 seconds, corporate address books and major feature creep. ...
I think I'll give up and go to the pub.
FWIW that comment should have the following chunk in the middle
I can honestly
If Samsung is smart they will recruit support from palm or any number of other PDA companies so that when/if Openmail gets a larger portion of the market share users can continue to sync their contacts and datebooks. It may not seem crucial now but 10 years ago nobody needed more then 640k memory.
a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise
Can somebody tell me what these features are, compared to what you'd get with sendmail/qmail / some-random-pop/imap-client ?
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Sheesh... If all of you weren't so damn scared of Lotus Notes. Runs on Linux, S/390, Solaris, NT, ASS/400 (yes, the extra S is there on purpose), and others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
It may be a bit different from what you're used to, but it supports, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and HTTP(S) methods to access your mail easily..
viruses.
viruses
viruses
With exchange the calendar is shared between users, so you can do things like schedule meetings without having to phone round first.
The Evolution calendar stuff has all the features needed except that your calendar isn't accessible to other users.
Hopefully someone will write a free iCal server and an evolution backend to it.
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
I don't remain convinced about the decision makers thinking it is loaded with necessary features. Instead, I think it is because there is a significant amount of techs/companies/consultants that claim to have experience and knowledge of exchange. Therefore they justify finding someone to support it will be easy. I find this extremely amusing since if every company suddenly shifted to open source, MCSE's everywhere would be hitting the books for open source. The chicken and the egg.
If I were to try to point out why people are drawn to Exchange, it is because these companies are already deeply stuck in Microsoft territory. I am a big open source advocate so don't take these next statements the wrong way.
Microsoft does a really good job (mostly lately) of their products playing well with each other. In less than an hour, you can have a good VB app up and running that can interoperate with any and all of MS servers. Query a SQL Server, send mail through an Exchange server, even query a domain controller for a list of all user accounts.
Is this really the greatest thing since sliced bread? No, but it is this sort of interoperability that is seeping deep into the ears of management and making them approve purchase requests for MS powered servers left and right. "What, we can make it all work together relatively easy? We don't have to hire more people to make it work? GREAT! Where is my pen?"
What Exchangish can OpenMail do that Stalker's CommuniGate Pro can't?
Mac OS: gravy...
Don't forget there's another reader available that hopes to be a replacement for Outlook also.
Actually, that link does serve some purpose - the entire tone of the article is very amusing given that the vulnerability was fixed 2 days later, and is worth re-reading with that in mind to see the sort of crap and guesswork people will write.
I've been trying to convince them that 'proper' email is text only, and attachments if you are completely ftp-impaired but to no avail. They seem to insist on 200Mb attachments (sent to 30 other users no less...)
Get with it!
Information Technology exists to serve the needs of users, not the other way around.
If your users want to send 300Mb attachments to each other then propose to them the infrastructure and funding requirements of such a platform rather than shouting "ftp!" to their hands (because sure as hell the face ain't listening).
There is a massive gap between what most sys admins think of themselves and what their userbase actually thinks of them. This is a dangerous place to be in, and no amount of name calling will change their attitude.
Deliver what the users want within reasonable expectations and the prospect of a career *not* sitting in the wiring cupboard beckons, with all the rewards that can come (CTO anyone?!)...
I've had some of the better Outlook virii use the Notes address book, but only if specific versions of Outlook components were installed on the machine, even if they weren't used. I'm not certain how this technically was performed but it's still possible.
You need a customer friendly attitude in this business. The user doesn't care about computers. He want to get his work done in the shortest amount of time and then surf the internet. He already has enough on his or her mind about their job and they don't want to remember a bunch of obscure ftp commands. They just want to point and click.
Lotus Notes/Domino server runs on Linux as well as UNIX (especially AIX) and Windows, and besides the fact that it's a resource hog, I happen to think that Lotus Notes is pretty nifty. Although our nots admin won't say that :)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Oh certainly. IT does need to fulfil a role.
This is why we end up running a lotus notes architecture. It does have the concept of a 'shared' file, to which you can send a link to multiple other users, and thus have 1 copy of a huge file.
The problem is that despite this fact, many many users just do not bother to think about it. And thus we get large emails sent to everyone/multiple people.
I do have somewhat oldfashioned ideas. I expect that these 'power users' who want to be able to do wonderful things with their tools actually bother to find out something about how they work.
Oh well.
200MB files can be handled in may different ways that can be user friendly. The best to me would be an online document retrieval system that allows users to "publish" their document with versioning and anybody with proper access can download if they want. This avoids both emailing large files and explaining FTP to users. I would also set a max size on file attachments.
Of course, the way exchange does it is proprietary - using nasty hard to reverse engineer MS-DCE functions.
There is a project to reverse engineer this though: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osexchange.
Better would be an open standard for Calendar Access.
And there is one - CAP - it is a draft with no reference implementations, however (either a calendary or a server).
However the reefknot project is attempting to build libraries for CAP among other things.
Of course, a lot of development is needed. The dream should be a standards based server which supports CAP - but also offers MS Exchange emulation for "legacy" clients.....
Very good point. We were forced (by a parent company) to switch off of Exchange/Outlook to a product that doesn't yet have calendaring and senior management in our company almost revolted. We ended up with a compromise to keep the calendar part of Exchange running until the other products calendar app is ready. Just yesterday I had to set up a meeting with two VP's. Do you think I actually talked to them? Of course not. They don't know their own calendar. You have to talk to their assistants.
There will always be limits.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
It is funny to see that people want their mail agent to become a multi-functional application that has sharing capabilities like calendars, todo's, whatever.
However, the name for those applications isn't a mail programma! Instead we like to call them groupware.
M$ Exchange is a groupware application, so is OpenMail. I'm not using either on of them, instead I choose to install MoreGroupWare to provide all those features to me. But, Sylpheed, on the other hand, is just a (handy) mail agent/news reader.
Alas, my 0.02 Eurocents...
--------
I researched for days looking for a Linux/BSD based Open-source solution for this functionality, and I didn't find anything even remotely close. I tried to get OpenMail, but HP has shut down the download area so you can't get it anymore. Products like Evolution are slick and have a good email interface, but are single-user only calendaring systems, with no (automated) group coordination at all. Frankly, I find this type of functionality critical in a company of even 8 employees: I just don't see how companies can get along without some kind of group calendaring solution.
This is definately a major gap in the overall functionality of Open Source software in general, which is one reason why Exchange/HP OpenMail/Lotus Notes will continue to thrive.
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
OK, the UI for 4.x was pretty awful. 5 is a lot better - although there are some odd things in there. If it confuses you because you're only used to Outlook, well, too bad.
We use Notes throughout for a lot more than just mail/calendar and we don't get many problems at all. As well as support for all that stuff mentioned above, there's also stuff like S/MIME - with the ability to use the NAB as an LDAP server for picking up public keys etc.
Good administrators can keep it running flawlessly (ours don't do that badly either). We've never had an e-mail virus problem - if you install/configure MAPI to use Notes, then yes, that could be a problem, but why on earth would anyone want to do that?
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
U of Kansas needs to either hire some decent admins or put some policies in place. The Southern European Task Force deployed MS Exchange back in 1997 and we had problems for the first few years. But it was because there were no mailbox limits set and they kept running out of disk space. It's all in the admins.
Bill G.: Bring out yer dead!
HP:'Ere you go...
Open Mail:I'm not dead yet
HP:What do yer mean, yer ready to go at any time!
Open Mail: I'm getting better!
Bill G.: I can't take thi$, it'$ not GUI reliant nor i$ it a real threat to my monopoly!
Open Mail: I feel happy! I feel fine!
[THUD]
HP: Thanks a lot!
Users: Do you see them oppressin' me?
(wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean)
Please let me plug two products for a moment. The first is MailOne (descended from DEC's MailWORKS). Except for the Calendar/Groupware functions, it also supports Exchange/Outlook clients (including address book) as well as POP and IMAP (plus a command line and Motif client). Runs on Linux, AIX and Tru64.
The second is Direct21, an email migration tool. If you are trying to get off of OpenMail (or on, I think) this tool will do that quickly and easily.
Both can be found through the website.
324006
A networking group in my clec used to keep a calendar in an MDB database. Once they screwed it up and I had to restore from back up tape. I made them a calendar on our exchange server, they love it and I haven't heard from them in weeks.
What about Lotus Notes? The domino server we run here seems very stable (especially running on our AS/400), and supports loads of features.
The client could use a little refinement in some areas, but overall, it's pretty good.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Hmm, I thought Notes does all those things and more...
Ok, its another proprietory beast, but they all are.
Life is too short for crappy pictures.
We run OpenMail on Linux and it is smooth as silk. I find it to be a fantastic product. What version was it when you were using it? We started w/ 6.0 and are just now migrating to 7.
I couldn't agree more. I've been spending all of my free time putting together documents and a plan to get my company to switch to Linux workstations and Linux/*BSD servers. It's a major multi-national corporation, and if we slowly migrate (successfully), I guarantee it'll be documented in at least a few industry publications.
My point being that if IT managers and developers see articles of success, cost cutting, and other improvements, their interest peaks. Doesn't matter what platform or language it's about. All you need to do is raise their interest so maybe others will try the same, and once it's visible enough, others will come into the market to compete with software like this.
I sure hope my company will look beyond Microsoft... and I'm going to do everything in my power to make management aware of their options.
Developers: We can use your help.
>Except for the Calendar/Groupware functions
/need/ the shared calendar. They have nokia 9110's / wince devices etc and they want it all to synch with outlook. So you can argue with them until you are blue in the face that they won't all use the calendar and this and that but in the end it only takes a few dedicated users on a user group plus one manager to crack and hey ho you need to be evaluating notes and the insight/trade server from bynari otherwise you'll have exchange by the end of the month :-)
And therein lies the rub - and this goes for all the others above who are plugging imap as the solution.
The users say they
I work for a Very Large Organization that uses Openmail in parts of itself, and Exchange in others. When HP announced they were knifing Openmail, this gave some people the excuse to start planning the switchover.
So, now it's not being knifed. I made sure to get this information to my boss, who is going to pass it on to other people today, to read, review, and spit bile over, because now the reason for their pet project going through is negated. And it means we're not going over to Exchange, which is, pretty much, a good thing overall, even if having two different email systems between the parts of the corporation that merged together is a Really Not Very Good Thing.
I love the sound of an entire Fortune 10 corporation's IT management and planning group having a collective stroke, especially when I gave the information that causes the stroke. It really makes my mornings worth it some days.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Agreed. Domino.doc does this on top of Notes/Domino. It even replaces all the Office save dialogs so they have to save it into a repository. For the real sticks in the mud that resist, it even has an explorer looking 'My Domino.doc' icon that they can drag documents into.
I feel it necessary to point out that OpenMail is definitely NOT the *only* platform to support a whole slew of outlook features. Novell's Groupwise 6 product supports despite what MS may want it's clients to believe. In addition to the technical features it is a LOT cheaper than Exchange. For those people who seem to buy into the MS line that Novell is old and outdated, I must laugh at them. Our Netware servers run rings around our NT boxes in terms of uptime and speed. Netware also now runs Apache, and I have heard that they are currently hard at work at porting PHP as well.
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product. It looks like it's coded in C/C++ using a cross-platform library of some sort. Since you can replace the entire UI with something custom-written in Java (and I've known people who've done this) then if people find it that offensive then they can do something about it.
The core product is pretty good though. We have a few hundred in-house developed databases which do everything from discussion to complex workflow. We don't have many problems. Once you've got it set up, being able to pick a bunch of people and a room for a meeting, then hitting "find free time" (although, god knows, this is beyond most project managers) is cool. Oh, and our web stuff runs on it as well.
In response to the AC reply, you can fix the daylight saving. I'll admit we did have a problem with the fact that the states and the UK didn't change at the same time, but that's sorted now.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
the < symbol can be written as <
Use your favorite html book to find some more goodies.
While there are plenty of Open Source programs that do what Exchange does, Exchanges wraps them up into one central program and for me that's a feature.
I think that if you want to kick MS out of the server room, than a Open Source "Exchange Killer" needs to be developed. Until that time it may be worth it for the community to promote OpenMail.
eramm
I'm still holding ot for a ximian evolution server.
As far as I'm concerned, this will have the same problem that Exchange Server has: its coolest feature (calendaring) is supported in the Linux client only.
Our enterprise is about evenly split between Windows users and Mac OS X users-- we recently went through a huge rush of employees buying new iBooks. Any email/messaging/whatever platform that requires a specific client must provide that client for both of those operating systems for it to be useful to our company.
I'm this --> <-- close to giving up and doing the whole thing on the intranet with PHP and Postgresql.
The Admins @ the University of Kansas are probaly a pack of morons.
Where I work we run one of the larger Exchange systems in the country, about 100,000 named and 65,000 active users. There are plenty of problems to go around, but uptime isn't one of them.
The current uptime is about a month, because a pipe burst in the server room, forcing a shutdown. It was up about two months before that.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The premise of the author is that "HP refused to market OpenMail energetically as an Exchange replacement because it was more interested in protecting its relationship with Microsoft"
I think a large part of the problem does not rest all in the admins. I think a larger part of it is how funds are distributed in acadamia. Colleges like to give money to services that will make them money in return. I work at a college and watch them stuff as much money as they can into our continuing education program (non-credit, teaching buisnesses) because it has a very good turnover to it. They also put alot of money into student relations because they need to put that first impression on you. Now by the time they are handing all this money out how much do you think goes to the computer budget? Just enough to make it adequate. Unless you are planning on competing with MIT or something then computers arent going to get the same turn over that placing those funds elsewhere would get. When was the last time you visited a college and said "...geeze, i think i wanna go here because they have a really stable e-mail system". It is just one of those things that are overlooked all too often. Now then compare this to the Army Corps of Engineers, you already said that they have 300 servers, and I doubt that any of them are less than adequate. So they have a pretty good cluster of servers running to load balance etc. Alot of colleges do not have this kind of equipment, even if the admins know we need it and want it. At the college I work at we have one (1) Unix sendmail server running, no clustering so downtime is to be expected. Unfortunatly if you need money at the college level you had better be ready to wait in a very long line.
I'll be the first to admit that Exchange Server and Outlook are one killer combination. However like I have stated several times over the years, I'll be god-damned if I'm going to lock up my company's data like that. The data store is proprietary. The access tools are proprietary. Maybe I'm getting old and crochety but I've been bit before (too many times in fact) to just let it go.
... I suspect with a few more jerks of the costomer's chain by Microsoft this fact will become even more apparent to many more people and companies down the road, when years of corporate records and correspondence are at stake because of soemthing as asinine as a file format change, rather than merely a few tens of documents that are suddenly inconvinient for the secretary to access.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. This is our company's policy as well, both for development products and (most importantly) data: it cannot require a proprietary product that would, under any circumstances, leave us beholden to any vendor, no matter how benevolent. Let's face it, the nicest, most well meaning vendor in the world can, through no fault of their own, be run out of business. Indeed, likely by a much less benevolent vendor who would just love to keep your data hostage *cough*Microsoft*cough*.
On a personal level I was using Applix Word on GNU/Linux. A great, albeit proprietary, software suite for office applications and a wonderful word processor. Not as bloated as Microsoft Word, yet having many of the snazzier features that actually facilitate getting one's work done. I was using it extensively while working on a novel and screenplay I'm writing.
I dumped it.
Not because of any missing features, or price, or anythnig like that, but because, one day, it was reluctant to start. Turned out I'd clobbered a font it wanted when doing a dist-upgrade against debian-testing (the next apt-get fixed it, but th e whole event scared me). I had, for a few minutes, the horrifying feeling that weeks of work had just become as inaccessible to me as the surface of the moon.
Once I got Applix running again I converted everything to HTML, then spent several days cleaning up the crappy HTML Applix generates, into a more readable and maintainable format. Not the handiest format for word processing around, but adequate and, most importantly, very accessible. I will never fear loosing my hard work again. What is more, now that I've finally gotten around to learning some emacs (something I've been procrastinating for years) I find I can work with HTML files as quickly and conviniently as I was the Applix stuff, within the self-imposed limitations that HTML implies.
You are 100%, absolutely correct. Data is by far the most valuable asset on a computer (exceeding the value of the hardware and software combined in most cases), and storing it in anything other than an open, non-proprietary format is a recipe for disaster. It appears this is becoming aparent to industry already
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Personally I don't want to muck up my email with a bunch of unrelated things, like calendars. It probably appeals to the PHB sort, but I can't the use in this stuff. I like my email the good old way, plain text.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
One word: Calendaring.
As much crap as LookOut/Exchange does, there is no other piece of software that seamlessly integrates the groupware automated scheduling functionality that Exchange does. From a New Event window, I can create the event, add users from the Exchange domain, verify their schedules, move the event, confirm it, have a mail sent that shows up to each person with the information and 3 buttons (Accept, Decline, and Accept Conditionally). After I send the Email, I can then track who has opened the Email, who has replied, who is coming, and who isn't.
Evolution is a nice client, but it's a client. All of that work is on the serverside.
Notes is OK, but I need a bigger machien to run it on than I run my data warehouses on. And when it crashes (when, not if), it's gonna be seriously borked.
This is why companies use Exchange/LookOut. Not because it's a great mail client, but because it integrates all of the possible messageing functions a business needs, and talks to additional software like Project to plot out Project Management information.
OpenMail is the only other server-side enterprise messaging system out there that fulfills these needs. It's a decent program, it's not MS, it's significantly cheaper (if for no other reason then you only need 10% of the servers to run it on), and it runs on a more stable OS.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
What I'd be extremely interested in finding is a linux client that will let me use another email application other than Outlook that will interoperate with exchange server 'features' like the shared calendar and address books.
It would make my life much easier.
Does anyone know if there is such a beast?
I use kmail at home, but would =love= to be able to get rid of the windows side of my dual-boot laptop.
This is an ex-parrot!
It's "viruses," goddammit. Not "virii."
I don't know too much about these things, but isn't Lotus Notes (or is Domino the server) a serious competitor to Exchange? And I know Lotus runs on Unix & Linux. Isn't Lotus part of IBM, and most people have seen how much IBM is pushing Linux as a platform. Anyway, obviously I am asking these questions more than making a statement, but I know Lotus is pretty widely used, it runs on Unix, and has many Outlook features, so why is OpenMail "the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange"?
Sounds like we need to start over and have the OpenSource Community creat a new Mail App that does what MS Exchange does only better and more stable..
I too, was looking at deploying OpenMail for a client but voice objections after reviewing HP's support record on this piece of software..
Not to mention the errors and stability issues..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
USACE is contracting most of their IT work to a company called Syntegra. I think most of the WAN is now Syntegra. And they want to start moving the admins of the local sites to syntegra and away from US government employees. I heard the annual contract is something to the tune of $350 million.
that Andover.net is on the rocks -- the attitude that they should buy our product because they should know better.
It's the right attitude for marketing as they aggressively sell their product and CONVINCE users that their product is really better. The wrong attitude for tech's.
Another poster mentioned Dec's MailWorks and its descendant: there yoiu have another case of an excellent product (for its time) that sank because of lack of commitment by the vendor. (Well, you can say that about Digital in general near the end, but MailWorks was one of the earlier signs.)
Sorry, folks, but at the level where OM was pitched, perceptions are very important.
Anyone here use it? Is it any good?
Having worked for them before I know all too well
how they view 'any' product when it comes to thing they ultimatley care about, Money. You guys want openmail to stick around? Start contacting Samsung on a reg basis. Get in contact with the project manager and the developers. TELL them exactly what you want i.e group calender. Offer to beta test new release and return quality bug reports and recommendations. Recommend openmail to your colleges. You see Samsung being a huge company that makes money in so many different ways. When they have a product X that may not have as high a revenue output as they had hoped for the next quarter (not year) they 'will' begin to plan to reduce the resources allocated to X to something else that is proven to make money. They do it and they do it often... Samsung uses 'very' conservative busniness practices. I would have MUCH rather had IBM take over openmail.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
I think it is fair to mention Caldera's Volution Messaging Server, which is marketed as a Linux-based, low cost alternative to Exchange. What is interesting is that a large part of this product is actually open source: Postfix, Cyrus-IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, HORDE/IMP. Caldera's contribution is arguably valuable: they tied the whole mess together, added a user-friendly interface (integration and user friendliness is something open source projects are often horrible at) and added Outlook-compatible calendaring. Still, what is notable is that the open source world is already a long way there. All it needs is packaging and calendaring. Make it work out of the box without the fuss, and you got an Exchange-killer.
..Lotus Notes/Domino, that has all these features, runs on Unix and Linux, and most importantly ACTUALLY WORKS.
'nuff said. f.
I started working with it shortly after our firm moved from v. 4 to 5 (or B.04 to B.05 in HP parlance). And I did read that they fixed the ownership I/O problems in 6.
I suspect that some of our problems were due to using a port that HP regretted having ever made. As I mentioned, we were running it on Solaris and eventually came to the conclusion that we were the only U.S. customers running on that platform. We usually ended up having to get support out of England. We also eventually discovered that HP didn't even do the Solaris port but contracted it out to another shop.
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
IMAP and LDAP have provided us with the means to share email and address books, even with proprietary exchange servers.
What we need is more support for standards for shared calendaring too. Email clients which have calendars should be able to send and receive appointments in vCalendar/iCalendar format, and allow the user to accept the appointment.
Beyond that that, they should support iTIP (RFC 2446) for general group scheduling.
Do any opensource projects support this yet? All the open source projects I have looked at develope their own proprietary methods of sharing calendar information.
Its not _perfect_. but it DOES support group calendering and shared contacts.
The people at my org that wanted exchange are happy with it as a substitute..
www.cybozu.com
We priced OpenMail last year for a enterprise solution. We compared with Exchange, Sendmail, and the Iplanet solution. It was just too expensive. We ended up customizing Sendmail.
- AZ
Let me guess: You don't get promoted much.
Lies about crimes
It runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows. Has a whole array of features: mail, library (document storage), discussion forums, distributed enterprises. It supports the usual set of standards: IMAP, POP3, NNTP, LDAP (not in the Linux version though :( etc.
It's a great product; it's hugely scalable and unbelievably fast. It comes out with monthly to quarterly builds, has a free 50 user key for Linux until 2005. Keys and the RPMs are openly available via ftp.
- Guide-rev1-1.htm , and buried in this ftp (ftp.itrc.hp.com) somewhere are the tarred RPMs.
:)
The Linux version is well supported and comes as an RPM (that works). The message store is fast as hell; the web client is excellent and comes in a few flavors.
The sad thing about Slashdot and what keeps me from posting here is that this is old news. Samsung picked up OpenMail months ago. Why I don't bother to post - well, those of us who don't know the editors know why I don't post.
linuxkey@openmail.com is the email address to obtain Linux keys, there is a useful but slightly dated FAQ about installing HPOM here, http://www.hpc-consulting.com/OM-QS-Configuration
The licensing is kind of freakish and annoying, Exchange administrators enjoy being able to steal seats, but they also enjoy a broken product. I have investigated Exchange 2000, we flat out denied the product as unscalable and useless, and are very glad we used OpenMail.
Death to Carly Fiorina - the crappy CEO of HP (and the organizer of the Lucent spin off from AT&T a COMPLETE failure). She is a bane to HP. She tried to kill OpenMail, fricking SAMSUNG picked it up. Death to Carly. Walter B. Hewlett, David Woodley Packard, Susan Packard Orr and the Previous CEO of HP, Lewis E Platt, ALL HATE YOU CARLY. YOU ARE WRONG AND THE PACKARD FAMILY IS RIGHT. The merger with Compaq is a bastardization. She actually destroyed the HP RPN calculator division because it wasn't growing fast enough! The division makes money - but doesn't grow fast enough. She has no 30 year vision, she is a horrible CEO, and while Steve Jobs of Apple takes a $1 a year salary (and that's what he deserves for not porting OS X to x86), she took 3 Million on bonus this year even though the STOCK TANKED.
I love OpenMail; I love RPN calculators, and long live the real HP (and Agilent). Death to Carly. (Hey, Carly, I dumped my HP stock when I saw you messing around, and I saved myself a lot of money by doing so.)
PS - HewPaq will fail. They *think* they will compete with IBM, hah. Ha. ha. IBM still makes new technology, not fires whole divisions of engineers. And Carly, learn from your FAILED Price Waterhouse endeavor. You suck as a CEO. You are a bad person.
Long live OpenMail!
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
there are lots of Unix-based competitors to Microsoft Exchange. What about sendmail? There are not a lot of Exchange clones with code licensed from Microsoft in them that will behave exactly the same for Outlook clients. Even then there is now Evolution from Ximian. Volution from Caldera, Insight from Bynari, and various web based solutions.
How about an alphabet soup of open standards that does the job better, easier, more efficiently: POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, SSL, CGI, FTP, LDAP, ABCDEFG, ETC?
Its not called competition if you're selling the same product.
I have been looking for some time for a way to replace Exchange Server in my organization. In fact, I would like to replace the NT domain controllers in my organization as well. There are two things limiting me right now.
1) I can't find a way to do shared contacts. What a really want for Christmas is some way to put shared contacts in OpenLDAP and have them accessible (and editable) through MS Outlook clients. I can easily do email address books this way, but I really want full contact records viewable transparently in Outlook.
2) I can't use Samba because it doesn't support trusts between NT Domains. I understand there are some not-yet released projects like Samba-TNG that may be able to do this, but I can't put something not even released in a production environment.
Wishlist: I would also like shared calendaring, but am not holding my breath on that one.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
As is discussed elsewhere you can run iNotes for Outlook and still use your beloved Outlook client...
(Linux support in RNext). Or you can use a browser - for one of the best browser based email systems. Personally I like IMAP clients under linux and the Notes client under winblows.
...OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features.
That is not true (any more). The Calendar product in OpenMail is a version of the Steltor CorporateTime calendar. The Steltor Calendar has an Outlook 'service provider' that allows Outlook to talk to their calendar server. Combine that with SMTP/IMAP4/LDAP, and you've got a close competitor to Exchange..
Take a look at Bynari's Insight product... for another 'possbility'.. Calendar-server less calender service!
Oh, one thing about OpenMail.. it IS standards based, as long as you don't mind running an X.400 mail system with an SMTP gateway...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Did I say I worked in U of Kansas? I've personally seen and managed Exchange servers with an uptime of months without reboots. So anytime I hear that someone's server keeps crashing it means bad hardware, bad admins or politics is influencing proper administration of the servers. For example management says no mailbox limits and the server crashes because it runs out of disk space.
This is great news considering OpenMail was the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange.
Except of course for Lotus Domino, which thousands of corporations run quite happily on Solaris, Linux, and all IBM servers (AIX, OS/400, OS/390).
I personally hate Domino (and Exchange), but saying that OpenMail is the only serious competitor to Exchange when there are so many Domino and Notes users is incorrect.
--Mythos
"Any email/messaging/whatever platform that requires a specific client must provide that client for both of those operating systems for it to be useful to our company."
So what are you using?
I ask because we have such a split as well. Though the Win machines probably outnumber the Macs 2 to 1. We all use Exchange/Outlook for mail, calendaring and contact management. Our biggest issue is some customization I've done in Outlook that simply doesn't show up on the Macs and it's probably more important to them than to most of the PC users.
But it works for us.
Shhh...don't tell anyone...but yeah, MS products and "it works" in the same post.
Consigned to flames of woe.
So what are you using?
Um... an IMAP server and calendar.yahoo.com.
The truth is, we have no central scheduling app. We have a bunch of admins with those big spiral-bound calendar books like they use at doctor's offices to write your appointment down in, and then the little card, which you lose, like, immediately, like it doesn't even make it into your pocket somehow, and you miss your appointment and then you get the statement from your HMO that says they paid for the visit anyway, and you wonder if you've just accidentally committed insurance fraud.
there are lots of Unix-based competitors to Microsoft Exchange.
What about sendmail?
Bad example. Sendmail is one of the most non Unix pieces of software ever, in terms of modular and secure design. More to the point, its at best clone on the Exchange Internet Mail Connector. An MTA != A groupware app.
There are not a lot of Exchange clones with code licensed from Microsoft in them that will behave exactly the same for Outlook clients.
Not, but there are clones which will behave exactly (as in, equivalent functionality and no staff retraining) the same for Outlook clients.
Evolution from Ximian.
Yes indeed. Exchange connectors for Exchange5.5 and 2000 will be avaliable at the start of next year. They do all the X400 based stuff Outlook and Exchange do, including group calendaring, unsending messages, etc.
Volution from Caldera
I thought this was a system management tool and a repackaging of postfix, an imap server, and a couple of other bits and pieces. Again, an MTA and MDA are not groupware. Though it it has OpenLDAP and more importantly some way of doing the calendaring stuff it would be close. Corect me if this is the case.
Insight from Bynari
Indeed. Insight also does all the Exhcange - > Outlook specific stuff. The client is also free as in beer, so download it and give it a try. it does seem a little clunky tho, especially when compared to evolution.
Steltor
You didn't mention Steltor that seems to be the best of the Exchange comaptible groupware servers. I have yet to implement it myself but from what I understand its much better maintained and works better with existing Unix services than the others.
35,000 users / 300 servers => 117 users per server. I could do that with PostFix and 300 matchbox '386es! IBM have TWO MILLION USERS on ONE zSeries box, no sweat, for much less than the software cost alone of running two million Exchange clients. Now that is `scales well'!
Damn Microsoft and their abuse of terminology! An `embedded' system should not require 64 or 128MB of RAM and gigabytes of disk!PS: visit Bynari for another Exchange alternative, including alternative clients.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What can I say? ``Bynari?'' Visit http://www.bynari.com/ (no commercial connection).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Which is uniquie because it's stunningly responsive for Microsoft.
Consider IE's recent broken-MIME-handling vulnerability, in which you could get an EXE file silently run by shipping it from your webserver with a mime type like audio/x-midi; it's been in IE for at least six years and it took Microsoft three months from the initial public outcry to the fix.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
FYI, about a year ago I posted an entry in Webmin's wishlist about an easy HP OpenMail configuration module. Sam Przyswa started to code about a month after. I kept in touch with him for a while, but now I have no news.
I believe an easy configuration could make network admins interested in the product, which I am sure could easily replace costly Exchange Servers in Small/Medium Enterprises. Many IT managers I know don't want to hear about OpenMail because they would have to cope with Unix command line and read new documentation. Really, this would change if OpenMail could be easily set up.
It's too bad I can't get in touch with Sam again, I just hope that some kind spirit would help in developing such a useful Webmin module...
Cheers people.
Language is what makes us different from primitive animals, and bureaucrats.
Many a folk complain that the UI in Notes uses many a convention that errs from the well trodden path of M$. Well, of course! Notes clients had to accomodate OS/2, Mac, Win 3.1, et cetera.
And yes, the server is very stable now. But it is only as stable as the OS. Run the Domino server on top of Wintendo and what do you get? Run in on an IBM s390 machine and...well, you get what you pay for.
Oh, by the way, it runs very well under Red Hat, too.
Check out www.notesbench.org
They have all the stats about how many users you can stuff into one Notes server.
And yes, some organizations do have this many users per box.
"The truth is, we have no central scheduling app."
I guess we're really in the same boat. Except that my aforementioned Outlook "customization" *is* a scheduling app! It's a custom form published to a public folder.
Of course, the only people who can use it are folks who are either here at the plant or "dialed in" through PCAnywhere. Or the Macs running Virtual PC. Or you can get a stripped down version through Outlook Web Access. Or the Mac people can go over to a Windoze machine. (Which they hate, and I don't blame them being a former MacHead myself.)
So we're running your basic Exchange/Outlook fiasco that is, yes, the technical equivalent of the fatass notebook stuffed with post-its and ragged business cards. I tell the users that the best backup they have is the laser printer down the hall...
So. You know. I feel your pain.
Consigned to flames of woe.