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.

Comments

Re:The Chicken and the Egg

[alen]

Exchange is actually one of Microsoft's best products. Unlike the NT registry and SAM database it's based on LDAP and a dumbed down SQL database engine. In addition to the workgroup features like calendars, team folders, public folders it has a ton of other great features.

One is called Deleted Item Retention Time. You set the number of days and when a user deletes an email it's not really deleted for the specified days. If he realizes he made a mistake restoration is from the Outlook client and takes seconds saving the admin time from going to the back up tapes. For businesses like law firms it's a life saver since they are required to keep records and emails for five years or so. They simply buy a lot of storage and set a deleted item retention item of 1600 days or so and it's a secondary back up.

A second feature is single instance storage. You send a file out to 50 people it gets stored once in the database saving you storage space.

Then third party back up programs have a feature called brick level back up's where you can back up individual mailboxes. If you delete on by accident restoration is simple. Exchange 2000 has this feature out of the box.

Exchange is scalable. It's overkill for small offices and I've supported it for a government agency with 35,000 employees and 300 Exchange servers. It scales very well.

A good Exchange anti-virus program like Trend Micro Scanmail 3.7 has file blocking features and greatly eases the management of your anti-virus strategy.

Since email is in a database searching for messages is easy.

And the global address book is great. Users don't have to keep their own huge address book and greatly minimizes the calls to the admin of I sent out this email but it came back returned and asking you to track down an email address.

Sure you can cobble together a few products for most of the functionality and perform some of the usability features manually, but you'll spend more time while the CEO is asking you to restore an email from a year ago.

Re:Outlook but not exchange?

[killmenow]

We use OpenMail. I read about the discontinuing development last February with much sadness.

When I heard about the deal with Samsung a few weeks ago (we got a letter), I was pleased. I had already read what Bruce Perens had said about open sourcing it...it just wasn't going to happen. He would've like it to (as would I) but there was too much code licensed from third parties, etc. that would have to be re-written before it could be open-sourced, and the whole point was: they weren't developing it anymore.

At any rate, when I came on board at my present employer, the front end client (Outlook) was deeply embedded into the environment here. I am still working on weening people off of it. But the great thing about OpenMail is that I can let them keep Outlook if they want. Believe it or not, when dealt with properly, Outlook is not so bad. The end-users love it. They really don't know and don't care what happens behind the scenes.

OpenMail gives me the flexibility to use any IMAP/LDAP client I want, or the web interface if I so choose, or Outlook. It lets the Outlook users have a system directory, shared folders, and shared calendars...all nice features...without buying into Exchange. It also lets me control what the Outlook users can do. Every time they connect to the server, I can send them a MOTD, reset their security settings to my way, and force all incoming/outgoing mail to be plain text if I so please. I can limit the size of their mailboxes, and I can set up gateways to just about every other type of messaging system I want. I can scan for viruses in attachments at the server and force Outlook to block all attachments of an executable type...whether the server detects a virus or not.

As for the administrative tools, the command line tools are the bomb, but take some getting used to...and the GUI admin client basically sucks.

Overall, I love OpenMail and was glad to pay for the licenses. We have about 100 users hitting the server via Outlook, Netscape Mail, the Web interface, and we even have a whole department with old DOS PCs, accessing their mail via a packet driver and PC-PINE!!! (They refuse to upgrade because it works for them and as the adage goes...if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

Killer Feature = Shared Calendaring

[EricLivingston]

We have a small company of about 8 people and while our Web site is BSD and our time tracking system is Linux, I've recently had to bring up a Win2k Server box with Exchange 2000 for the SOLE purpose of being able to do group calendaring - that is, the ability to:

• Create a new meeting
• Bring up a list of employees and check their schedule availability
• Schedule the meeting for an open slot on everyone's calendar
• Invite all the participants through an email
• Have those invitees respond to the mail by accepting or declining the meeting
• Have their responses automatically tallied by the server, allowing me to log in and check on the invite status at any time
• Move and/or cancel the meeting, with automatic update emails sent to all participants which will update their own calendars at the push of a button

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.

Why companies use Exchange and nothing else

[TBone]

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.