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SUSE Openexchange Under GPL
Gustavo writes "'Netline Internet Service announced today that it would contribute its OPEN-XCHANGE Server, the core technology underlying the industry's top-selling Linux-based groupware, collaboration, and messaging application, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).' How does it compare to OpenGroupware.org which was open sourced a year ago?"
It looks like everything SuSE had closed off before is now GPL'ed. Now, if only Doom 3 was GPL'ed... ;)
Uh... openexchange can act as a server for Outlook? Many /. geeks just don't get that people use exchange not for email, but for all the other stuff it does - group calendars+meeting appointments, resource reservations, shared address book etc.
Yes, packages exist for every individual exchange+outlook does in the open source world. No, they don't work together.
A couple of days hacking and the recently released connector from ximian and bingo a connector will be born.
Got Code?
I'm sorry but SLOX is not anywhere near a decent groupware system. Nice try. My vote (and my money) has gone to Exchange4Linux. I've evaluated SLOX, Samsung Contact, OpenExchange or whatever the hell the humongous OO-branded thing is, the various web-based crap out there and probably half a dozen other's I've since forgotten. E4L's server-side is open source, actively developed and the Outlook client is reasonably priced. The backend runs entirely inside of PostgreSQL and is written in Python. MTA interface is agnostic but documented with Postfix. non-outlook people can access the entire system through IMAP, although that is still not quite there.
As I said everything is stored in a PG database -- I can access any part of the system through SQL and it's stored to make Outlook happy which means no weird-ass compatibility problems that I've seen in every other client. The weird-ass issues I encounter with E4L and Outlook revolve around parts that are still in development. :-)
SLOX is top-selling groupware? Forget it.
Your experiences do not match mine.
There are plenty of huge, multi-national Exchange enterprises out there. Some have hundreds of thousands of users, and 5000 or more per server. They're not all having the same trouble with the product you claim to have experienced. Maybe you just don't know as much about Exchange as you think you do.
You missed a few:
1. Serious problems with logging. In fact from the point of view of people spoiled by the sendmail and exim level of logging the Exchange logging sucks rocks through a thin straw
2. Joint server/client limitation (to some extent it is an Outlook problem) that one mailbox is limited to 2G. Dunno if that is still the case in 2003, but 2000 + Outlook screws your mail magestically once you hit 2G limit. F.E. My mailbox is currently around 5G. It is on courier + imap + mozilla which are quite happy trucking along with it. If it was on Exchange + Outlook it would have been corrupted long ago.
3. Loses mail with no trace if left to send versus slow senders on a congested network. No bounce is returned to the user. Basically if you are using Exchange 2000 (dunno about 2003) without a front-end relay you will have to learn to live with the fact that some mail will be lost. Probability depends on many things varying from around 0.01 to 0.5%. Combined with the wonderful logging this becomes really entertaining for the support people.
4. Similarly, loses mail with no trace when receiving it on a SMTP channel (not exchange). Once again while the probability for this to happen is not very high, it still happens often enough for it to be a business problem. I have seen it on 5.x, I have seen it on 2000 as well. As anecdotal as it may sound, I have nearly lost my residence status in the country I worked a few years ago because the company exchange server lost all the documents which HR had to use for the work permit application.
5. Basically, it is a very good groupware and SME solution for internal communcation. That is what it has been designed for and it is not going anywhere without a redesign and splitting into components (which MSFT is not willing to do for political reasons) or external systems to assist it.
Based on experience in dealing with it, on its own it is not suitable for business use if you need full record of all of your email transactions with customers and other people who do not communicate with Exchange. If you are doing any business by email I would suggest to look into something else or use it in a combination with a good mail relay (sendmail, exim, postfix) which has proper logging and audit trail of what was sent, when, where and how. Exim 4 is possibly the best as it is the easiest one to implement copying all mails in transit to a suitable audit store (besides the exellent logging).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Note -- I am not a Microsoft apologist, but I do think that the combination of Exchange and Outlook is vastly superior to anything I have seen in the *nix world. Please allow me to address your 4 points. Please don't think of my comments as a flame, they are not meant to be. I just want to point out that Exchange is not as poorly constructed or difficult to administer as people make it out to be.
1) All the public emails are stored in a single information store file... So that's 4 files that hold all of your organization's "crucial" information. These files break easily; in my experience about once a year on a good RAID and much more often on bad hardware or more than about 500 users. At that point your options are rolling back to a backup (which, btw, requires a special expensive plugin for any backup software suite) or paying data recovery people a few hundred dollars to get it back.
If you have more than 100 users you should be running the Enterprise Edition which gives you the ability to house multiple information stores. If one store breaks, use the MS utilities (which are very good, BTW) to fix it or use the recovery store to feature in Exchange 2003. As for your "expensive" backup agent, look at the prices, not more than $1000-$3000. A drop in the bucket compared to the rest of an enterprise ready backup system.
2) Moreover, when even one of those stores go down, the other stores usually stop working. So if your contacts store gets corrupted, you can't use your calendar or send email.
Do you even know how to configure a proper Exchange org? I have to assume that any sizeable Exchange org with have more than 1 server or info store. If properly configured (it really isn't hard) the only people that will experience downtime are those on the affected store.
3)They incorporated email, calendaring and contact management into a single software package. Bad design in principle, but fine. The worse problem is there's no way to extend it to work with the rest of your particular fulfillment chain. Want to do some lead management with your contacts? Host a local NNTP server you want indexed in a public folder as though it were a thread of emails? Want all calendar entries to display in the home office's local time? Tough... pay through the nose for MS's CRM solution, because there's no way to write one yourself without having to reimpliment most of what Exchange does.
I can't argue with much of this, but keep in mind that there are plenty of Exchange API's to work with. How do you think that so many commercial products (Antivirus, Blackberry) do it? If looking for a good CRM, consider Interface Interaction (or several others). They all tie into Exchange very nicely.
4)You can't distribute its components (mail, calendaring, contacts, etc.) on your network without a lot of handwaving and paying for a lot more licenses.
Almost true, they tie users, not services, to a particular server.
Now think of some of the benefits... A first-class web interface (I can't think of much that competes with OWA 2003, even with non-IE browsers), compatibility with almost any device a corporate user can throw at it, great calendar and contact integration, a workable permissions model, and the knowledge that a real corporation will support it if something goes wrong. I support over 30 clients running everything from Exchange 5.5 - 2003. Many of those clients are well over 2000 users, yet I have NEVER had more than 12 hours downtime on a single information store (roughly 75-100 users). Personally, I would love to see a good alternative to Exchange that works on Linux. SuSE OpenExchange always looked promising, so I'll keep one eye on this release for my SMB clients and the other eye on the new Groupwise for my larger clients.