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?"

Comments

Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu

[Thundersnatch]

Your experiences do not match mine.

1. We have run Exchange since version 5.0 on many servers, and have never had an information store become corrupted. It simply does not happen "frequently", at least on decent hardware. Exchange 2000 and 2003 simply have never gone down on us, ever.
2. Contacts are NOT stored separately from any of the other private mailbox storage in the Exchange system. Public folders are separated from mailboxes. Exchange 2000 introduced the "stream store" for storing messages from each type of store in native RFC2822 format, but everything appears logically the same to the user (and the backup software). And in Exchange 2000/2003, you can have multiple independent stores. Taking one down does not take down the others in the Storage Group. Do you really know anything about Exchange, or do you just sell your services against it?
3. Not sure why you consider integration "bad design", especially since those functions are all necessary for a business communications tool. You need your contacts handy to do messaging, and you need your calendar handy too. Clicking all over the place and logging into different apps to acomplish this is stupid. There are plenty of 3rd party applications that integrate with exchange. The API and object model suck, I'll grant you that, but they're publicly documented and certainly no more convoluted than those provided by Notes.
4. Yes, surprise, Exchange costs money. Quite a bit for large multi-server organizations. All those evil commmercial software vendors price software this way. But since Exchange has no true competeition in the OSS community, it will probably continue to do well.

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.

Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu

[arivanov]

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).