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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?"
What is this, a linux site?
Is there something special about Aug 3?? First it was Real with Helix going GPL, and now this! :-D.
#diff -r opengroupware openexchange
IBMs Java Database and now this . . . if I didnt know better, Id say that theres something of an open source release conspiracy going on. . .
Now Sun won't have to buy them, they can just fork them :)
Open Source Java DAO Generator
They dont give browser specifics, I wonder what they actually consider 'a major browser'.
Can these open-sourced alternatives be a reasonable solution?
Now, if only Doom 3 was GPL'ed
Just wait a couple of years, until noone wants the Doom3 engine, due to one of "Quake4:Universe" or "Lets go back to Castle Wolfenstien Again, I Dont think we Killed Everything Yet" is released and ID can no longer make money off of the D3 engine.
Carmack has always been pretty good about throwing out his old technology to the hands of the public.
I like the screen shots. For those who have used it, can I use an alternative browser other than Mozilla? I still find the Lotus Notes interface more intuitive and simple because it uses tabs as in tabbed browsing. In a case, the browser is implemented as another tab.
Now that the entry costs aren't the same as Exchange, I think it will end up being a little more competitive. I settled on Horde because Openexchange was just as much as MS Exchange for our small office.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I need a replacement for an Exchange 200 server. I still need calendaring/task functionality for Outlook clients. Currently I'm looking at Mailserver from Kerio. Anybody here have any experience/thoughts/advice to share? Help me make the case for an Open Source replacement for my hated Exchange box! I'd also appreciate any offline discussion as well.
This guy is way out there
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.
OPEN-XCHANGE(TM) is a collaboration platform that integrates open source and proprietary servers and clients. Accessible through a common web browser, OPEN-XCHANGE(TM) allows users to share e-mail, calendar, tasks, threaded discussions and documents originating from both proprietary and open source systems. For customers who need seamless integration with a Windows client, commercially available connectors will be released later in 2004.
Same problem as always, move along. Like the Bynari Insight connector, the magic bit is still closed. Interestingly SUSE have a connector called iSLOX for their OpenExchange product, which is a free download; perhaps these two added together will finally be the CAL-free-groupware-with-Outlook-as-the-client we've been looking for?
Your help-fu is strong today!
Opengroupware actually was a big hype, but they failed to deliver what everyone was hoping for: a complete open-source and free groupware server and client, with all popular features such as folder sharing, ACLs, free/busy, etc...
The problem with OpenGroupware, is that except for the web interface, there is no client. You can pay for an Outlook connector, yes, but it is rather expensive (no trial version available), and, more importantly, it did not prove very reliable in my testing. The web client, is not very impressive either. The community around OpenGroupware seems rather limited, I have the impression that all work is still done by one developer of Skyrix.
SuSE OpenExchange on the other hand, does have a very nice user interface. The Outlook connector works fine, and with KDE 3.3 coming out in a few weeks, we will have a free client under Linux. I have heard a connector for Evolution is currently in development. AFAIK Suse OpenExchange lacks ACL based folder sharing, hopefully this feature will be added soon.
And then there's Kolab, another competitor for this market. Currently, Kolab 2 is in development. It seems that it will offer a lot of features that people missed in Kolab 1, such as ACL based folder sharing, and server side generated free/busy. Problem with Kolab is currently also the lack of a native Linux client. Kontact 3.3 will finally have support for Kolab 1, but that's not very impressive, knowing that Kolab 2 will already be out at the end of this year.
Anyway, interesting times are coming!
The challenge faced when trying to move from Exchange is the tight integration between Outlook, Exchange and Active Directory. As the user authenticates to AD when accessing Exchange over RPC(enc. in HTTPS if desired), defined in the Outlook MAPI profile it is a single user instance. The competitive products do not this ability for obvious reasons, and for anyone looking at large scale Exchange support environments that is daunting. If the site does not have Exchange/AD then over alternatives are more attractive, but when faced with AD/Exchange 2003/Outlook 2003 and throw in Sharepoint Services (free Win2K3 service) then it's an interesting beast to try and tackle. Competing on a FOSS vs $$$ argument becomes very hard when the support/value proposition is in favour of the $$$ solution.
http://www.billworkgroup.org/billworkgroup/home
Praise God! That was the flea that kept me from using OpenExchange. Now I have a shot in hell of using this instead of MS Exchange.
Thank you!
Don't know about OSS, but to avoid Exchange, find out all serious competitors, OSS or not, search for facts about them, and tell your CTO to analyze them closely and carefully. Try to stress him as much as possible that as you currently do not have any groupware (assuming this as you only mentioned Sendmail), the cost moving to Exchange would include mostly licensing and HW costs -- but, if you ever want to move off from Exchange, it will be very expensive, as Exchange's data format is neither open nor standards-based.
Try to convince him that whatever your solution will be, it's source code must either be available for competitors, or there must be an otherwise standardised way to convert data off if necessary. Otherwise you will just have yet another MS Office-like situation, where you're firmly locked into a single vendor and are forced to pay whatever MS wants you to pay -- even if the competitors' products would be able to handle your basic documents, you'd still have to rewrite all your existing VBA stuff (for example), causing huge migration costs.
In short: one of your primary criterias when choosing software vendors should be making sure, that you're never migrating to something, from which you can't cheaply and easily enough migrate off later, if that would ever became necessary. Try to make this fact clear for him and forget all unnecessary OSS advocating, and you're much more likely not to end up being an Exchange administrator.
Of course, if that CTO of yours is a PHB and already lured by MS marketing sirens, he'll probably not listen anyway... but then, that's life.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Not to echo half of your previous replies, but it depends on what your CTO wants. Most manager-types I've consulted for have this idea that there's this magical technology somewhere that makes them suddenly understand their business like they did when it had 20 employees. And for whatever reasons they think that software is a groupware suite.
In my experience, Exchange commits some design sins that are so grevious that there are almost no good situations in which to use it:
I've consulted for quite a few managers who really really wanted Exchange. In each case I told them they didn't need it. It can be a real blow to a manager's ego to have to accept that he doesn't run an "enterprise", but in 99% of the cases that's true.
Exchange is a mediocre MTA, a slightly sub-mediocre contact manager, and a slightly better-than-mediocre calendaring system with some glue scripting that sometimes works to tie them all together but often doesn't. Its sweet spot performance-wise is from about 100 to about 300 users broken into 10-15 organizational groups, working on a single VLAN, transporting no more than about 20,000 messages a day total. If your organization fits those criteria, Exchange may well be a good solution for you. If not, I can tell you from my clients' bitter experience and my very expensive overtime cleaning up after it that Exchange WILL end up costing you a lot more money than almost any other solution.
Most managers who want to use Exchange want a public calendar, a big contact database, and IMAP email. That's not rocket science. There are outstanding mail transport agents, contact databases, and public calendars; if you can't get a developer to pipe them together for *much* less than an exchange license, you're looking in the wrong places for developers. Plus, your support costs will be much less with that solution since you don't have the single, concentrated point of frequent failure that Exchange becomes.
All's true that is mistrusted
A couple of days hacking and the recently released connector from ximian and bingo a connector will be born.
Got Code?
Actually, the lastest patch adds spell checking in the web email client.
It's lovely and intuitive software with a few odd bits here and there, mostly related to the fact that non-native English speakers designed the interface. I even heard a Novell exec refer to it as "Germanglish," which is about right.
Then again, with it open sourced, we can all get in and fix that little stuff, right?
I'm rolling two slox servers out right now, and most users have been very impressed.
GPL'ing it should accelerate the development cycle, which you can see here:
http://devel.slox.info/
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.
Thats an interesting observation. I too have seen stuff happen that was like stated in both posts. It seems that the average msce flunky can't really admin exchange right and some shops try to not have an admin there for it at all.
exchange needs to be played with from time to time. In my experience an exchange system just left there to do its job will have all sorts of isues. You can't treat it like a postfix or sendmail system and set it up and be done with it untill your change users. (well maybe if you not using any of the features it has outside mail) the funny thing is that an organization big enough to use it should have someone on staff running it. I just saw a law firm get toasrted out of 150+ thousand to install an exchange server and upgrade all thier workstations (about 30). To date knowbody is using the shared contacts, calendering or anythign. I stongly feel they would have had a better return on investment if they would have scaped thinking about productivity and bought some rental property somewere. This doesn't count for the now 7 times in 3 motnhs the system has went down for no explainable reason with at least 3 different consulting firms looking into it while a samba box with postfix running jumps to the rescue durring downtimes (that was in place before the upgrade).
unlike that place i have seen exchange run without hickups at other sites too. it seems to be about a 60-40 split in who will have problems.
It is not GPL'd, it has a BSD lic. But it's source is freely avail. And it is FREE.
Have you actually read the qmail licence? Indeed, can you even find the licence for qmail? The closest thing I can find for a qmail licence is:
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html
Very restrictive licence. Noone is allowed to distribute qmail modified in *any* way, you cant even change the install paths, you *must* accept DJB's unrelated-to-SMTP ideas on where software should be installed. You cant add patches, etc..
Qmail is not Free Software, and a maintainance nightmare because of the licence.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Very very true. As a MTA, I found the combination of postfix, courier imap, amavisd, anomy, procmail working very well. Central contacts might be done with ldap. But I still have to find a solution for central calendering, preferably one that works with a webinterface and outlook, and preferably a single app, instead of something intergrated with the mta, contacts and kitchen sink. Any suggestions? Most of the groupware solutions I have looked into were monolitic intergrated apps.
I tried an early version of DBMail and found sufficient problems to build my own - it's not very hard to hack a postfix delivery agent to store data in a database and not much harder to hack a POP3 or IMAP server to get it out again. I haven't tried a recent version.
Experience, though, is that storing e-mails in PostgreSQL isn't a particularly wonderful idea. There's a high ratio of insert/delete operations to read operations and this causes rapid growth in both database and index sizes. It's a bit of a slow operation to vacuum and reindex the databases regularly. Also, archiving and restoring mail for individual users is a problem unless you write software to do it.
In retrospect, the file system is a better candidate for storing e-mail than a database!
Also, I generally tend towards the opinion that the last thing the world needs is *another* implementation of the IMAP protocol. IMAP is badly designed, badly documented and almost impossible to implement in an interoperable fashion. If you stick to a "mainstream" implementation, it's more likely to have been tested against a variety of clients.
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
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I like Tclhttpd because it's a webserver implemented as a TCL package. I can hack, override, or out-in-out reimplement any chunk of the system. (For instance, I rewrote a chunk of the mime handler to deal with cases where a file is being pulled from an index and has to be renamed for the client.)
We are also a postfix shop. (I'm in the middle of migrating our Email setup from Gentoo to OS x.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
We're in the opposite boat. 110 user medical practice. We use Exchange 2000, which required us to upgrade our site from a Domain to Active Directory.
1) Exchange is expensive per chair. In our situation, Medicare cuts have tightened our budget enough I'd rather spend the money somewhere else.
2) Exchange is hardware intensive. While that server is also a home directory server, I really wouldn't care to run many more users on a single server, while with alternatives (postfix for example), I'd feel comfortable running a much higher user-to-server ratio.
3) There are just certain things that require mucking about with the Active Directory internals. It's unsupported by MS, but the only way to do certain things. I'll grant some of our issues here are due to having to run in a mixed domain/ADS mode for a while.
4) We'd still require running Exchange behind a mail filtering incoming/outgoing server. Take our bias with a bit of salt as you will, we also don't allow any MS product to touch the outside world without filters/firewalls/scanning in place.
Very few companies use all the functionality that Exchange provides. Better to look at alternatives. Do remember that for most cases, you are also tying yourself into Outlook and all the problems that entails, so that should factor in as well.
In any case, expect a heck of a lot more handholding of the service than you have with sendmail.
Good luck!
Maybe, maybe not. Here's a link.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.