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

Two linux stories in a row

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, a linux site?

Re:Two linux stories in a row

[damien_kane]

Scheduled? Ha!

Why, in my day, Windows rebooted often and randomly, and that's the way we likes it...
Stability? bah, who needs it?

How do they compare?

[Anonymous Coward]

#diff -r opengroupware openexchange

Re:How do they compare?

[spacecowboy420]

OpenGroupware sucks, eGroupware has many more features. I have had a difficult time with angel mail (egroupware mail component) handling courier imap CORRECTLY though. The integration of the fud forum, and ticketing agent is especially nice. Opengroupware would be nice, but if you compare other open groupware offerings it is lacking (i.e. phpGroupware/ eGroupware). Opengroupware also depends on the postgreSQl db backend, if you already have mysql running, tough. Although Opengroupware handles courier IMAP better, it seems to muck up the dates so sorting your mail sucks. Opengroupware also has limited functionality. It does like 5 things well. To be honest, openexchange will be a welcome suite to evaluate.

Real life reviews / experiences would be helpful

[weave]

Our new CTO is making noises about us possibly ditching sendmail/linux and moving to Exchange. I'd really like to hear opinions about alternatives. He swears his mind is not made up already!

Can these open-sourced alternatives be a reasonable solution?

Re:What a day!

[Karzz1]

It probably has quite a bit to do with the Linux World Expo that is going on this week -- A venue for companies to make announcements about their Linux products.

OpenExchange vs Opengroupware vs. Kolab

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Cool Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love the text in one of the screenshots!

Hi Manuel,

Do not forget to rent a car for your new wife :)

Regards,

Manuel Kraft

Heh, I even like the part where the option 'Request read receipt' is checked.

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.