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Mozilla and Google — Exchange Killers At Last?
phase_9 writes "The latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird may still only be in beta but already the user community have started creating an extensive set of viable Exchange killers. One such example is the latest mashup between Thunderbird and Google Calendars, providing bi-directional syncing of calendar information from both the client and internet. How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current imposes?"
Evolution replaces Outlook, not Exchange.
For those who don't know what Evolution is. Screenshots.
Speaking as someone at a company who tried very hard for a very long time to 'replace' exchange with OSS, i'll tell you it can't be done. Any kind of mix&match of software and jerryrigging of protocols may, kinda, sorta come close to offering approximately the same sort of capabilities of exchange. However, there will be caveats and gotchas, and all sorts of limitations that joe-users won't put up with or understand having to put up with.
Remember, you have exchange for the company environment, not for just your dev team. And as hard as it may be to admit, exhange+outlook actually functions very well when it's set up and admin'd properly.
One other thing: i know the whole setup is expensive, in terms of hardware and software and licenses. One can argue, that if your company can't afford the outlay for a working exchange environment, your company doesn't need it, and it would probably be a waste of time trying to replicate its features. So call a spade a spade; say you want OSS shared calendars, tasks, e-mail, whatever. But that alone is certainly NOT an exchange replacement.
The idea of replacing Exchange is not targeted at home users, it's targeted at companies.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We'd LOVE to be able to provide an open calendar that can be used by staff and students alike but we won't be relying on a 3rd party to host everything. Much as I'd love to see Exchange finally gone from our campus it won't happen until we get either an appliance or software that we can host in our data center.
There's not really any particular reason that you'd have to use Google calendar to host your calendar. Sunbird and the Thunderbird/Lightning thing work with the iCal format, which you can host on any webDAV server...if you want a web-accessible component, just use a PHP Calendar that also reads iCal. That's what we do at work...Using Google just makes things a little easier.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.
These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT.
There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution. (Disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy there, but I completely agree with them in terms of keeping things centrally hosted.)
In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid. There's not just the issue of Google policy, there are all sorts of other issues such as the hundreds or thousands of miles of fiber, all suscptible to a good backhoeing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I recently upgraded our company from R5 (very irritating) to Lotus Domino 7.0.2, and I'm amazed at how far Notes/Domino has come along. Here are a few things that have really impressed me:
- The Domino server actually runs very nicely on older hardware.
- While we're currently running our Domino servers on Windows 2000, I'm planning to move them to either Linux or Solaris 10 once it comes time to buy new hardware. Domino offers that flexibility.
- The Notes mail and calendaring in 7 is actually quite good.
- The web client is very nice, and works perfectly with Firefox.
- I've configured our Domino mail server to also work with POP3 and IMAP, and I have users reliably accessing their Domino mail with:
1) Notes clients on PCs and Macs
2) Various browsers on various OSs.
3) Palm and Windows Mobile Devices.
4) Microsoft Outlook clients.
I'm just really impressed with how flexible it is. I'm also currently configuring a Blackberry Enterprise Server to integrate with our Domino mail infrastructure. That will apparently allow push e-mail and calendaring to Blackberry devices, as well as Palm, Symbian, and select Samsung devices running the Blackberry connect client.
If you were ever put off by older versions of Notes, it's worth another look IMHO. And the public Beta of Notes 8 is very impressive, indeed.