Quality Open Source Calendaring / Scheduling?

Jim R. Wilson writes "In past jobs, I've used Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and Google Calendar for handling business appointments. I'm sorry to say it, but I have yet to see a rival to Microsoft's scheduling features. On Slashdot I have occasionally read rumblings that there are better open source email and calendaring solutions out there. Can anyone substantiate this claim? What are the OSS alternatives? Can any compete with Microsoft's resource scheduling?"

Comments

no

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:no

[Crispin Cowan]

Who ever moderated the parent as "troll" didn't think about it very hard. A simple "no" in answer to this question is actually quite accurate. That is sad, and there is a great deal more to be said on the matter, but it is the truth.

Re:no

[rsborg]

Who ever moderated the parent as "troll" didn't think about it very hard. A simple "no" in answer to this question is actually quite accurate. That is sad, and there is a great deal more to be said on the matter, but it is the truth.

Perhaps the troll rating was because there's no easy way to moderate something as "incorrect". Troll/Overrated are the only two real options, unless the moderator wants to give up modding this topic and reply to the post (as to why I feel "No" is wrong, see other replies further down)

Also, "No" is very much NOT informative nor is it insightful. I think the current moderation of the GP post is inaccurate, becuase there is no real meat to the reply. A one-word "informative" "answer" is neither. It could well be the beginning of one, but is incomplete.

Re:no

[mapsjanhere]

It's correct, and it includes all the necessary information without wasting any electrons. Perfect example of an informative post imho.

Re:no

[sammyo]

Exactly, there's even a book about the biggest most heavily funded effort: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software but download it and try it out!

Re:no

[jdparkinson]

Jim, take a look at Thunderbrid with Lighting or Sunbird. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/ The community is making great progress. It may not be everything you want but I think you will find it to be pretty good and getting better all the time. Your input will also help make it better.

Haven't found much

[cbreaker]

I haven't found much, either. It's either some half-done web-based solution or it's got seriously missing features.

Evolution works great with Exchange; all they need now is to create their own back-end =)

PS. Public folders have gone away in Exchange 2007; big mistake if you ask me. It was a selling point for Exchange.

Re:Haven't found much

[Wicked187]

I believe the removal of Public Folders in Exchange 2007 is a result of integration with Sharepoint. The functionality is supposed to still exist, just outside of Exchange, itself. I haven't tried it out yet, as I do not have a 64-bit server to install on, but I do like a lot of the features in Sharepoint, and I can see how they would be better than Public Folders (and considering that Outlook pulls data in from Sharepoint, it should be fairly seamless from the user perspective).

Re:Haven't found much

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure about public folders?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/topquestions.mspx?wt.svl=overview

Q. What is happening with Public Folders?
A.

Public Folders are included and supported in Exchange Server 2007. Microsoft has communicated that future releases of Exchange Server may not include public folders. If you use Public Folders, read the Exchange Team Blog on the topic of public folders for more guidance.

Re:Haven't found much

[Spinlock_1977]

I wrote a calendaring web app a few years back, and it was certainly a half-done web-based solution some seriously missing features. I wish you had included mine in your survey, because I still don't have any customers for it.

Re:Haven't found much

[ibi]

It's worth looking at Chandler (fat client) and Cosmo (server) from

http://www.osafoundation.org/

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally approaching a useable release and it's quite interesting. I think it will be a real choice in 2008...

Re:Haven't found much

[cbreaker]

Yea, that's what I've been seeing - use Sharepoint. But Sharepoint is a whole 'nother beast. I think they should have improved the functionality of Public Folders. Sharepoint can't do a lot of things that PF's can, and Sharepoint itself is a bit of a pain in the ass.

It's going to seriously slow the adoption of E2k7 because many companies really use them. One company I contracted at a couple years ago had over 25,000 public folders, many of which were used daily.

Outlook integration isn't quite as seamless as it could be; you still have to link folders to Sharepoints, etc.

Re:Haven't found much

[sharkey]

Public folders have gone away in Exchange 2007

They are in there, just disabled by default. If you use Outlook 2003 or older they are required, so Exchange 2007 includes them.

Re:Haven't found much

[samkass]

The best candidate I've seen for the full calendaring "infrastructure" is the open CalDAV spec, but it's only really used commercially by Apple at this point. But since Apple has released their reference implementation as open source , perhaps we'll get more implementations and a snowball effect of support.

Re:Haven't found much

[Crispin Cowan]

That is so painfully wrong.

Paper calendars work great for scheduling with the rest of your family, because you all pass through the kitchen. But that does not scale to large enterprises, you know, like with more than 50 people. It does not scale to distributed organizations, where you don't share a kitchen. It does not connect appointment scheduling to nag 'bots that remind you to attend the meeting.

But I think this is the core reason why open source calendaring sucks: it is a problem that most open source community people don't have, and only really is a problem in large organizations.

Sadly, this has lead to open source completely failing to take over the mail server market. Linux & *BSD, Postfix, and Qmail all make great mail servers, and are used by many ISPs, but they are largely unused in enterprises, precisely because of the lack of calendaring. As a result, corporate mail servers are invariable Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Novell Groupwise.

Hula was an attempt to address this, but either due to Novell not doing it right or the community just not caring, it did not work out so well :-(

I would really like to see the open source community get this right. If we don't, then the mail server market will continue to be dominated by proprietary products.

Re:Haven't found much

[jamshid]

This is a great article about the Chandler saga: http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html. It's the Mitch Kapor financed Exchange killer. So many smart people, so many good intentions, but 7 years later it's barely beta.

I've always thought really smart, hard working people are the biggest problem with software -- they tend to make things that only really smart, hard working people can use, fix, and extend.

Re:Haven't found much

[maetenloch]

In other news, NASA spends 1 million on a pen that writes in space. Because, you know, pencils are so lower class.

It would be funny if it were true, but it's not according to Snopes. Space Pen

Re:Haven't found much

[greginnj]

Pencils are dangerous in space.

1. They are more pointed than pens, and thus more likely to puncture things that shouldn't be punctured.

2. They create dust, which is a no-no on space missions. Wood pencils (obviously) from sharpening. Mechanical pencils are prone to have their leads break off, and float about. More to the point, the operating mechanism of both kinds of pencil is to rub off graphite dust onto paper. Some of this dust may be released by smudging.

Remember that graphite, and thus graphite dust, is conductive. Do you want to take the risk of conductive graphite dust causing a component to short out?

Why do you want NASA missions to fail???? ( oblig bit o funny )

Re:Haven't found much

[tzot]

Now, I am a python programmer and it's a great language, but this type of application would best be handled by a lower level language (I think). Python is great when you need to bang stuff out quickly, or expect to be continuously making code adjustments, but at a (small) sacrifice in performance (which is negligible in a network-limited application). In other words, the exact opposite of priorities than for a mail server (stable well thought out code (note to self: python does not support buffer overflows, too), running as fast as possible (which would be a problem if the python mail server ran on a 4 year old or older machine)).

There. Now it's correct.

If I may summarise: a mail server is not computation-intensive. Give me €100,000 (€100*10^3) for a year, and I will prove my point that python is fast enough (eg compared to postfix) on current hardware for a mail server; of course, we would sign a contract with specific details mutually agreed upon, and if by the end of the year the program wouldn't cover the contract terms, I would give you back your money.

Power Failure Resistant:

[Anonymous Coward]

Application: Pen and Paper.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[PrescriptionWarning]

Unfortunately its not chicken scratch resistant

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[Eberlin]

As much as I love the Y2K compliant Office App...

0) Geeks will argue which pen and which paper is the best.
1) The Gentoo crowd will make their own paper from pulp.
2) Where's the ^H on Pen?
3) There are some serious latency issues
4) Sometimes the output is so horrible that others can't read the file.
5) Sometimes the output is so horrible that I can't read my own file.
6) You can backspace on a word processor. You can shake an etch-a-sketch. If you mess up on paper, you need new hardware.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hire an assistant ... somebody who can come in to your office every minute and put a sticky note on your monitor. That person can also be responsible for syncing your schedule by making lots and lots of photocopies.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[SleptThroughClass]

1a) The Slackware fans will make their own paper from tree seeds.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[OptimusPaul]

Mod parent up! Serious, nothing beats the Pen and Paper, except maybe the pencil and paper. Once they find a simple way to replicate it we will be set.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[tuomoks]

Rated as funny and, yes, it seems funny today. I'm from time we had secretaries and I miss those times. Scheduling between internal and external (customer) connections is PITA. The secretaries were able to negotiate, no system can do that, it is out of your time. They knew personal things what you never would put to any scheduling system, bring flowers or a bottle of whiskey to next meeting because the big boss has a birthday, whatever. They reminded you of all the papers you will need to take to the meeting, they had your flights ready, they proposed to have another person to go with you or just sending another person because whatever reason, etc. No calendar, scheduling, computer system can never do that and it is out of your time - sometimes a lot! So hire an assistant!

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[fruey]

Hear hear!

However most modern companies in modern industries (like tech) don't believe in assistants any more, when they are a key resource to take away scheduling etc. from people who can use their time more productively (writing code, testing a site, whatever).

Just because the computer can do email, scheduling, and you can use IM and phone... some people aren't good at that and waste way too much time when they could just say to their assistant "I need this tomorrow, let xxx know about that meeting next week and schedule it, and I need to be in Houston a week tomorrow" and it'll happen.

In my company, there are 150 employees and 0 assistants. And people bitch most about execs not turning up to meetings on time and forgetting stuff, even though they have blackberries and outlook and mobile phones and laptops.

Re:Power Failure Resistant:

[tehcyder]

Mod parent up! Serious, nothing beats the Pen and Paper, except maybe the pencil and paper. Once they find a simple way to replicate it we will be set.

Maybe they'll invent a machine that's, like, a typewriter attached to a TV screen, connected by wires to other typewriters attached to TV screens, and they all save the words you type onto some sort of permanent magnetic record?

I know, but a man can dream...

Compatibility

[WPIDalamar]

I think the main problem is we can't really come up with an open source scheduling system that's compelely new and innovative because you need compatibility with people outside your organization.

If we're not coming up with something new and innovative we're stuck making outlook clones. People don't like writing software like that.

Re:Compatibility

[forrestt]

How is that an assumption about your scheduling? It's an invitation to a meeting, if you can't make it or don't want to, you are free to decline the invitation or even just ignore it. But, it would be nice if your dentist could send you an appointment reminder with a link that would put it in your calendar so when your boss is wondering where you are he can look at the calendar (no, telling your boss has no effect on them knowing where you are when they want you). Or perhaps your friend could send you an email to go do something that would require you to take off early Friday and include a link to update your calendar. Or maybe some vendor could send you an invitation to meet them for lunch with multiple times for the event and you could pick one. Or maybe a customer needs to meet you to schedule a time they can call you so you send them a meeting invite, Or maybe even the people from SANS sending you an email after you register with a link to update your calendar to say you won't be at work for that week.

Being in your company has nothing to do with wanting information in your calendar, and you are the person that gets to decide if it is worth putting in the calendar or not.

Re:Compatibility

[brunascle]

you can just put them in the calendar yourself. that's what i do.

if my dentist sent me a meeting invite, it will not be how i want it. he'll likely mark it as "busy" or "out of office" for the exact time of the meeting, with the default 15 mins reminder. that's not how i want it. i'll need it to expand much further than that, because it takes at least an hour to get from work to there; and i'll want a 1 week reminder.

i agree with the GP. sender-created meeting invites work fine for the office, but not for anything else.

Re:Compatibility

[toleraen]

You're not in my company; don't make assumptions about my scheduling. Yeesh, I take it you don't get too many party invitations in the mail? Your Friday nights are booked up all the way through 2009? How dare someone try to include you in a gathering that might be relevant to your interests!

That's why, at least in Outlook, there are "Propose New Time" and "Decline" buttons. We should get together next Tuesday at 1330 so I can show you these features.

Re:Compatibility

[Jamie Zawinski]

• If we're not coming up with something new and innovative we're stuck making outlook clones. People don't like writing software like that.

What are you talking about?? Writing clones of commercial software is the prime directive of open source! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that actually there are quite a lot of people who like nothing more than doing exactly that.

Citadel is the best i know of:

[guysmilee]

Citadel is the best i know of: http://www.citadel.org/doku.php

What features?

[Spy der Mann]

It's hard to expect the developers to write a feature they haven't been asked about, and/or don't even know it exists.

In other words, what features do you use in MS products that you haven't found in the free/open source applications?

Re:What features?

[jimbojw]

In other words, what features do you use in MS products that you haven't found in the free/open source applications?

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my initial question. What really impresses me about Outlook/Exchange is when you go to schedule a meeting, it allows you to see when all the participants, rooms and resources (like projectors) are available in a horizontal chart of sorts. People who are busy are marked off in blue, out of office is purple, etc. To find a time that works for everyone, you just scan across until you see a vertical bar of white (everyone free), or try to minimize conflicts.

I don't know of MS holds a patent on the UI, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when. It's a pretty simple bit of eye candy, but nonetheless, I've only seen it in Outlook.

Re:What features?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I don't know of MS holds a patent on the UI, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.

This function is available with the CalDav server standard and that particular feature is available in the implementations in the open source Zimbra client/server and the 10.5 version Apple's iCal server/client. I don't know about other implementations, but I imagine most other ones either include this or will soon, as Caldav has really taken of in adoption by major projects. Zimbra even offers that feature via the Web interface to their server.

Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when.

I think Evolution has an interface like this (works with CalDav), but if I recall Zimbra allows you to overlap as many calendars as you want in one window, making the comparison quite a bit easier IMHO.

I'd definitely look at Zimbra if you're serious about a OSS solution with lots of features and compatibility with both standards and proprietary interfaces (they have a full featured Exchange plug-in so users can still use Exchange as their client if they want). The server will run on all the popular Linux distros, OS X, and as a VMWare appliance.

WebCalendar

[DaGoodBoy]

We use this: http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php

Works well for our needs.

Could you help us help you?

[narrowhouse]

Jim,

I hate to say this, but unless you give us a few reasons why some of the solutions you have looked at are not sufficient I doubt you will get any meaningful response.It's a pretty common problem when people ask for an open source replacement for a program they have used and were reasonably happy with.

Without some starting point for comparison you will just get dozens of stories about how product X works fine for them.

Re:Could you help us help you?

[whoever57]

How about this:
1. It needs to have a client/server architecture (for mobile clients who don't have always-on connectivity). Pure web-based calendars don't do this.

2. It needs to have Windows and Linux clients.

3. Outlook plug-ins don't work. This is a limitation of Outlook. The plug-in can't be the default calendar, and Outlook will only pop up reminders for the default calendar. Also, my experience of OpenGroupware's plug-in is that it is unstable.

4. It needs to have a means for one person to schedule an event on someone-else's calendar (if the appropriate permissions are given).

5. It needs to have a way for people to view the details of other people's calendars (if the appropriate permissions are given). Free/Busy information is not enough in some cases.

If someone can tell me of a calendar system that meets these requirements, I would be thrilled!

Oh, one more -- it desn't need to try to replace other things, such as email servers, etc..

This is Slashdot.

[jellomizer]

Just because it is by microsoft people hate the product even if they never used it before. They will say Some Obscure Open Source tool is better even though they never really used the microsoft one... After so they just may realize that they are missing someting. That is the last thing they want to hear. It would be like someone from an other political party saying someone from the other party actually made a big difference and the world is better because of him/her. It just wont happen.

Re:This is Slashdot.

[orclevegam]

I've used Outlook before. I used it for over four years as it's the official corporate e-mail/scheduling client. The scheduling they did a pretty good job on, I'll give them that, but as an e-mail client I've never cared for it. I much prefer thunderbird or the web interface on gmail. Really the question people are looking for is, how do we replace the scheduling portion of Outlook and still retain all it's nice features while using the e-mail client of our choice?

This is particularly tricky because one of the nicer things with Outlook is the ability to send e-mails with meetings in them and receive feedback as people accept or reject the meeting request. My thoughts on it are that you could probably get around the problem by using a new URL scheme, something like schedule:schedulingserver.com/scheduleID109 or some such that you can associate to an external application that way you can embed it as a hyperlink inside en e-mail. Using something like that you can use whatever scheduling client you want (assuming it understands the protocol the scheduling server uses) and whatever e-mail client you want because it's just a hyperlink with a URL.

Re:This is Slashdot.

[srussell]

Just because it is by microsoft people hate the product even if they never used it before.

I have to use Exchange at work every day. It sucks. My main gripes are:

• It doesn't integrate very well with anything but Outlook
• It often has problems with timezones and/or time changes. We get a week or two of screwed up scheduling twice a year, right around the daylight savings time change.
• Resource scheduling is just stupid. If you forget and add a room as a required participant instead of a resource, it doesn't get scheduled, and ends up double-booked. This happens to everybody, even people who have been using it for years.
• Sometimes it silently drops people from the invite list

That said, the free/busy tool is pretty decent, and the IMAP functionality is acceptable.

--- SER

Re:.....or

[disasm]

opengroupware has a plugin for working with outlook. I haven't used that one in a while though.

Sam

CalDav

[jlittle]

CalDav is the wave of the future, with most calendaring clients supporting it (but not MS), and many servers commercial and otherwise also supporting it (Zimbra). The real coming out party was the commercial release of both OSX Server 10.5 and the client, which have both ends. But guess what, the server is open source: calendar server can be gotten and put on any platform. If you want something today, Zimbra or OSX Server are there for the taking. RedHat has a Messenging product coming out based on Zimbra for this exact purpose.

Re:CalDav

[zoontf]

I just attended the Mac OS X Leopard Server seminar Apple is touring through the country with... in Boston... and during the talk about CalDAV, the Apple tech reps said that Microsoft had a plugin available to Office for using CalDAV to some degree. I don't know more than that, but at least some Apple people think that MS is on board with CalDAV. Actually, they listed the steering committee members for CalDAV on a big screen, and buried among the 50-some-odd names was Microsoft.

So, CalDAV maybe worth more investigation.

Re:CalDav

[wodgy7]

CalDAV is indeed the holy grail. Finally we have something open source that supports all the major user-visible features of Exchange (time visibility, resource scheduling, etc.), is standards-based, and is supported by multiple vendors. There has been nothing like this for far too long.

Re:CalDav

[wolfgang_]

We are currently developing a full-featured, professional-grade, Calendar (actually "groupware") server. It is based on standards such as CalDAV and even CardDAV (which has no RFC yet). The implementation of those is not yet complete but we are getting there. So it works well with Thunderbird/Lightning but not yet with Apple iCal.

Also, the web interface provides a look similar in look and feel to the Mozilla applications. We did this in order to provide a good integration between the user environments (web interface and Mozilla clients) and to provide a simple yet useable interface....

The software can be downloaded from http://www.inverse.ca/contributions/sogo.html. Also, you can play with it on http://sogo-demo.inverse.ca/.

Re:CalDav

[palegray.net]

The real coming out party ...

I didn't know CalDav swung that way. You never can tell these days...

Re:CalDav

[wodgy7]

CalDAV is much more flexible than just downloading and publishing iCalendars. It's a complete groupware server. For instance, your secretary can make changes to your calendar if you authorize her to, you get free/busy time slot viewing/finding for team members, everyone in a group can schedule a fixed resource like a meeting room, etc. Most of this is difficult with just iCalendars, which are fundamentally just files.

What about Darwin Calendar Server?

[SuperKendall]

Apple provides a nice calendar server with Leopard server - but it works with Linux (any anything else running Python) as well...

What Is The Point??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some particular reason you need to replace Outlook for an Open Source alternative?

This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now.

Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.

Re:What Is The Point??!!

[orclevegam]

It's also nice to be able to eliminate Windows machines off your network that you're not really using for anything but hosting a few select applications that require it. Having to have an entire server running just to host exchange server is a pain in the butt when you already have plenty of Linux servers around that could do the job if there was a cross-platform alternative to Exchange open source or otherwise.

Re:What Is The Point??!!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

s there some particular reason you need to replace Outlook for an Open Source alternative? This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now.

Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed it was the best solution for most businesses, but times have changed. I don't know what industry you're in, but a lot of larger companies are introducing more Linux and Macs on their networks and the ability to function cross-platform and across a variety of clients is a huge feature for a lot of companies.

Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.

According to MS, in order to license the current version of exchange it will cost you $4000 per server + $97 per user + some unnamed fee if you want to interconnect with other companies servers. So, assuming you have 1000 people and two servers, you're looking at over $100K. And for that price you can only use all the functionality if all your clients are on Windows, so your advertising people on Macs and your software development team on Linux both end up running their own little calendaring servers or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client. People with smartphones also end up costing you extra for connectors that allow them to access some of the functionality of your Exchange server, instead of all the functionality of a CalDav server.

To summarize, the failures of Exchange are:

• licensing costs
• future licensing costs for upgrades to support new clients
• lousy cross platform support
• added expense to support smartphones
• lack of choice for clients
• lack of choice for server platform (only Windows and VMWare) Whereas CalDav servers like Zimbra also support OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc.
• lack of choice for support and customization and services, only MS instead of RedHat, Zimbra Inc, IBM, etc. (If MS does not fix a security hole tht is a problem for you, you're screwed, whereas with CalDav you can hire someone else to fix it or even fix it using internal programming resources)

...there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.

Umm, not magical, but being OSS is a feature, one that Exchange is lacking. It is not the only feature that matters, but it does bring significant benefits, including reduced risk and protection from vendor lock-in.

Re:What Is The Point??!!

[Meorah]

"or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client"

The OWA client for Exchange 2007 is so good that there are companies who are getting rid of Outlook for all normal mail users and having everyone use the web client. The only people who get Outlook 2007 are Exchange Admins and special case-by-case basis (usually execs). So heterogenous environments are better from a client perspective (plus its easier to administer the web client anyway).

"licensing costs"

marketing websites and resellers say different things. resellers get massive breaks and pass them on to customers. Our Exchange 2007 organization license was just under $3k from our reseller and our CALs were $25 per user.

"future licensing costs for upgrades to support new clients"

OWA is going to be the client of choice in the future. Outlook already has too many garbage features that nobody uses in it. This is not a big secret to system integrators, sr system admins, tech managers, or MS. There are too many advantages to web clients for most environments to bother with issues related to mail clients, including future licensing costs for upgrades.

"lousy cross platform support"

OWA light does suck (firefox, opera, safari, etc). But if you can use IE, OWA is great.

"added expense to support smartphones"

Simply wrong. There are no additional licenses required to use Exchange ActiveSync on your CAS server. You licensed the user to access a mailbox. They can use any method to access that mailbox that you turn on. You may be confusing this with the premium CAL required for users of companies who choose to go the unified messagine route. You can't use OVA without UM which requires the premium CAL.

You have to buy a blackberry enterprise server if you want to use blackberries, but you had to do that before and will have to do it again in the future. that's RIM's deal, not MS. Any symbian or palm phone that support EAS will work just fine out of the box, and obviously all the windows mobile phones are seamless to integrate.

"lack of choice for clients"

Outlook, OWA (web), EAS (mobile), OVA (voice), and basically any client that supports POP3 or IMAP4 if you choose to turn those features on, on the server. Nobody says you are limited to the native Exchange MAPI unless you choose to do so.

"lack of choice for server platform (only Windows and VMWare) Whereas CalDav servers like Zimbra also support OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc."

True, but do you really blame them? As nice as it would be to load Exchange up on Linux, it just doesn't help MS make more money by doing that. The fact that Exchange depends on all sorts of Windows-specific technologies like PowerShell and the .NET platform doesn't make it a very easy application to port to another OS, either.

"lack of choice for support and customization and services, only MS instead of RedHat, Zimbra Inc, IBM, etc. (If MS does not fix a security hole tht is a problem for you, you're screwed, whereas with CalDav you can hire someone else to fix it or even fix it using internal programming resources)"

True, and really the only valid point you made. Congrats!

Re:What Is The Point??!!

[einhverfr]

tired of doing point by point analysis, but Exchange 2007 is probably one of the most valuable products that MS still offers. That says a lot right there. Note that you are comparing Exchange to other MS products, while the GP is comparing Exchange to the competition.

Not really

[initdeep]

Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/

Scalix http://www.scalix.com/

are the two closest, but honestly, neither is a perfect replacement.

Re:Not really

[HermMunster]

Zimbra is INCREDIBLY COMPLEX TO INSTALL. It was sold to Yahoo who essentially is going to abandon all open source and take it out of that market. Do NOT trust Yahoo on this one.

Zimbra's programmers were daft. They would only make installs for certain releases of the OS and then they would get rude to those who were seeking support. They essentially created a product and abandoned those in the open source arena, and they don't care about you.

Their install requirements, their installer script, and their attitude is obnoxious at best.

No callenders?

[tristian_was_here]

Mozilla has an active callender project with Sunbird and Lightening

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Zimbra

[sg_oneill]

Zimbra pretty much does it all. The web client is top notch, and makes a perfectly fine outlook replacement (Yeah, I know. Just try it, seriously), and its got some serious scaling capacitys (Its used by some of the biggest ISPs around). Yahoo now owns it, so its got some name backing. The catch is the outlook compatible one ISNT so open source, but its pretty cheap.

Citadels pretty nice too, and Ignatius foobar is a cool guy, but its a pretty eccentric product. I think they've kinda been fucked around a bit with outlook compatibility, but I admit I havent checked in a long time.

I am waiting for a good calDAV server

[dominux]

in the mean time I am using webcalendar which works great. Lotus Domino runs on Linux and would be my preferred choice of proprietary solution, I am trying to get IBM to make Domino a CalDAV server, anyone who has an IBM rep is encouraged to beat them up about CalDAV support. www.bedework.org looks quite good now. Might have to re-evaluate that one.

iCal Server

[HiredMan]

Apple's iCal Server is Open Source PHP (with Twisted Framework) and based on the new CalDAV open standard. Everyone (with the possible exception of Microsoft) is moving to CalDAV as the open standard. Many big companies (Oracle, IBM, Google) are involved with the committee and hopefully the holy grail of inter-operable calendaring systems - including free/busy, invitations etc - is finally on the horizon.

The server just officially went gold with Leopard but has actually been done for a while now. Apple's iCal Server and (closed source) Client are currently the most polished products but now that there is a solid CalDAV server I expect that the various clients with gain alot of polish and other CalDAV servers should start to roll out as well.

Check out the CALCONNECT standards body for more information: http://www.calconnect.org/

=tkk

PS Microsoft is finally a member but their commitment level is not that of the other partners.

Re:iCal Server

[Erskin]

Apple's iCal Server is Open Source Python (with Twisted Framework) and based on the new CalDAV open standard. (It's probably an innocent slip of the brain, but figured I'd mention it for anybody unfamiliar with the tech so they don't get confused.)

Re:iCal Server

[MouseR]

It should be noted that

- Apple's Calendar Server is indeed open source, unlike mentioned above.
- Apple's current implementation of recurring events in their CalDav server has some issues.

Disclaimer:
It should also be noted that I work for Oracle in the very same division responsible for the calendaring stuff and that my intent is not to diminish Apple's offering. Oracle aims for full interoperability with other CalDAV-compliant offerings, including that of Apple.

Zimbra

[hackus]

http://www.zimbra.com/

We are replacing all of our Exchange users and dumping exchange by the end of the year.

It is an open source free replacement for Exchange.

Very nice and integrates well with Sunbird (Thunderbird Calander).

-hack

Citadel is *the* solution

[IGnatius T Foobar]

You really want to check out Citadel. It has a very comprehensive feature set -- not just calendars but also email, address books, message boards, instant messaging, access via all standard protocols plus a gorgeous ajax-style web user interface.

The best part about Citadel is that it is very easy to install. There's an automatic installer script right on the web site. No fuss, no muss, just enter the install command and watch it go. No tedious mucking about with integrating all of the pieces yourself, as the entire Citadel system is self-contained.

And the whole thing is GPL, unlike solutions such as Zimbra and Scalix which claim to be open source, but when you actually go there you find out that to get the full feature set you have to buy a commercial version. The Citadel project makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms.

Re:Citadel is *the* solution

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I've looked at Citadel myself. I think it looks good, but I also think that when you say "shared calendars" to most middle and upper management, it gets interpreted as "Outlook + Exchange".

Sadly, there is quite a bit of truth to that statement. Fortunately, there is an Outlook connector for Citadel currently in beta test. It's quite nice -- while most non-Microsoft Outlook connectors merely do synchronization, this one implements a full store (i.e. the equivalent of what you get when you connect to Exchange). Outlook and non-Outlook clients will *both* be first class citizens on a Citadel system. We'll have this out within the next couple of months, and it'll be very useful.

Re:Citadel is *the* solution

[WebCowboy]

I expect that MS-Exchange connectivity will be licensed under GPLv3, just as the rest of the citadel and webcit projects are presently licensed.


Sadly it looks like the connector is being developed by a closed source developer rather than within the Citadel project itself so my prediction isn't quite true. Still it would make a great alternative to Exchange, and fortunately for me Exchange compatibility is not an issue.

I quite enthusiastically plug Citadel wherever I can, not only because it performs extremely well and is easy to administer, but because the project is very open (the citadel.org site has a LOT of info on protocols and other technical developer stuff) and the more people that are aware of it the more likely people will get involved in developing it and moving it forward (eventually, perhaps, leading to a Free exchange connector ;-). I'm still amazed that software of this quality, with a 20 year history of development, continues to fly under the radar with much of the Free software community.

Re:Zimbra

[myowntrueself]

Zimbra is, arguably, not Open Source.

It comes under an 'attribution license' and hence cannot be forked. Its 'badgeware'.

Ie: you cannot take the source code of Zimbra and produce your own version *without* the Zimbra logos.

Re:.....or

[ahodgson]

I'm sure if Microsoft ever allows outside software to properly interoperate with Exchange, that will happen. But they don't.

Shocking, I know.

But of course... Citadel..

[wizard of aahz]

So you want something that's truly open source? You don't want to have to pay for the commercial version. You want something that's not new on the block and looking for funding. How about a software package where the leadership is devoted to the open source mindset, beliefs and methodologies?

Software that actually works. It's in use. It's actively being maintained. As new technology is released, there's a proven track record of it being incorporated into the software.

Then you're really making a mistake if you don't look at citadel.

Email, Calendaring, Contacts, multiple interfaces, multiple standards compliant protocols, instant messaging and it all can run on one server. But wait.. It scales! So if you want to run multiple servers and have them communicate, go ahead. It's built right in.

Visit http://citadel.org/ for more information and to download or there's even a vmware appliance, all set up and ready to go. All you need to do is download and run. Try http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/723. -

MS must be open

[SleptThroughClass]

Microsoft interoperability is no problem. Judges ordered Microsoft to open their protocols years ago. So of course by now all the protocols are crystal clear.

/me ducks...into an undisclosed secure location

Sun's JES is worth evaluating

[Arrogant-Bastard]

It makes my short list, along with ZImbra, Scalix, and Openchange (so far).

The nice things about JES are (a) it's rock-solid (b) it works well with many mail clients, even horribly broken ones like Outlook (c) while it doesn't have every possible calendar feature in the world, it has all of the ones that people actually use (d) it scales amazingly well -- it's really no problem to get it to support millions of users (e) because it's been around for a while (including a prior incarnation as a Netscape product) there's a pretty solid support community for it (in addition to Sun) (f) it's flexible enough to support integration with other products.

The bad things about JES are (a) the install is complicated, even if you're very accustomed to complex installs (b) the documentation, like much of Sun's documentation, is poorly written, verbose, uses opaque terminology, and lacks cohesion (c) the log files are inscrutable (d) it's somewhat bloated (somebody needs to trim all the legacy code out of it) (e) it's overkill for anyone who just needs a mail server (i.e., no calendaring).

But...given that you get mail, calendaring, LDAP, all rolled up in one package -- it's at least worth looking at. I'm aware of any number of places that have migrated from Exchange to JES, so at least their requirements were met.

Re:Haven't found much - Actually...

[bmzf]

Actually, yes... perhaps. For whatever reason, Novell decided to let go of the Hula project but, being open source, others took the project on and it's alive (although it seems to be progressing forward slowly due to lack of man power). It's called Bongo, and it looks pretty nice. Go check it out.

Zimbra!

[alexborges]

Zimbra does it, does it very well and can be made compatible with full fledged outlook.

You dweebs cant even do a google search before just saying "no", can you?

Re:Zimbra!

[michrech]

No.

Zimbra does it, does it very well and can be made compatible with full fledged outlook.

You dweebs cant even do a google search before just saying "no", can you?

Re:Zimbra!

[stacey7165]

Zimbra is a great alternative to Exchange. I have also used Doodle http://www.doodle.ch/main.html to schedule/suggest meeting times that work for people through a poll mechanism, however it doesn't integrate to your calendar to remind you that you have the meeting...

...shameless plug: if you're looking for open source monitoring software either your Exchange or Zimbra installation, you should check out Hyperic. Its open source and manages both of them right out of the box. :)
Stacey Schneider
http://www.hyperic.com/

Re:Zimbra!

[lazybeam]

I used to work at a church where the previous IT guy had setup a standard Fedora box as a server. Everyone used Outlook with POP3 mail over the LAN. It was only a Celeron 600 that also did file serving, spam/virus scanning and web filtering. With 35 users it was seriously underpowered.

I upgraded them to two servers: RHEL with Zimbra for everything mail-related and CentOS for fileserving. They were even considering Evolution for the client, which I found funny for a church! Anyway, they've been like this for over a year and there has been no major problems. The new servers even had Gigabit cards so people could get full speed from the gigabit switch!

They were a little against Exchange because their neighbouring retirement village used Exchange on SBS and had no end to problems. Last I heard they linked networks and migrated the retirement village accounts to their Zimbra server.

Re:gratification physiology

[Xabraxas]

Very common mantrafesto indeed. Apache, Linux, MySQL, Postgres, Firefox, and too many others to name were all yesterday's "next year's choice"-of-the-year choices, some of them more than once, but it so goes.

Considering Linux, Apache, and MySQL are a part of the LAMP stack I'm pretty sure they are well past "choice".

YES

[corigo]

Zimbra actually beats Outlook and Exchange server hands down. The first solution I have seen to do so. Still waiting for a completed off-line client though. Web based email and calendaring the surpases Exchange is a great start though!