Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source

Fjan11 writes "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."

Comments

Hm, if this works as advertised

[pembo13]

They better start hiring support personnel, because there will likely be profits to be had with service contracts. Maybe even a Redhat buyout/partnership

Over the last few months, I've been forced to use Exchange/Outlook a lot, and for the life of me I don't get the big deal. But I know that people consider it a big deal, so I wish this company the best, and fair

amount of profit.

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[noc007]

To answer your question, IMHO the big deal is collaboration, productivity, integration, and a lot of features "just work"*. I'd wager to say that the majority of medium to large companies use MS Office and MS Outlook as their productivity suite and e-mail client respectively of choice.

Collaboration
Setting up meeting requests are simple. I can easily see other people's calendars so I can pick the best time and I can even set a meeting location which will automatically reserve something like the meeting room for example. Meetings automatically get put on my calendar as tentative and I'll receive a notification in case I forget to accept the invitation. Updated meeting change my calendar as well without intervention.

Productivity
I can set reminders, flag e-mails for follow-ups, create folders to organize, create processing rules to eliminate common tasks. A lot of rules will run on the Exchange server without the need of a client running and I don't get unnecessary e-mails on my phone. Outlook maintains a constant connection with Exchange so e-mails are sent and received nearly instantly.

Integration and crap just working
Obviously most MS products can seamlessly integrate well with one another. In the latest version of Outlook I can preview a number of attachments within Outlook without actually opening them up in their designated app, thus a new window. I can set a folder to actually open up a webpage within Outlook to "Integrate" a webapp or just be sly on reading Slashdot.

Phone integration really is a big one for me. Using a WM5, WM6, or iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync is almost the best thing since sliced bread. I remember the days of having a PDA and the PITA it was to do a hard-reset or get a new one. Even getting a new phone and having to manually enter in each contact sucked (I've been a CDMA whore for eight years). All my contacts are kept on Exchange and this allows me to reference and edit them via the phone or Outlook. Having to do a hard-reset or get a new WM phone is no big deal; a three minute sync with Exchange over the air gets me all my contacts back and access to my e-mail. The rare third party apps I use are kept on an SD card. Life is easy getting the execs and lusers up and running as well.

Integration with Active Directory (LDAP) makes my life as an admin easier with GPOs and groups to divvy out permissions. And for some reason all this stuff works without much hassle.

The bad
Exchange and Outlook truly do have their faults. If I were to have my own company, I can't honestly say that I would run them. I wont get too far into the bad since I'm running out of time with the wife waiting on me. If I were to have my own company, I can't honestly say that I would run them. Exchange works great with communication within itself and other Exchange servers. It does a decent job at SMTP transmissions most of the time. The big headache I have right now stems from a tech at MS telling me that "the RFCs for the SMTP protocol are merely suggestions." It's not like SMTP is overly complex; there are only a handful of commands that are exchanged within SMTP communication and Exchange even F's that up. And don't get me started with how Outlook is written in VB.

I'm glad to see some open source Exchange clones out there. I'll eventually run one of them for my server at home just so I can keep my contacts synced when I leave my current company.

To put things into perspective, I'm not a MS fanboy, but I'm not a MS hater either. I know their products well and is a part of my profession. My real passion is UNIX; specifically FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I try to introduce them where possible and applicable. Not to mention there is some stuff I can get done easier and faster with UNIX than I could with MS Windows. Other products out there are just as buggy and bloated as MS's; they just get more attention since they're more widely used.

I hope that Zarafa and others continue to innovate and make a nice profit. Competition is good for innovation and lowering prices; both of which benefits us consumers.

* Setup can be a RPITA. When something doesn't work as expected it can be an easy fix or cause suicide.

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[Martin Blank]

Messages sent by the assistant have a clear "Bob accepted on behalf of Alice" kind of structure. The logs also show that it was Bob accepting on behalf of Alice, IIRC. This is useful not only for the tracking perspective, but also so that the recipient knows that it was not necessarily directly handled by the person invited.

Woohoo!

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Well, that's certainly nice, push-mail, activesync, mapi, all the things people like about Exchange in an open source variant, why the hell not?

I've been running OpenGroupware myself as a cheap replacement for Exchange (using funambol to replace ActiveSync) and it works nicely, but the more alternatives to Exchange the better!

I've yet to try this one, i hope it's atleast as "easy" to manage as an Exchange server tho, if you need 10 Rocket Scientists to install it, then open sourcing it won't make it magicly defeat Exchange, and sometimes i get the impression people tend to forget other people use their applications too.

In short, the more the merrier! Long live FOSS!

GPL'd community edition has limited MAPI clients?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I looked on the Zarafa website, it looked like the free community (GPL) edition had a limited number of MAPI clients. I guess this is still the case? If so, it's not really a practical replacement for Exchange unless you pay for the commercial edition.

Oh, not this shit again? Come on....

[LibertineR]

Quotas anyone? OWA?

Drop in replacement, you say? Will MOSS or CRM play with it? Will it pick up AD rules and GPOs? What about BCM and Project Server?

OR, is it just another glorified POP/IMAP box?

I read the feature set from the web site.

I know Exchange, I was in the original product group way back when. This AINT no DROP IN REPLACEMENT.

That said, for what it does, good for them!

But people should watch their words. Side by side against Exchange 2007, it would not be a fair fight.

Re:Not GPL, maybe not Free Software

[gamanimatron]

Hey, look! FUD!

Outlook support = pay to play

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

From their FAQ:

If I build Zarafa from source, can I still buy a license for Outlook access?

Technically this is possible, but you always need to have the Zarafa-professional package for Outlook support. This package is available for the default supported distributions.

Re:Not GPL, maybe not Free Software

[zx-15]

Somebody mod parent down.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
"Preamble

The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
"The Affero General Public License, often abbreviated as Affero GPL and AGPL (and sometimes informally called the Affero license) refers to two distinct, though historically related, free software licenses: (1) the Affero General Public License, version 1 (published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002, and based closely on the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2)), and (2) the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and closely resembling the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3))."

If FSF considers it to be free software, how it is not free software, and by a lot of people you mean who?

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[hairyfeet]

Xandros with Scalix also works as a drop in,with the added bonus of being able to be either a member or a domain controller in an AD forest. Really nice if you need to support a mixed environment. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Not GPL, maybe not Free Software

[Just Some Guy]

If FSF considers it to be free software, how it is not free software

One of the requirements of Free Software is "[t]he freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)." The Affero GPL explicitly denies this freedom:

If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.

I don't care who endorses the AGPL; by the FSF's own definitions, it is not Free Software. Get pissed off and mod me down all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the AGPL is a EULA in that it governs the behavior of people who merely run the software, even if they do not distribute it (by any reasonable definition of the word "distribute" that has been in common usage during the history of computing).

Re:Hell yeah

[darkpixel2k]

That's right, Microsoft: open source software can gun for you too, motherfuckers!

I'm sure Microsoft is trembling.
The site is so hammered I it took about 4 minutes to load, and the first thing I noticed? Two colums for downloading. The first one says "AGPL3 Only" and the second says "incl. 3 users Outlook support".

Common--you know that that means. "We open sourced part of our software to try and suck you in--but you'll really find it limited until you fork over slightly less that you would have with Microsoft Exchange."

Re:not vetted/tried and true

[wasabii]

Exchange does not use PSTs. Migrating off Exchange is fine. You canc onnect to Exchange with IMAP and dump data. Just like you can with every other open source server. Problem is that Exchange has features which these other servers do not, and thus it's not really going to work out: Calendars/Contacts. And yes. I do juggle backups, patches, etc. I run Exchange on a set of clustered boxes sharing storage. I can fail over a machine, patch one, and bring it back up. Pretty freaking easy. I honestly never touch the thing except to apply patches. Once every 6 months. Ever tried to migrate a user's mailbox from one site to another? One button. It moves it on it's own. Authentication is integrated into AD. One password. All communication uses Kerberos. It's lovely.

Re:Hell yeah

[mhall119]

That's exactly what they did: http://www.zarafa.com/content/versions

Nice crippleware slashvertisement

[Linux_ho]

The community version doesn't support using Outlook if you need to use more than 3 clients, according to the installation document:

The proven Zarafa groupware solution (ha) is now also available as an open source community version licensed under the Affero GPLv3. This version includes:

AJAX based web access
Mobile webaccess
IMAP/POP3 gateway
iCal gateway
Z-Push - ActiveSync compatibility (licensed under GPLv2)

Additionally you can use this version with the closed source Zarafa Outlook clients up to 3 Outlook users.
Important: To use Outlook support in the community version, you need to run the zarafa-licensed daemon.

Re:Hell yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks like cripleware to me. The "open source" version is limited to 3 outlook clients. That doesn't sound very open!

(posting as AC because karma system sux).

Re:not vetted/tried and true

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

I disagree! With just a few simple apps you can do everything exchange does and more.
Email-Postfix
Calendar-iCal + LDAP
Meeting requests-iCal
Tasks-iCal
Synchronization-Webdav or SyncML
Publishing Calendars-Webdav(Caldav) or SyncML
Sharing/Editing the same calendar-Webdav(GroupDav) or SyncML
Webmail-Many choices, some with calendars, AJAX, etc
Blackberry-Funambol, SyncML I mean seriously, what else do you need? Encryption? Got it. There are tons of more features with clients like Evolution and Thunderbird including desktop integration.