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

not vetted/tried and true

[Anonymous Coward]

I've not looked at this software, but Exchange is one hell of a piece of machinery. Say what you want about MS, but I've seen an Exchange server with terabytes of email, gigabytes per day, keeping up fine. It's a pain in the ass sometimes to be sure, but I wouldn't trust my production network to this today anyway.

Re:not vetted/tried and true

[Just Some Guy]

Say what you want about MS, but I've seen an Exchange server with terabytes of email, gigabytes per day, keeping up fine.

BS. I've seen Exchange servers with gigabytes of mail and megabytes per day roll over and cry until we put a FreeBSD/Postfix/Amavis/ClamAV server in front to lighten the workload by 95%. If this is built on top of FOSS components, I don't doubt for a second that it'll run rings around Exchange.

Exchange has traditionally had exactly one reason for its popularity: vendor lock-in. If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs, we'll be Microsoft-free on our servers by Monday.

Re:not vetted/tried and true

[LibertineR]

Sorry, that is just bullshit.

Exchange inflexible?

What do you say to the Hundreds of Thousands of clients who get their Exchange via SBS (Small Business Server)? And that's just the 2003 version.

How many Enterprise apps do you know of by ANY vendor that dont degrade with low disk space? Come on, dude, that aint fair and you know it.

Exchange is one of those apps that can look bad if installed by an idiot. You would think a proper architect would have worked out space and usage requirements early on.

How do you reach a low space condition ANYWAY, if you are making proper use of quotas? No product takes more abuse due to stupid administration than Exchange server.

But please, inflexible? When you have dozens of 100K+ client installations of Exchange humming along at places like Chevron and others, while the very same product can keep 20 people happy on a $500 box, you cant call it inflexible. Thats just wrong, pal.

Re:not vetted/tried and true

[LibertineR]

So tell me; did you present your management with a cost/benefit analysis, supporting your request for additional hardware? Did you point out what a catastrophic failure of the Exchange infrastructure would cost them in lost man-hours and productivity? If everyone in your company is getting "mailbox -full" notices, it would seem to me an easy argument to make in DOLLARS, as to the amount of time spent by staff just to find items to delete each week. Am I wrong?

Have you looked into tools like GFI's Mail Archiver or the Mimosa tools to get you some disk space back, and bump up overall performance?

See, it is very easy to just say, "management sucks, exchange sucks, yada, yada", but until or unless you have done all you can do to make your case, I repeat: IN DOLLARS, you have to bear some responsibility. This is what is wrong with IT these days. I'm guessing you didnt do a cost analysis, and you would not be alone in that regard, but someday, IT folks are going to have to prove that we are REAL professionals, or management has no good reason to pay any attention to us. IT is not just about technology, you have to sometimes be a teacher and a salesman to be effective, even when Management makes you not want to really give a shit.

Personally, if you had done what I suggested, and gotten the response you described, were I you, I would have walked out of there, before I let anyone put my name on a fucked up server.

But, that's me. (climbing down from my soapbox)

"successful" is ambigous

[bogaboga]

...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...

While I hail this development, I wonder what "successful" means in this story. Here are questions I might want answered:

Was it "successful" at sales? If so where are the figures? I would not really praise them that much if the original goal - to make money, could not be reached making these fellas to opensource everything...much like what Netscape did years ago.

Was it "successful" at actually replacing Exchange with no [significant] trouble for Systems Administrators? I need to know. How come it is not that known in IT circles? What's going on?

Re:"successful" is ambigous

[Joe Enduser]

Let me enlighten you a bit on the "success" factor for the sysadmin. I implemented this at a very small organization. While it does integrate nicely with Outlook, and handles the calendar and contacts stuff very nicely, it is the first time I am trying to manage a mailserver which blatantly has dropped mail regularly and silently, at least in a previous version. In the current stable version, an imap client cannot delete a mail from any folder. This is fun when a client does not actually move mails between folders or the trash, but copies first and then deletes, such as Apple Mail. Also, an update of the server version to a new main version, i.e. from 5.xx to 6.xx does not only involve a new version of the Outlook plugin on the clients, but also mandates a new user profile in Outlook. That is a lot of work. I hope that opensourcing this stuff eventually makes it more maintainable, but I have not been able to find out about access to the actual source repositories which might enable actual collaboration on the product.

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[nine-times]

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.

I don't think it is a very big deal. I've supported Exchange servers in companies of various size, and it's really not doing anything astoundingly complicated, and what it does it doesn't do all that well. But still it does a bunch of things that other solutions haven't done an even worse job at, and does them all together. Things like "I can send a meeting invitation to my boss and his assistant can check his mail, accept his invitation, and reply on his behalf without actually logging in as him."

I know, it doesn't sound like that sort of thing would be all that important, and it's not even clear all the time that it makes a lot of sense, but there are companies that run on this sort of procedure. So there are a bunch of random things like shared calendars and push-email to phones that people don't want to live without, and unless you can provide a seamless replacement, you're stuck with Exchange.

I, for one, am eager to see a suitable Exchange alternative. I have a real love/hate relationship with Exchange. There are some options out there, but none of the options I've tried have worked out.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[Eric Smith]

Sure, but there's a lot of difference between offering a similar feature set, and being a drop-in replacement that is compatible with all the crufty MS protocols.

No different than all the others...

[shaitand]

Yet another open source exchange replacement that didn't open source everything required to interact with outlook.

Without that, whats the point?

Umm... and why does this matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former MAPI programmer (don't worry - I've largely recovered) I have to point out that this is utterly irrelevant.

The only compelling reason to use an Exchange compatible server is to support Outlook. The issue is that Zarafa charges for the Outlook connector. This is not a new business model, people, and truth be told its been a fairly common paradigm of 'Exchange-killers' for quite awhile now. Nothing is killed until the connector is free. Full stop.

So why doesn't anyone offer a free connector? Because it is ridiculous amount of work to build and it is something corporations are willing to pay for. It's not that replicating the server functionality is difficult, it's that Microsoft twisted and violated open standards into something utterly unholy known as Exchange to ensure that nobody but Microsoft could communicate with it. MAPI is Microsoft's obfuscation of traditional messaging protocols and is infamously poorly documented.

I wrote about this issue for Redmond magazine about 2 years ago and nothing's changed. The connector is still the kicker and, regardless of how nifty the back-end is, until an open-source Outlook connector appears Exchange will remain one of MS's top 5 products.

Nothing but PR to see here. Move along...

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[gander666]

Well, the reality is that senior executives have always had personal assistants (used to be secretaries) who really opened all their mail, sorted it, and typed responses to the mundane, and took dictation for the serious ones.

The executives typically have 100% trust in their admin's and this feature is absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of a senior management team. It may seem like a security risk, but in the cases that I am aware of, both users are aware of their status, and it rally operates like it did in the pen and paper days.

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[funkatron]

Having others able to act on your behalf without using your login simplifies the process of proving that you did/didn't actually do something. The information about who logged in and did what on whose behalf can easily be logged. If, on the other hand, you have a system where your login has to be used to act on your behalf then the logs can only show your username no matter who actually used your account.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[theshowmecanuck]

Jesus H. Fucking Christ. 99.9999999% of all companies just want to buy a tool that works. They don't want to build the fucking thing. They don't even want to fix it. That's why they buy the support license. This whole 'we can customize the code if we want' is a huge stinking load of specious crap. Companies of any size BUY their software because they don't want to customize software they don't have to. Like office software. Customizing a huge billing system is one thing (if you are a big enough company to warrant doing that), but why would an insurance company, or a local widget maker, or a medical clinic want to become an email server programming company???? Get a grip. They'll go out and buy exchange or lotus notes or whatever because they just want the frickin tool. And if it is buggy so what? It works for the most part and they don't have hire programmers or keep programmers around to fix bugs that said programmers introduced when they screwed around with the source code. It's cheaper to pay for the licence for a year than to pay for an unneeded programmer for a year.

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[DragonWriter]

If others can act on your behalf without actually logging in as you, what proof is there that e-mails allegedly sent by you were actually sent by you?

If others can be delegated permissions to act on your behalf in specifically designated manners without logging in to your account, then, if the system logs who did what under what account, there will be accountability.

OTOH, if others can't act on your behalf without logging in as you, and you have a business need them to act on your behalf, you have no choice but to give them your access credentials (dongle, password, whatever) and then there really is no accountability, and no control over the manner in which they can act on your behalf.

So, rather than destroying accountability, supporting delegation enhances accountability (and security).

A week??? You need new employees

[baileydau]

it's around 2,400-- but then you also require 25 outlook licenses.

once again, the price of the software is negligable compared to the cost of 25 employee's salaries...

go ahead, waste a week of each one's time teaching them whats different about the new program.

This is server software we are talking about here. The end users don't change their software (that's the entire point). So there is no cost for retraining end users.

You would obviously have to train the server administration staff, but even if you did put in a "Genuine Microsoft" Exchange server, you would probably still have to do this.

Besides, even if the front end did change, a week of training is a LOT. As it would be replacement software, the concepts are the same, it's only which button you push to do it that changes. So if you can't train them in a matter of hours, if not minutes, you really do need new employees.

Where I work, we use a non-MS stand alone calendaring solution. Our end user training takes a couple of hours.

How long do you think it would take to train users to use the new version of MS Office?

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[Eric Smith]

The MS protocols tend to be crufty because they are developed in secret, don't get any public review, and are allowed to evolve in a completely ad-hoc manner.

That's not to say that all protocols developed by open processes are wonderful, but on average they seem to be better.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[that this is not und]

The MS protocols are crufty because the direction of the design of them is left up to middle managers.

That should explain it fully to anybody curious.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[sweet_petunias_full_]

"...they can finally have something that works!"

Hear, hear. And maybe they can finally have something that doesn't try to break protocol standards, introduce a non-interchangeable mail archival format, artificially create a need to have ten times as many server licenses as necessary... in short, businesses would do well to uh, swap it for something else.