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

Aren't there others like this?

[jd]

I seem to remember ogo being a full replacement and that's been out for a while. Also, although you want to provide compatibility with Exchange, don't you want to provide additional capabilities so that Exchange systems are forced to upgrade to you, rather than the other way round? (Embrace-and-extend, but non-toxic.)

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[mistermocha]

Well, there are some of us who work at mom & pop software shops that do have a clatch of intelligent developers on site but don't have a huge budget to buy an email solution.... and we're a lot more than 0.0000001% of all companies.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[vawarayer]

That's a nice long explanatory answer... for the first question! ;). Do you have an answer for the 2nd?

I might even add... do you have suggestions?

I have already checked out a few of 'em (not necessarily OSS):

• Zimbra
• Scalix
• eGroupware
• PHP Groupware
• Communigate Pro
• Citadel
• Kolab
• Open Groupware
• Open xChange

...of which many of them have a great potential, but I always end up having some trouble somewhere or find 'em not user-friendly/admin-friendly enough.

Re:Aren't there others like this?

[jimicus]

There are plenty, but most seem to miss the point of Exchange in some fashion.

Point the First: Everything that you're likely to plug into Exchange must also work with whatever alternative or it isn't an Exchange alternative. That means things like Blackberries, other vendors' smartphones, seamless (yes seamless, not "install this plugin which sort-of works") Outlook integration, remote management of smartphones (including wiping them). Zimbra's pretty close here, but falls down on remote smartphone management and seamless Outlook integration.

Point the Second (Scalix falls down here): Exchange is only a small proportion of the overall licensing costs. You've also got Active Directory (which implies a Windows Server infrastructure) and CALs for AD. There's not a lot of point in having AD without having your workstations on an AD domain, so you've got to factor in all the necessary licenses for this as well. If you demand I supply my own AD infrastructure and you price your product at [price for Exchange - 10%], I might as well just pay the extra 10% and eliminate the risk of being passed between vendors in a game of telephone tennis in the event of support issues.

Point the Third: Whether you like it or not, the PHBs who like Exchange are often rather stuck in the Exchange way of thinking. I don't care how much better you think your solution is, if your argument is "it's cheaper but it's only better if you're prepared to accept a totally new way of thinking about groupware" then it's not better because the PHBs in question probably aren't. Citadel's a good example of this.

Patent encumbered?

[timotten]

I did a quick test with this product a few weeks ago, and it sync'd well with my phone. My only concern was that Microsoft appears to assert patent claims relating to ActiveSync. Anyone have thoughts or experiences on using this product in the US market?

Re:Hm, if this works as advertised

[xouumalperxe]

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.

Hell, I read what you described and thought "damn, that's a really good idea, hope it's also a well thought out and implemented feature". The idea that I can easily give you permission to act on my behalf is probably the single best way to kill account promiscuity. Plus the example you gave is also a damned practical one too, and a good way to prove that this is a feature, and not a solution looking for a problem.

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.

In other news, when a piece of software is truly convenient, you use it, even if it's not perfect.

MORE than that

[way2trivial]

I can give a meeting room, or a projector, or any other resource-- it's own exchange account- and set it to !automatically accept! some peoples meeting request, and other people's requests will have to be approved.. and when I send a meeting request to my boss, and two co-workers, and conference room B-- then conference room B will automatically show that it is 'busy' for my meeting.. and if I need a projector later-- I can send an invite to the 'projector' and reserve it as well..

I can de-invite individual attendees....

What about Outlook itself?

[VirtualSquid]

I'm happy for the server-side people if this is progress on replacing Exchange, but what about replacing Outlook itself?
It's one of the 3-4 missing apps that prevent me from moving to Linux. I mean, how hard can it be, to implement an email client with integrated calendar and contacts? It doesn't need every single bell and whistle - just the few features i depend on (rich text in contact memo fields, savable contact searches). I'd happily buy such an app for Linux (at, say, the same price as Outlook.) Outlook's been around for what, 11 years? And in all that time, nobody's thought to make a viable Linux alternative?