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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."
That's right, Microsoft: open source software can gun for you too, motherfuckers!
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.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Linux is for the garbage can!
Sweet! What won't Linux run on these days?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
If I had some mod points I would give you one for funny. Ignorant, but funny.
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!
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.
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.
..I'll DEFINATELY be installing this for our company's mail server. I currently have Zimbra setup, which is very nice, but the bosses don't like it because it doesn't integrate into Outlook very well (iCalendar, contacts, etc), without the outlook connector that you have to pay for. No hate on Zimbra though...I absolutely love it's capabilities and ease-of-use, but it's a deal-breaker w/the management types if won't support the 'advanced' features in Outlook.
The nice thing about GPL software is that it's easy to go in and change arbitrary limitations like that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
...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?
Office Depot, Office Max, and Staples reported a shortage of office chairs in the supply chain. When asked, representatives were unsure to the exact nature of the shortage.
"According to our suppliers, someone in Redmond, Washington has decided to corner the market on office chairs," one company spokesman said.
----------BREAKING NEWS-----------
This just in! According to NORAD, the nation's defense system went on alert after controllers detected a large number of unknown flying objects coming from the Pacific Northwest. While the status has not entered DEFCON 1, a spokesman for the Defense Department assured the public that this was a precautionary measure as the objects themselves do not appear to be very large and that they originated from the Northwest rules out an nuclear attack from either China or the former Soviet Union.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
can be measured to be 1050 dog-years of work.
Big things missing though - No public folders, which allow automated, customized workflow processes, no single instance store (each attachment is a separate file within the message store,) limited support (enterprise class support 24x7 is > 15,000 euros and their business hours aren't conducive to US business support - GMT+1) and it runs on linux instead of bsd *grin*
With that being said, I can see where a LOT of businesses will be able to make extensive use of this. Best of luck to them!
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those? Take THAT, big iron.
Parent was obviously modded down by some newbie to moderation who didn't get the joke, doesn't understand throwing chairs in Redmond, and modded it off-topic because he didn't understand it. This is a lousy excuse for moderation!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Only because the people with Linux experience and the people with condom experience are disjoint sets.
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.
Not until Q4 2008
From the features pdf
http://download.zarafa.com/zarafa/en/Featureslist620.pdf
"Integration with the Blackberry Enterprise Server to get email, calendar items, contacts and tasks real-time on your Blackberry. Available Q4 2008"
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
Hey, look! FUD!
cogito ergo dubito
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.
From the F.A.Q.:
"The first three users that connect to the community versions with Outlook can only use Outlook. All other users can only connect via webaccess, imap/pop3 or Z-Push."
Yet another open source exchange replacement that didn't open source everything required to interact with outlook.
Without that, whats the point?
I just get bad checksum so there is a way to advertise... say its (A)GPL and then not provide the source !
links anyone ?
Google for the debate on debian-legal about whether it complies with the DFSG. Anyway, the crux of the matter is that authors can embed unmodifiable sections in their code, and you are not allowed to alter that code even if you will not be giving copies of it away. The theory is that you're distributing the output of the program, which is part of the program itself - or some nonsense like that. This goes against decades of precedent for the idea of usage versus distribution.
For example, if you VNC to a machine on my home LAN, you could potentially run Quickbooks. It would be executed on my machine and exporting its display to yours, but no one would ever consider this to be distribution. However, if I were running an AGPL'ed equivalent of Quickbooks on my home web server and you accessed it, the authors of the AGPL would claim that I distributed a copy of that application to you. That's their legal theory behind restricting my usage of it.
Another poster said I was spreading FUD. Yeah, I am, and with good reason. I fear that some project I depend on may adopt the AGPL. I'm uncertain that I'd be able to use it given the additional restrictions that it piles on top of the GPL, to the point that I actually doubt it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I think you mis-understand. This isn't meant to replace Outlook, the Windows-only desktop mail/groupware client. This is meant to replace Exchange, the Windows-only mail/groupware SERVER that Outlook is built to connect to, complete with cloning the MAPI protocol Outlook speaks. We won't have a drop-in Outlook replacement until Evolution finishes their MAPI code (IIRC in the next release).
Of course, this is all moot in a lot of businesses if it can't connect to BES, which you (currently) need a Windows box for anyway.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
why enterprises run Windows?
Does anybody have links to success stories of large(-ish) corporations converting to Zarafa?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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?
Quick! I need a baby in a month! Find me 9 women!
What sort of misguided geek thinks it's a good idea to work on a project which facilitates the rest of us getting invited to meetings?
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...
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:
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).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
FUD? Well, I'll let others be the judge of that but the difference between GPLv3 and Affero GPLv3 are HUGE:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source (...)"
This is the FSF on steroids, it's the anti-ASP license and it's also unsuitable for any software you want to improve internally and not share if it in any way interacts with externals. It's still not an EULA as creating derivates is one of the copyright holder's exclusive rights (except fair use) but it's definately stretching copyright law to the absolute limit in order to force the release of code.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
> 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.
That they require too many administrators and cause more downtime.
> 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.
He also mentioned it degrading due to *large mailbox size* That's the big PITA. And you have to buy crapware to shovel messages around, whereas with normal mail spools, you can shuffle mail around pretty easily with a few quick scripts.
> 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.
Yeah, but it's also one of those apps that's usually installed by an idiot.
> 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.
No product needs as much administration as Exchange server.
> 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.
Powerpoint with #$#%ing embedded videos. But that's another story entirely.
> 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.
Everyone else can do that too. But they do it better. The main advantage of Exchange is all that integration so they can send polls or schedule meetings or whatever else. But as far as simple email goes, Exchange is more trouble than its worth.
Which is why this project is important.
include $sig;
1;
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?
Ever stop to think
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?
Crud, I quoted an older version (that Google listed higher than the one you linked at that moment, go figure). The current version is:
The principle is the same: you are not allowed to modify it in certain ways, even if you do not plan to distribute copies of it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The difference is who has the right to ask for the source. The GPL says anyone who gets the binaries can ask for the source. The Affero GPL says that anyone who connects to the program running on a server can ask for the source.
Centralization breaks the internet.