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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.
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 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 you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those? Take THAT, big iron.
DEFINITELY
(If you're gonna write a word in all caps, spell it right :-) )
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.
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.
Yet another open source exchange replacement that didn't open source everything required to interact with outlook.
Without that, whats the point?
Quick! I need a baby in a month! Find me 9 women!
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?
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
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?