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Exchange Comes To Linux As OpenChange
joesmart writes to tell us that new work on OpenChange and KDE seeks to bridge the gap between groupware compatibility and open source. KDE developer Brad Hards spoke at the Linux.conf.au conference and said the goal of OpenChange is to implement the Microsoft Exchange protocols as they are used by Outlook. "OpenChange has client and server-side libraries for Exchange integration and relies heavily on code developed for Samba 4. It is open source software licensed under the GPL version 3. Hards said more work is being done on the client side and 'we have code for the server,' but estimates another 12 months of development is required to produce an OpenChange server ready for production."
The goal is laudable but strategically speaking: do we really want to focus more OSS efforts to replicate MS protocols and methods?
Whilst a million enterprises out there shrug their shoulders and think 'why would I want to wrestle with this when I could just go along with the AD stack that I know, trust and my MSCE admins love'
Of course they may come out with a fantastic 100% interoperable and virtually bug free product and I'll have to eat my words. But history is not on their side.... also will this have to plug into openldap/kerebos/samba nightmare?
If by "KDE integration" they mean Kontact, I'm all for that.
Mostly because of the design -- Kontact looks and feels like a monolithic, Outlook-esque application. Instead, it merely combines pieces you already have as standalone programs -- KMail, Akregator, KOrganizer, and so on.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It is nice to emulate Exchange, but raising it to the level of suk that MS achieves would be a labor of decades.
(You gonna mod this troll or funny? Huh? What ya gonna do, boy?)
--
open source governance
I had a conversation with one of the openchange developers a few months ago to talk about some of the architecture being built here, and was pleased to find out that they're aiming to do something useful. They do want OpenChange to be useful as a standalone server. That gets you something Outlook can talk to. But they're also going to expose all of the right API's and stuff so that OpenChange can be integrated with an existing store or server. That means that with the right amount of glue code, we'll be able to integrate it with existing open source groupware servers like Citadel or Kolab or OpenGroupware. All of these servers currently have Outlook compatibility, but you need to add a plugin to Outlook in order to make it work. With any luck, OpenChange will allow Outlook to talk to all of these excellent FOSS groupware platforms as if they were Exchange servers.
... some of them are excellent. I'm particularly fond of Bynari's connector which is totally seamless, works with open source groupware servers, and costs far less than Exchange licenses. But a connector-free option will be nice too.)
(Not that I'm knocking the plugins, mind you
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I've been using Evolution and the Exchange plugin to connect to my company's Exchange server.
I can access mail and online calendar with not much problem. There are some annoyances, but I can live with them.
I would prefer OpenChange and Evolution work together in improving the already existing stack instead of creating a new one...
It's amazing how MS is so successful in making NOT having their products very inconvenient. Evolution almost works. I still kick and scream when someone asks me to set up a meeting. Think about how those MS users must feel. Here is one of the "Tech" team, and he has trouble:
*Scheduling Meetings
*Printing from time to time
*Dealing with Spreadsheets on a share drive
I will keep my Linux desktop at work, but boy do I envy those "Blue Pill" MS users.
This is a space that I've observed for a long long time. I can assure you that if anyone ever gets even remotely close to a replacement for Outlook against an Exchange server (or Exchange against an Outlook client), Microsoft will change the APIs so fast your head will spin off and fly away.
MAPI, AD and such are PROPRIETARY protocols folks, and Microsoft knows they are the keys to the kingdom. That's why all the Exchange clients ever created work ok at the start, but before they can really get going they fall back several steps. Then they arrive at the real problem of playing catch-up every time Microsoft breaks them. The customers and users don't blame Microsoft because Outlook and Exchange still work (as well as they do, anyway) -- the fury is pointed at the third party software that promised a way out of the Exchange but failed to deliver.
Remember "Windows ain't done until Lotus don't run." That play works.
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients. Shared calendar, great web gui, etc. Oh yeah and they are owned by Yahoo now so you can feel like you're supporting the newly crowned Internet underdog while you're at it.
Depending on the field, there are a number of applications that tie into an exchange environment beyond just the email client. I'm talking things like (VOIP based) voicemail to email, Blackberry Enterprise Server, and their ilk.
For the record, I hate blackberries, and would actually recommend a windows mobile device over a blackberry any day. In how many corporate environments, however, does the IT department get to call the shots in that manner? No, in reality, if the CEO and the other board members want blackberries, they're going to get them, and a BES to support them.
So is there any chance for supporting other apps that work with exchange, or is this just jury rigged to the point that outlook recognizes it as Exchange?
Hmm, Citadel with the Bynari connector already does all that Exchange does. You can literally replace dozens of Excange servers with a single Citadel server and the users won't know the difference.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If you want a replacement of Exchange and you don't want to wait a year, you could look at Zarafa. www.zarafa.com
OpenChange has been around as a project since at least 2004. Prior to that (1990 - 2001) there was a commercial product called OpenMail that worked quite well as an exchange replacement. In 2001 HP announced that it was discontinuing sales to new customers and would not develop it further. Fast forward to 2003, a startup called Apptran Software was founded with a main goal being to develop a similar product. In 2006 it changed its name to PostPath, Inc. and was acquired by Cisco in August 2008.
It's always mystified me as to why a business with less then about 100 employees would use Exchange Server. Yet it seems the vast majority do, even though they could just use IMAP with Outlook.
Is it the shared calendar/resource booking thing? In which case why do they elect to spend serious money (probably close to the annual wage of one of their junior employees) when a web-based shared calendar would be free? Heck, a couple of days evaluating the hoards of good alternatives on freshmeat.net wouldn't kill them would it?
I dunno. Weird. Medium to large corporations (200 seats+) I can sort of understand, but even then...
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Oh, look, I guess WINE is a bunch of trolls, too... cause that's where they are at. Interoperability is apparently hard when you are dealing with things that weren't designed to be interoperated with, but don't remind a slashbot about that.
Does it run Lotus Notes?
For a small business that is just now looking at getting an Exchange server, what would be the bess OSS alternative?
Thinking that it would be much easier to build and integrate the OSS solution from the ground up, rather than shoehorn it into an existing Exchange environment, what's the best approach here?
[...] the Evolution MAPI plugin [...]
I'm stuck wondering about this.
Rather than writing a plugin for evolution, wouldn't it be better to write a mail server (i.e. pop or imap) with a lot of extensions that map onto what exchange can do, and then have an evolution plugin that talks to that?
In that way, you can do all the boring old mail operations from your mail client of choice and be happy, and use evolution for all the fancy non-mail stuff.
If there's a standard calendaring protocol, make the wrapper daemon compatible with both imap and the calendaring protocol. Or split it into two daemons (who talk together if need be).
(and of course provide a nice "Setup exchange account" in evolution that configures and runs these daemons; make it easy to use, of course.)
[for those of you who love design patterns, this'd be the adapter pattern, right?]
I believe you can get all the features of ms-exchange from google mail, for nothing, or next-to-nothing. I further believe that this has already been successfully done by some government institutions with with tens of thousands of users.
Also, in some cases, you may be able to replace sharepoint with google docs.
I would agree that Exchange and Active Directory are two very important reasons why Microsoft will remain dominant. The third MS technology that the Open Source community could really compete in, but appears to be sleeping is SharePoint.
There is O3 Spaces that works with MS Office and OpenOffice.org/Star Office, and has a Free Community edition available.
Am I the only one that knows about Zarafa? I swear it was a slashdot post long ago. Seems quite relevant now. Since this article says "12 months" is required for full development.
The quote is "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run," as told to Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative reporter James Wallace by a Microsoft developer while Wallace was doing interviews gathering material for the book Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire:
http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233430962&sr=1-1
From one review of the book:
The Kremlin had a term for people like you back during the Soviet era: "useful idiot."
This has just nothing to do with KDE at all - if you read the article, the GNOME / Evolution integration is there already, and working at some level - the KDE integration is just hype - so why is it a KDE story I ask ?
I really don't see the point of writing code to emulate an exchange server when Microsoft is just going to break it again anyway. Why not write a open standard for calendar and scheduling interchange and take a decent FOSS client (e.g. thunderbird) and extend it to work with that protocol? If you really want outlook capability it should be written as a gateway to the open standard protocol.
why not just use Lotus domino on a variety of Linux platforms and if you really must an outlook client , this works out of the box
men will do for beer
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