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."

Comments

Here we go again.....

[wintermute000]

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?

Re:Here we go again.....

[Beached]

Yes, I believe the MS gamebook says to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. Or as their competitors liked to say EEE!!!!

Re:Here we go again.....

[fotbr]

Its been my experience that IT and admin types are more open to change than end users. Sure, they bitch and moan amongst themselves, but they usually don't raise the type of hell that results when the rest of the staff has to adapt to a change.

So a business might be more open to dropping their (quite pricey) exchange server in favor of this, IF their end users don't see any difference while using Outlook, which they already "know".

Re:Here we go again.....

[devman]

Also worth noting this will be nice for people like me who work in windows shop but would like to run a Linux and actually use exchange functionality from a native client.

Re:Here we go again.....

[techno-vampire]

The goal is laudable but strategically speaking: do we really want to focus more OSS efforts to replicate MS protocols and methods?

If you want to telecommute, you need to be able to access your work email. If your company is one of the many who use Exchange, you have to use a client that can talk to it. Having a native Linux client that can do this would mean that you wouldn't have to run Windows, even in a VM box if you didn't want to, just to get your work email.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Raul Acevedo]

The goal is laudable but strategically speaking: do we really want to focus more OSS efforts to replicate MS protocols and methods?

Yes, we do.

Why do you think Microsoft has such a stranglehold on the corporate desktop? Outlook and Exchange are the cornerstone of that lock. It's brilliant if you can produce a true Outlook replacement; that means everybody's email and calendars can stay the same. If you try to introduce a brand new calendering/email system, you have to deal with migration, and that is a ridiculously huge headache affecting the entire organization. Not to mention all the retraining and retooling (and likely re-hiring) you have to do with a new server architecture...

No wonder nobody does it.

If you can replace the client, you are much more likely to have clients that can talk to multiple back ends (e.g. Exchange or an open source alternative). Then you have the real possibility of replacing the back end much more transparently at a later date.

Unfortunately this two step solution is, for the next few years, the only real way it could possibly happen in most companies.

Re:Here we go again.....

[wintermute000]

Well at least if its OSS then its zero cost to try it out in the lab, except for time of course.

I'd be interested to see how well it plugs into an otherwise stock MS active directory domain. If it wants to take on MS in their home turf it must get this bit absolutely right.

Also note as MS's embrace extend extinguish approach has brought us all sorts of 3rd party apps that plug into exchange e.g. voicemail to email for VOIP stacks like Cisco CCM, I can only foresee lots of pain

Another point, sure us IT types are more open to this kind of change. We are also (at least those of us in Dilbert corporate land) very wary of the consequences of messing with core systems that are working fine. Despite what Cisco QoS teaches you, email is regarded by your users as tatamount to electricity and plumbing. Until this project gets to a critical mass here like say apache or mysql its an easy sell to management, you will find it hard to justify ripping exchange out for this unknown quantity

Re:Here we go again.....

[wintermute000]

good points, I must admit I glossed over the client side and was thinking primarily on the server side.

Having said that though I find exchange web interface perfectly adequate, although of course its tied to IE for full functionality (shakes fist at MS)

On the client side, I ask another (possibly stupid) question: how is this different from say Evolution's exchange plugin (which I have used via https and from what I could tell, it did what it said on the tin, if slow as molasses)

Re:Here we go again.....

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well, having used Evolution's exchange plugin, I'm hoping that the project being discussed isn't slow as you describe, and doesn't leak resources like a sieve and crash frequently like Evolution.

As far as I can tell Evo development is so close to dead as to be unable to be distinguished from it.

I'm happily working in a company that is not married to exchange at the moment, but what is described in this article is something that could have made my previous job a lot more pleasant.

Evolution sucks so bad that my solution in that job was to run windows and office under VMWare and use THAT for my email. running VMware and a whole other OS virtualized under a Linux host was faster and leaked less resources than Evolution.

Re:Here we go again.....

[realmolo]

Well, Exchange is *part* of the reason people get locked into MS products. But the bigger reason, by far, is Active Directory.

AD *works*. It's easy. It integrates seamlessly with Windows. The management tools are good, and easy to use. There are tons of third-party products that integrate with it. Seamlessly.

The current LDAP/Kerberos/Samba situation is a fucking MESS. It's unusable in a production environment. It's hard to manage. It doesn't have GROUP POLICIES, for Christ's sake.

Samba 4 supposedly fixes some of these problems, but I doubt it comes even CLOSE to providing all the functionality of a genuine Windows Server OS.

THAT is why people are locked into MS products. They simply work better than the alternatives in many cases, especially on a corporate LAN.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Cyberax]

I have just finished installing Samba4 alpha6 on my network (I already have LDAP+Kerberos set up). I can say that it's pretty impressive.

I was able to setup it as AD controller and join my notebook to it without a problem, single sign-on and ability to SSH into my Linux servers without entering login/password also rocks. AD management tools also work just fine. And Samba4 setup actually was not that scary at all :)

I'd say that in ~1 year we'll really have nice working replacement of Exchange+AD, compatible with legacy Windows clients.

Re:Here we go again.....

[TheRealFixer]

What's nightmarish about OpenLDAP, Kerberos and Samba? I run this combination on my home LAN. Couldn't be easier.

Key words being home LAN. In a corporate LAN, or even a mid-size company network, management of these alternatives quickly becomes a nightmare. Stuff just doesn't work quite right with the Windows clients, and you don't have key components of Windows management available, like Group Policy Objects. Might be good enough for your hobby network at home, but multiply that across a couple thousand clients and it's not exactly fun.

I'm all about cutting costs by going open source wherever I can, but Active Directory, when you're dealing with a Windows environment, just works. The headaches and time I'd waste trying to get the current LDAP/Kerberos/Samba "alternative" working well enough that we wouldn't be getting flooded with calls about stuff not working how the users expect, greatly exceeds the cost of just implementing and maintaining Active Directory.

There's some hope that Samba4 will fix a lot of that, and after it's released I'll look at it again.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Orion Blastar]

I think the best strategy to ween companies over to Linux is to replace each Microsoft product they use with a free or open source version of that product.

Why you may ask?

The answer is simple, they want to keep their Windows workstations and change the server over to Linux, without missing features. One of the arguments corporations had against using Linux was that it did not support MS-Exchange protocols so they could keep their Outlook clients and have shared calendars and shared email files.

I suppose next is modifying My-SQL or PostgresSQL to support Transact-SQL the SQL language that MS-SQL Server uses.

Novell Mono already tries to replace Microsoft Visual Studio with Linux, Mac OSX, etc versions, and while they may need some rewriting of code, legacy Visual Studio code can be ported over to Linux for those custom made applications.

When I worked at a law firm in 1997-2001 I used Internet Explorer 4/5/6 and VBScript and ActiveX controls for web Intranet applications using Active Server Pages. I told my manager that the employees who use Macintoshes cannot access our Intranet applications unless we wrote in Javascript and used Java instead of ActiveX. He told me it was nonsense. I said if we had clients who needed to connect to our Intranet and they ran OS/2, Linux, *BSD Unix, or Mac OS 7/8/9 whatever that they couldn't connect. He didn't believe me and told me to never develop in Java and only use Javascript when it could do something better or faster that VBScript couldn't do like some Dynamic HTML features.

Then the Mac users complained why the Intranet apps wouldn't work on their Macs. I told them to ask my manager, as the decision to support the technology that works for their computers was not my decision.

Then in 2001, they decided to use ASP.NET in beta tests to be cutting edge technology and use server side objects to solve the incompatibility issues.

Eventually I got too sick to work and went on short term disability, and when I returned to work I was fired two weeks later for being sick on the job. (The stress upset my GERD and made me throw up in trashcans when I couldn't make it to the bathroom) and security quickly escorted me out of the building.

Two months later my coworkers begged me to reapply for my job back, that the whole Intranet went to shit because I used to debug every Intranet program and Visual BASIC program, and now that they started to write new code without me, the system would crash 12 or more times a day and they even had code they couldn't compile. I told them I couldn't go backward, if they needed me that bad they should not have fired me, besides the stress of the job got to me. I was Atlas for the programmers and held everything up on my own shoulders so everything worked like it should. Eventually they had clients with Linux, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, etc. I recall reading on the Microsoft Newsgroups when I searched for their domain name, all of the issues they had and asking Microsoft why ASP.NET and VS.NET does not work as well as the ones they replaced and does not have all of the features they promised.

I think I am better off on disability now, than working some thankless job and carrying most of the programmers because they hardly knew what they were doing. Why I chose to go on disability rather than risk another job that could only make me sicker and cause a stroke or heart attack due to high stress causing high blood pressure. If I didn't do that, I'd most likely have died on the job with a stroke or heart attack, or been paralyzed due to a stroke, or go without a job and lose the house. On relief I get is from friends and family who help out, plus my local church. If not for that support system, and it isn't money, but emotional support and activities, I am not sure what I'd do. Maybe kill myself like one of my friends did in 1999 who had the same mental illness disability that I have, he shut everyone out of his life divorced his wife, his mother was dying of cancer, he stopped going to church, and just sat home

Re:Here we go again.....

[Orion Blastar]

Having Linux as a backend server for Windows workstations is a wonderful thing for a corporation.

It saves them a lot of money. Do you know what 1000 Windows 2008 Server client and Exchange Server client licenses cost? Well use Linux with SAMBA and OpenChange for less than the cost of a bottle of water. Beat that, Microsoft, and managers who always try to justify Microsoft software over Linux software.

Re:Here we go again.....

[wrecked]

Exchange 2007 deprecated the Outlook Web Access protocol that Evolution depended on for interoperability. As another Linux user in an Exchange corporate environment, I am anxiously awaiting the day that the Evolution MAPI plugin (which depends on the Samba4 and Openchange libraries) is functional. I've been compiling the development code for the last month, and it's been hit and miss. If anyone is interested: Evolution MAPI tarballs released and the Openchange Evolution MAPI blog.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Antique Geekmeister]

Sadly, it's unlikely to work well past t he next Exchange or MS Office upgrade. You _cannot_ maintain compatibility when the primary authors of a product are determined to break your compatibility, and it certainly fits Microsoft's history to do so.

Re:Here we go again.....

[jargon82]

The current versions have searching (pretty fast, too). The interface is fast and responsive. A lot of the old complaints I've had about it are gone. I'm not sure what you mean by attaching one file at a time... afaik, it hasn't had such a restriction since 2000 at least. It's not perfect, it's not a substitute for a day to day local client, but it's certainly better than a lot of the webmail solutions I've seen... not to mention having your contacts already there is useful for what (to me) is a backup email system for when I don't have access to my fat client.

Re:Here we go again.....

[TooMuchToDo]

Wow, I guess you haven't been around long enough to pay Microsoft huge yearly amounts for support contracts to have them say to one of your problems "We have no idea. Good luck." Give me OSS anyday.

Re:Here we go again.....

[evilviper]

AD *works*. It's easy. It integrates seamlessly with Windows. The management tools are good, and easy to use.

Like ALL Microsoft products and technologies... Active Directory is pretty easy to get into a minimally working state if you like all the defaults. And isn't too difficult to get it to do some of the lowest-common-denominator simple tasks that everybody wants, like single sign-on, roaming profiles, and a few policy restrictions.

AD isn't really "easy" unless your time is worthless, and you don't mind insane problems cropping up. You're going to be browsing around context menus, sub-sub-sub-sub options with utterly insane names and absolutely no comprehensible scheme, to find the one option you want to toggle.

God help you if you want some slight variation of how Microsoft thinks it should work, because you've just gone from "easy" to "practically impossible" and are going to be delving into the darkest realms of the registry, and deeply hidden configuration menus and files.

I know plenty of companies who think Windows servers are easy, and work well... Plenty of them have hired me to get them to stop "working" the way they do.

Whatever time and money you think you've saved by going with Windows servers goes out the window the first time you try to copy a very big file to a Windows Share, only to have it fail at 2GBs... Yes, Windows quietly decides your gigabit LAN is a dial-up link, and decides to go for the slow, high-delay, 2GB filesize limit variation of SMB. Samba never does.

The current LDAP/Kerberos/Samba situation is a fucking MESS. It's unusable in a production environment. It's hard to manage. It doesn't have GROUP POLICIES, for Christ's sake.

I have no idea what you are talking about. You can manage group policies on a Samba server with some of Microsoft's own management tools (ie. from a Windows workstation that logs-on to the domain).

And once you've got Samba setup, it will silently work, exactly how you configure it to do so, forever. A Windows server will require CONSTANT attention, as weird one-off bugs continually spring up, performance suddenly drops dramatically one day, and slowly starts recovering over the next week, but never quite gets back where it was. Never mind the standard Windows practice of quietly disabling/corrupting one driver or another for no particular reason. And did I mention the utterly useless error messages, and logs with lots of useless information and NONE of the HELPFUL information you could possibly use.

THAT is why people are locked into MS products. They simply work better than the alternatives in many cases, especially on a corporate LAN.

No. They just sound better when you're reading the spec sheet, and trying to get a basic server minimally working...

The fact that Windows is popular with numerous companies is actually a sad commentary on corporations, who go for the quick way to save a buck, and ignore the vast amount Microsoft costs them over time.

Re:Here we go again.....

[mlts]

There is also Sarbanes-Oxley and other issues. Part of the costs of keeping "Due diligence" valid by doing Exchange is that Exchange comes with a lot of the features needed for compliance built in. For example, with E2007, it is almost a no brainer to set up archiving and retention so incoming and outgoing E-mail is retained as per laws... laws that are a bad thing to break.

An OSS product is going to have to not just grok the Exchange 2007 protocol, but be able to support features that Exchange offers, from OWA, to replication and clustering (larger installations have one Exchange server on their DMZ and a cluster for their mailboxes.) Most importantly, companies will need to rely on the solution to be able to archive and audit. If a solution can't produce logs when auditors come by, people go to prison, as per HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or CALEA.

Maybe RedHat could do something like this and get it FIPS/Common Criteria/whatever certified so people have an alternative to Exchange, but until then, a lot of companies will remain tied to it and Active Directory.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Gordo_1]

I'm not saying MS doesn't have incentive to break the protocols, but they do have to maintain some sort of compatibility between versions of Exchange. That's because corporations typically update Outlook software across the organization in a continuous fashion and asynchronously from Exchange server upgrades. IT departments would raise bloody hell if MS didn't provide a mostly seamless transition.

Re:Here we go again.....

[GigaplexNZ]

There is a big difference between not attempting to maintain compatibility and actively going out of your way to break the compatibility.

Re:Here we go again.....

[_Sprocket_]

Except Exchange costs a lot more than the $50 copy of Windows. I mean, you've got a valid point. But the example you give completely fails to make it.

And, by the way, a sufficiently large installation of Exchange is going to require quite a bit of work to get right as well.

Re:Here we go again.....

[rrohbeck]

However, MS's customers are no longer on the upgrade bandwagon so MS can't easily push new protocols into the market.
Our company is still 100% on Office/Outlook 2003 and nobody wants to change that. And given the complaints I hear about Office 2007 I have a feeling that we're not alone.

Re:Here we go again.....

[zig007]

Hear, hear!
Actually, you don't have to have a very large network to run into issues like this.

I decided to switch to a samba-based network at home for (at least) five reasons:

1. When i had ran out of the cost-free licences i got through MSDN-certifications(i was an MSCE) i found out that even a home network would become ridiculously expensive if I wanted even the slightest bit of redundance/fail-over functionality. Which I wanted. For some reason, that's considered "enterprise level" stuff, according to MS. They are SO 1995. Also, customization and scripting support sucked extremely hard. You can't do that, was the standard conclusion.
2. I had huge and completely unexplainable performance and stability issues. I almost went insane by the lack of logging and cost of super-crappy support(first through third level knew less than me and they said the exact same stupid thing, logical reasoning did not work, "tried reinstalling?"), since I had recently started to try Linux and gotten a bit spoiled by the ease of troubleshooting and the fantastic community support.
3. For each version of windows system requirements effectively doubled or tripled, for practically NO ADDED VALUE on the server-side. I couldn't afford to buy new servers every third year for my home network. Also, I wanted it to run on cheap hardware. Yeah, i now about MTBF, but RAID and redundance helps, new drives are cheap and the other parts don't fail as often, especially in even temperatures.
4. I had started to HATE IIS and it's super stupid settings-database which got corrupted resulting in really strange errors for no reason. NOT funny that backing it up still worked. ARRGH!
5. Granted, I wanted to learn more about Linux, Apache, Postgres and LDAP. Which I now do.
6. And oh, I almost forgot. Backups. How did you do that on Windows in 2004 without getting ripped of? I first solved it using scripting and then came Bacula, beautiful and "enterprice-y". Actually, since 2007, it is ported for Windows. I almost don't like that. It must suck. :-)

What were my experiences?

1. That when I did this, things were more difficult than they are today. But everything worked the way it was supposed to.
   And continued to do so. For YEARS.
   I encountered only two or maybe three bugs during my entire transition. As opposed to the almost daily hair-tugging of the windows experience.
2. Text-file-based settings are so ridiculously superior to weird binary file-system entities (the registry) that I don't know where to start.(WHY? WHYYY?)
3. Plain-text, logically localized log files and configurable logging levels are so ridiculously superior to weird binary log-files that I have similar problem of where to start.
4. Community support is ALWAYS better than the paid MS support, since there you can eventually, and quicker, get the answer from the actual developer of the application. And, almost always, someone else have encountered the same problem, so the forums gives you the answers most of the time. Which is great in the case of ReiserFS, where the main developer is incarcerated. :-)
   There is an exception to this, though, and that is if you use really exotic software with a small user base. Obviously the number of questions and answers in those forums are less numerous. On the other hand, It might be easier to get a hold of the developer.

Of course, there's stuff that pisses you off in the Linux world. But it belong almost exclusively to the desktop part of that world.
Administering *nix servers are a dream come true in comparison to the windows server nightmare. Yup, I have nightmares about windows boxens.
Everything is so damn smart and logical. Uh, well sometime maybe not according to YOUR logic, but at least to some logic, which can then be understood.
And things are getting better all the time. Especially the communities. An now I have redundant LDAP, DNS, Backup, DC, clustered databases and so forth. On crap computers with non-crap raid controllers. Don't need much more.
What has gotten better in the MS-world? Vista? The servers, IIS? And their .NET versions?
Well, I can tell you since i am now a windows developer for a living: Not much.

Re:Here we go again.....

[jregel]

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.

On it's own SharePoint is a pretty basic application, but it's gaining a lot of traction, and the functionality is increasing with add-on modules. The Office integration with SharePoint is also getting better and when a company has most of its documents in MOSS, they aren't going to rip them out for something in the future as the hassle will be too great.

Re:Here we go again.....

[bit01]

There is also Sarbanes-Oxley and other issues.

Sarbanes-Oxley applies to the USA only. 95% of the world's population don't give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.

IN any case archiving is trivial and there is no need to duplicate system functionality in yet another application. Email logging is built into almost all email systems. Clustering is available in all major OS'. Setting up country applicable audit trails is trivial.

You're just FUD'ing.

---

Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.

Re:Here we go again.....

[Antique Geekmeister]

Yes, they do have to maintain some compatibility. But that compatibility is to be able to read _old_ versions, not to keep new files from new versions of MS Office compatible or even legible to old versions of MS Office. Upgrades that work for MS owned software seamlessly, in particular, but by default save old files in new formats, are absolute hell to keep interoperating with third-party tools.

The result is that features can be added to Outlook that are not compatible with _any_ third party software, and even directly violate third-party API's, and they can and will say "gee, you should have used Exchange/Outlook/Word/Excel! That works!!!!"

Re:Here we go again.....

[jonaskoelker]

Do you know what 1000 Windows 2008 Server client and Exchange Server client licenses cost?

No, but last I heard the Microsoft licensing is so hard to figure out that the lawyers who can tell you how much this would cost are almost as expensive as the software itself.

(rimshot)

Kontact is cool.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Integrate with existing FOSS groupware

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

(Not that I'm knocking the plugins, mind you ... 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.)

Just use Zimbra!?

[TheNarrator]

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.

Citadel

[flyingfsck]

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.

I don't understand Exchange

[gilgongo]

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...