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.....

[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.....

[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.....

[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.....

[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.....

[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.....

[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.

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.