Slashdot Mirror
Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam
jbrodkin writes "An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011. Based in Germany, Open-Xchange has tripled its user base from 8 million to 24 million paid seats since 2008, with the help of three dozen service providers including 1&1 Internet, among the world's largest Web hosting companies. Microsoft is still the 800-pound gorilla, with a worldwide install base of 301 million mailboxes in 2010, expected to reach 470 million by 2014. But Open-Xchange is luring numerous service providers who are wary of Microsoft's attempts to compete against its own partners by selling hosted e-mail services directly to its customers."
Unfortunately, it's also wholly unsuitable for any business needing absolute confidentiality, just like every cloud solution.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Don't worry about Open-Xchange, OpenChange + SOGo is the real open source alternative:
http://www.openchange.org/index.php/component/content/article/7-news/55-openchange-and-sogo-the-first-interoperable-and-exchange-compatible-groupware-solution
- OpenChange Server is a transparent and native Exchange replacement for Microsoft Outlook users working on top of Samba 4. With OpenChange, you don't need costly MAPI connectors anymore.
- SOGo is a reliable groupware server with a focus on scalability and open standards. Let your Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning, Apple iCal/iPhone, BlackBerry and now Microsoft Outlook users collaborate using a modern platform.
No per-seat CALS or license fees whatsovever.
Here's the direct link to go read about it if you don't want to go through the networkworld blogspam article: http://www.open-xchange.com/
The "Server edition" is $1300, and they make you open a blind link to a PDF to figure that out.
Here's a handy feature matrix but noticeably absent is the free "community edition": http://oxpedia.org/index.php?title=OX_Product_Matrix
Also, the activesync thing (oxtender) is completely non-free and only available in the licensed versions.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
For example, I think Slashdot needs to come up with an alternative logo for Microsoft stories. Sure, the old one was really stale - but at least it looked like a Borg. With the new one, it just looks like Gates is wearing a really poorly-designed Bluetooth phone headset.
#DeleteChrome
The problem with this view is that it is missing some functionality that people now consider part of email thanks to Microsoft and Outlook/Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino. If you have never worked in a company that makes use of these features you wouldn't understand - but if any of your coworkers have they will expect them from you and will find your IMAP mail system to inadequate and unacceptable.
First is Calendaring - inviting people to appointments and booking in meeting rooms and shared resources (projectors etc) to those meetings. They even will recommend times when all the attendees and equipment is free. If you change the time it informs everyone and moves in all their calendars. This is not to mention sharing your calendar with others so everyone can keep track of where/what your team is up to. And you can do all of this on your mobile phone (ActiveSync or Blackberry) and have it update your server/client immediately.
Contacts - you can see all the people in your team, department and company. You can share your contacts with your coworkers. When you or they change them your phone updates with the changes immediately. I've seen our director's assistant add contacts to his mailbox via Outlook and he can call them from his phone's contacts within less than a minute when on the road.
Delegation - your assistant/gatekeeper or the person filling in for you when you are on leave can respond to your email and meeting requests on your behalf. It even says Susie Q on Behalf of John Doe etc. You can also have a departmental or a support or an information mailbox that many people check and share responsibility for.
Not to mention that Exchange offers the significant advantages of a large ecosystem of applications, tools and trained professionals that can back it up, maintain it, fix it, merge it, replicate it and all kinds of other things that you will eventually need to do in the life-cycle of an average modern mail system. I am dealing with a merger of two companies at the moment and them both running Exchange is a godsend - I'm glad it isn't an OpenExchange system I am having to merge with...
As far as I can tell, SOX is probably the second-most over-hyped piece of legal misunderstanding promulgated as fact on Slashdot, position #1 being the recurring myth that ISPs are subject to common carrier regulations.
SOX applies to public companies only. From Wikipedia, it does not appear to place any specific requirements on corporate IT, except that the corporate IT will be audited for compliance with the "normal" parts of the law -- so you have to keep records on various things. This hasn't stopped people from making shit up -- if the law specifies that certain data must be "retained" for X months, Slashdotters and charlatans selling "SOX compliance" services are going to say that means the law says you have to use RAID 1000000 and update your offsite backups every 2 days. Just, cuz, you know, that's standard practice.
The law -- and I haven't read it, but I can guarantee you OP hasn't either -- doesn't say anything like that. Just like it doesn't say you have to chisel your non-digital documents in titanium sheets in case the building catches fire. It's not specifying particular standards -- it's just saying you can't be Enron. If the building catches fire or the hard drive crashes, well, you know, shit happens. Whether not installing sprinklers or not having backups was negligent or in bad faith is for a court to decide. So far, it hasn't come up.
OP -- and I don't know him, and he's probably a nice guy -- may now tell me about his personal experience with how Fortune 500 companies DO chisel Xeroxes into titanium and DO use RAID 1000000 and daily updated offsite backups AND ANYTHING ELSE IS NEGLIGENT AND WOULD GET ME THROWN INTO JAIL IN THE "REAL WORLD". And I'm probably going to ignore him because this post took all the time I want to spend talking about this. But: unless he backs his claims up with a statute, a court case, or at least a letter ruling from some relevant executive branch agency ... I'd be suspicious, man. Think of all the corporate incompetence with information management (laptops with credit cards gone missing ... oops) you hear about on Slashdot. Now think if Slashdot talks about anyone going to jail for that, or even getting in any real trouble.
---linuxrocks123
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.