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HP's OpenMail to support Linux
HP has announced that it will support Linux with its OpenMail which provides a UNIX based messaging/scheduling package (similar to MS Outlook). According to HP it will also provide Outlook connectivity, which gives it a unique edge. There is a free beta available, and the release is set for September.
In addition to robust Internet e-mail-standards support, the Linux edition of OpenMail will include rich support for Microsoft(R) Outlook (including full wide-area calendar/schedule access) and OpenMail 6.0's new Web client.
That paragraph in particular seems to indicate this.cetan
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I agree that OM blows if you are only used to sendmail and Internet-compliant mail; however, it is X.400 based and apparently quite popular for directory services integration (X.500) & with Europeans. I used to admin several boxes for a company here in Houston that ran onGO, a weird British package (basically a CLI terminal front-end for OpenMail). The boxes were an old RS/6000 (probably a 60 MHz PPC) with 64 MB RAM, and an old Data General M88k 8500 with about 256 MB RAM and 80 GB CLARiiON SCSI-attached. This ran reasonably well for over 750 heavy users (biggest problem was lack of storage). This was several years ago, however, and probably used a really old version of OM. We also used sendmail 8.x as our MTA (the AIX box was the internet mail gateway and hosted the aliases file) which might explain the better performance we got. The main problem was when the company was bought out, we had to migrate to Lotus Notes 4.5. We ended up telling people to send all their important mail to themselves from the old OM account to the new Notes ID, because IBM didn't provide any migration tools at the time from OpenMail. D'oh! Now they do, though, says IBM, at least for Notes 5. P.S. I would imagine the newer OM revs have at least hopped on the LDAP bandwagon as well....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Buried in the massive hunk of obstreperous code that is MS Outlook is a pretty full-featured calendaring tool. Basically, it lets you create server-side schedules that others on your team can adjust. If someone is marked as attending a meeting, it appears in both the "meeting notes" view and on their personal schedules. (I don't recall MS's terms for these features, but you get the general idea).
PHBs love this kind of thing. It gives them the ability to ramp up due-dates with an effortless flick of the wrist, whereas before, they had to actually walk to your office (or call you to theirs). This doesn't even require interaction with a real human being.
(Seriously, though: this is pretty cool. I sure hope that new versions of Outlook don't break this functionality.)
Your client is not allowed to access the requested object.
Hey, what is this? They let people get through the registration screen, assign a username and password, and then deny access to the file! Oh well, at least I can get my money back. :)
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)
Of course Outlook supports POP3, but that's just for getting mail. You couldn't store your mail in addition to your calendar, todo list, etc. on the server. Using IMAP instead will at least give you the ability to store your mail on the server, but Microsoft has chosen not to support storing anothing other than mail on an IMAP mail store. OpenMail gives all these abilities back to you.
/.ers and other people if they dared to go against the IMAP standard and store non-mail items on the server in some proprietary format.
Can you name another client that lets you store something other than mail on an IMAP store? The M stands for Message, which most people take to mean Mail. I bet microsoft would receive holy hell from
HP provides a MAPI transport that allows Outlook to use its Openmail server to do a lot of groupware functionality, which is really cool.
Microsoft ships outlook with other such transports - one for ccMail, one for MS Mail. Compuserve wrote one to access Compuserve mail. Transend writes one that has more features for ccMail connectivity than the one Outlook has. There was even an ill-fated one written by AOL to access AOL mail, but that never got out of beta (AOL nixed it, not Microsoft)
It's up to the person or company who writes the MAPI transport to enable the functionality they want - whether it be server side calendars or just mail, it's up to them. Outlook makes it easy to write something that just downloads items to the local machine. To write a store provider as well as a transport provider (which is what it appears that HP has done) is more difficult but not undoable.
It isn't designed for the individual who justs wants mail, and shouldn't be read as such. Its for the corporation who wants to do scheduling and the such off their e-mail system, and don't want to use NT to do it.
There are a lot of reasons to use Openmail other than not wanting to use NT. HP used to have a version of Openmail for NT, actually, although they stopped producing new versions for it.
I can't speak for whether or not the product itself works well, or if it crashes all the time as people have claimed, but I do know that the arguments being placed against it as far as Oulook connectivity and its pointlessness are far from on target.
Well I think they're on target in that outlook is a common product and it's great if HP can leverage that (Along with them now supporting linux as a server platform) to get more companies to decide to use their server yet use a client that users might be more comfortable/familiar with.
OpenMail has both client and server offerings. The strategy from
a client perspective is to support an open "client of choice" paradigm.
Clients such as MS Outlook, Outlook express, MS mail, cc:Mail, LAN/Mobile,
Eudora and Netscape go against the same message store in Native mode.
"Native" means NO GATEWAYS, and no UGLY translations. So yes... OM
supports the MS Outlook client just like (or better) than NT Exchange.
The interesting thing is HP's plan to opensource their native Unix client
called OMGUI. The client has been ported to Linux and is available form
their web site. Given that HP has done the work to make the MS Outlook
client work against the Linux OM server, one can see how it would be
possible to take the opensource client (OMGUI) and quite quickly duplicate
and exceed the capabilities of MS Outlook. After all... the Linux based data store
already contains the data which is presented to the Outlook client.
On the server side OpenMail supports both the ITU and ITEF's internet protocol
suite. OpenMail is a superset of Internet and X.400/X.500. It can synchronize with
other LDAP directories,X.500 and even Domino/Notes DB's. It also supports SSL secure
access from the internet via their integration with HP's Virtual Vault offering. This is
great for mobile users and PDA users that simply want to "safely" read their mail by
entering a URL from any browser. This stuff could be big!
IMAP.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
By default Exchange is setup as an IMAP server - so just setup pine or mutt or Netscape (or even fetchmail) to use the exchange server as an IMAP server. Exchange is also an LDAP (albeit quite buggy) server for addresses - netscape can take advantage of this, as can mutt if you use an external program - I don't know about pine.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Originally, Microsoft billed client-side MAPI as a "Universal Inbox" and as an OS feature -"Windows Messaging". By the time Exchange v1 (v4) was out the door, people figured that they meant no such thing, and MAPI/Outlook is pretty well tied to Exchange server for many of it's features.
So when ever someone advertises that you can use Outlook to get at their mail store, it begs the question how much of Outlook's functionality actually works. (For example, you can sorta get Notes mail from Outlook, but that's about it.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
But what if you disable IMAP on your client?
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.