Helge-
Respectfully, your comments below are not all entirely accurate. Open-Xchange is GPL'd. The package, though difficult to install and manage (these are of course opinions), is rather complete. Most of the cosmetic issues are easy to resolve. The performance is quite reasonable. By using XMail underneath it and our own web interface on top, we have had a great degree of success providing an end-user manageable groupware solution with a robust backend.
The gaping hole in the solution is full Outlook connectivity. There is a strong need for a complete end-to-end GPL solution that includes not just email and contacts, but also calendar support. This support should be provided through at least two solid desktop clients: first Outlook and second a GPL'd program such as the Mozilla suite.
Now, on to the connector. It is very, very difficult for me to imagine a situation in which working the problem from both ends at the same time- desktop client out and server software in- would not make life easier.
Regards,
Darrell McGuire Pegasys Computer Technologies, Inc.
Helge Hess wrote:
Hi,
not wanting to start a discussion, but you got a lot of things wrong:
On 2. Feb 2005, at 01:25 Uhr, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
There is a very complete, GPL MS-Exchange "replacement" server project at http://open-xchange.org (that's how I found this OTLK-Con list).
Whether this is very complete might be open for discussion (but probably not in this mailinglist).
So far it only provides a web interface, similiar to the web-ui phpGroupware or OpenGroupware.org or any of the other 200 groupware servers listed in Freshmeat.
It is now the basis for Novell's OpenGroupware app, so it is both very full-featured, and can directly upgrade to a Novell-supported app (help, revisions, custom development, business-decision ready deployment).
First: there is no "OpenGroupware" from Novell. OpenGroupware is an independend free groupware server project:
http://www.opengroupware.org/
Novell's groupware server is called Groupwise. When Novell bought SuSE it acquired a second groupware server called SLOX. SLOX is now discontinued by Novell (announcement was done end of last year, available on the OX site).
The Netline company which provided some part of SLOX now tries to continue the product as what is called "Open-Xchange" - we'll see what comes out of this. Novell is supposed to provide enduser support for an upcoming (non-OpenSource!) product by Netline (just like any other Novell listed thirdparty tool).
It uses open standards/protocols for client/server transactions, and really
can replace an Exchange server. However, using Outlook as a client
requires installing a MAPI plugin, and the O-X plugin will probably not
be GPL.
Open-Xchange does not provide a MAPI plugin which obviously renders your first statement non-sense (it cannot act as an Exchange replacement).
This may or may not change in the future.
So the best open platform for developers and users would be the GPL O-X server, and something like the OTLK-Con Outlook plugin.
The best open platform would be an OLTK-Con Outlook plugin speaking some standard protocol (like CalDAV for events). This would allow the user to select the proper server depending on his requirements without being forced into one combo.
If we can get the two developer communities together, we can get both sides of the C/S system to work for us more quickly. Why not throw the "Exchange replacement" work we're discussing in this thread into O-X, and save the client development for OTLK-Con, rather than reinventing both wheels?
As you already found out Open-Xchange is not a free project, its run by a single commercial entity (Netline).
Anyway, this wasn't the topic of the thread, I just had to clear up misconceptions :-)
best regards, Helge
PS: of course I'm completely biased, but the above points are factual and hard to attack ;-)
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