I'm wondering if it's possible to use completely open-source technologies speaking to Outlook to reproduce the experience of MS Exchange. I have heard that you can use WebDAV and LDAP to replace the contact management and shared calendar features in Outlook, and of course you can use IMAP for email. Has anyone taken all these steps and can report on their success/failure? Are there any other client apps out there that are good enough for prime time that incorporate mail/calendar sharing/contact management all in one package and run on windows? I have done some research and found some candidates, all of which are in a very alpha phase of development:
Chandler http://chandler.osafoundation.org/ Thunderbird with Lightning integrated cal/task features: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning Evolution for Windows http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/ Does anyone know of any good other options? It also seems like some of these apps still lack some key integration between the various components, such as the ability to email an appointment to someone and have it automatically added to your respective calendars when the recipient agrees to meet. It's strange to me that this lynchpin of the corporate world (collaboration/groupware) seems as yet to be untouchable by the open source community. It seems that more difficult projects have already been developed and surpassed the popularity of proprietary alternatives, but this area is still in its infancy. I would love to be proven wrong, but I've just gone through the process of changing our office over to Thunderbird because the CEO was interested in saving money and said they weren't using calendaring and contact features anyway, only to discover that they were using these features and actually just didn't know what they were called :-) There's been general griping throughout the office, and the bottom line is we're fleeing back to MS Exchange and Windows Small Business Server 2003. I figured maybe someone with more experience than I might have succeeded at this and would love to hear your stories. Cheers, Carl /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
