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SUSE Openexchange Under GPL 248
Gustavo writes "'Netline Internet Service announced today that it would contribute its OPEN-XCHANGE Server, the core technology underlying the industry's top-selling Linux-based groupware, collaboration, and messaging application, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).' How does it compare to OpenGroupware.org which was open sourced a year ago?"
Two linux stories in a row (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:5, Funny)
Why, in my day, Windows rebooted often and randomly, and that's the way we likes it...
Stability? bah, who needs it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:2)
time: 22:37:59
uptime: 35 days, 16:35, 0 users,
load average: 0.08, 0.24, 0.26
processes: 78
totalhits: 1875194641
That uptime looks pretty good to me...
Re: (Score:2)
503 doesn't mean it's down (Score:2)
Probably just that.
you consider.... (Score:2)
hardly (Score:2)
However your supposition of fiction to mean truth regarding "kids overrunning
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:2)
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:2)
Just curious.
Re:Two linux stories in a row (Score:2)
What a day! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What a day! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What a day! (Score:2)
Re:What a day! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a day! (Score:2)
Re:What a day! (Score:5, Funny)
How do they compare? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do they compare? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How do they compare? (Score:2)
Re:How do they compare? (Score:2)
Re:How do they compare? (Score:2)
Re:How do they compare? (Score:3, Interesting)
You are right, it has a limited scope of functionality, but that is all some of us want.
moregroupware does a semi-decent job of doing everything, but the project is still in the early stages.
What I would love to see... is some collaboration between all these group ware folks. We have so much talent, go
Conspiracy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy? (Score:2, Interesting)
A little anti-FUD never hurts.
Seriously folks.. (Score:2)
Now sure, both companies are probably real happy about the added bonus of stickin' it to SCO with regards to their Linux 'licensing' program, but if you think that that was the main reason behind those deals, then you're seriously over-estimating the importance of SCO.
Re:Seriously folks.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy? (Score:2)
Damn. Wellll.....seeming how open source supports terrorists, and there seems to be an open source release conspiracy.... perhaps we should raise the terror alert level!
Mike.
Re:Conspiracy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy? (Score:3, Informative)
The Linuxworld Expo is taking place in San Francisco this week.
IBM and Novell probably just wanted to time their news releases with Linuxworld.
This is great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is great (Score:2)
That would imply they wanted to care and nurture Linux kit...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Browser? (Score:4, Informative)
* Mozilla 1.0 or better
* Netscape 6 or better
* Konqueror 3 or better
* Opera 6 or better
* MS Internet Explorer 5 or better
I can't afford this free software! (Score:2)
Re:I can't afford this free software! (Score:2)
May I suggest that you first upgrade your hardware from the that old mini or mainframe to a 286 or 486?
Safari? (Score:2)
Sooo -
what about Safari then. Does it count included with Konqueror?
Re:Safari? (Score:2)
More than one way to be useful.
Re:Browser? (Score:2, Informative)
Supported browsers
Real life reviews / experiences would be helpful (Score:5, Interesting)
Can these open-sourced alternatives be a reasonable solution?
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2, Interesting)
Ahhhh soooo..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
The bad side? The Web interface, I find klunky as heck. Hopefully this move will result in improvement on that front.
Duplication of messages (Score:2)
| formail -D 16384 msgid.cache
maildrop:
`reformail -D 8192 duplicate.cache`
if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
exit
No more duplicated e-mails.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
???? Bullshit. It is not GPL'd, it has a BSD lic. But it's source is freely avail. And it is FREE.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you actually read the qmail licence? Indeed, can you even find the licence for qmail? The closest thing I can find for a qmail licence is:
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html [cr.yp.to]
Very restrictive licence. Noone is allowed to distribute qmail modified in *any* way, you cant even change the install paths, you *must* accept DJB's unrelated-to-SMTP ideas on where software should be installed. You cant add patches, etc..
Qmail is
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
I'm using runit rather than daemontools at work because we can't comply with DJB's non-license. Please be a bit more careful before calling bullshit.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
Real life experiences (Score:2)
A decent IMAP server (like cyrus) does a good job of completing email support, but you'll still be missing shared contacts and calendaring.
We do the above (postfix+ & cyrus IMAP) and then use Oracle's Collaboration Suite to handle the calendaring, but I still need to find a good way to bring in shared contact management.
It's even worse now that the sales guys picked up Blackberries... that they also want to sync instantly to their emai
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:5, Interesting)
Try to convince him that whatever your solution will be, it's source code must either be available for competitors, or there must be an otherwise standardised way to convert data off if necessary. Otherwise you will just have yet another MS Office-like situation, where you're firmly locked into a single vendor and are forced to pay whatever MS wants you to pay -- even if the competitors' products would be able to handle your basic documents, you'd still have to rewrite all your existing VBA stuff (for example), causing huge migration costs.
In short: one of your primary criterias when choosing software vendors should be making sure, that you're never migrating to something, from which you can't cheaply and easily enough migrate off later, if that would ever became necessary. Try to make this fact clear for him and forget all unnecessary OSS advocating, and you're much more likely not to end up being an Exchange administrator.
Of course, if that CTO of yours is a PHB and already lured by MS marketing sirens, he'll probably not listen anyway... but then, that's life.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:5, Informative)
Not to echo half of your previous replies, but it depends on what your CTO wants. Most manager-types I've consulted for have this idea that there's this magical technology somewhere that makes them suddenly understand their business like they did when it had 20 employees. And for whatever reasons they think that software is a groupware suite.
In my experience, Exchange commits some design sins that are so grevious that there are almost no good situations in which to use it:
I've consulted for quite a few managers who really really wanted Exchange. In each case I told them they didn't need it. It can be a real blow to a manager's ego to have to accept that he doesn't run an "enterprise", but in 99% of the cases that's true.
Exchange is a mediocre MTA, a slightly sub-mediocre contact manager, and a slightly better-than-mediocre calendaring system with some glue scripting that sometimes works to tie them all together but often doesn't. Its sweet spot performance-wise is from about 100 to about 300 users broken into 10-15 organizational groups, working on a single VLAN, transporting no more than about 20,000 messages a day total. If your organization fits those criteria, Exchange may well be a good solution for you. If not, I can tell you from my clients' bitter experience and my very expensive overtime cleaning up after it that Exchange WILL end up costing you a lot more money than almost any other solution.
Most managers who want to use Exchange want a public calendar, a big contact database, and IMAP email. That's not rocket science. There are outstanding mail transport agents, contact databases, and public calendars; if you can't get a developer to pipe them together for *much* less than an exchange license, you're looking in the wrong places for developers. Plus, your support costs will be much less with that solution since you don't have the single, concentrated point of frequent failure that Exchange becomes.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
We currently run Horde and it lacks group calendaring and drag and drop (sigh).
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:5, Insightful)
Your experiences do not match mine.
There are plenty of huge, multi-national Exchange enterprises out there. Some have hundreds of thousands of users, and 5000 or more per server. They're not all having the same trouble with the product you claim to have experienced. Maybe you just don't know as much about Exchange as you think you do.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
You'd pretty much have to be an idiot to pay for exchange today.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:5, Informative)
exchange needs to be played with from time to time. In my experience an exchange system just left there to do its job will have all sorts of isues. You can't treat it like a postfix or sendmail system and set it up and be done with it untill your change users. (well maybe if you not using any of the features it has outside mail) the funny thing is that an organization big enough to use it should have someone on staff running it. I just saw a law firm get toasrted out of 150+ thousand to install an exchange server and upgrade all thier workstations (about 30). To date knowbody is using the shared contacts, calendering or anythign. I stongly feel they would have had a better return on investment if they would have scaped thinking about productivity and bought some rental property somewere. This doesn't count for the now 7 times in 3 motnhs the system has went down for no explainable reason with at least 3 different consulting firms looking into it while a samba box with postfix running jumps to the rescue durring downtimes (that was in place before the upgrade).
unlike that place i have seen exchange run without hickups at other sites too. it seems to be about a 60-40 split in who will have problems.
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Serious problems with logging. In fact from the point of view of people spoiled by the sendmail and exim level of logging the Exchange logging sucks rocks through a thin straw
2. Joint server/client limitation (to some extent it is an Outlook problem) that one mailbox is limited to 2G. Dunno if that is still the case in 2003, but 2000 + Outlook screws your mail magestically once you hit 2G limit. F.E. My mailbox is currently around 5G. It is on courier + imap + mozilla which are quite happy trucking along with it. If it was on Exchange + Outlook it would have been corrupted long ago.
3. Loses mail with no trace if left to send versus slow senders on a congested network. No bounce is returned to the user. Basically if you are using Exchange 2000 (dunno about 2003) without a front-end relay you will have to learn to live with the fact that some mail will be lost. Probability depends on many things varying from around 0.01 to 0.5%. Combined with the wonderful logging this becomes really entertaining for the support people.
4. Similarly, loses mail with no trace when receiving it on a SMTP channel (not exchange). Once again while the probability for this to happen is not very high, it still happens often enough for it to be a business problem. I have seen it on 5.x, I have seen it on 2000 as well. As anecdotal as it may sound, I have nearly lost my residence status in the country I worked a few years ago because the company exchange server lost all the documents which HR had to use for the work permit application.
5. Basically, it is a very good groupware and SME solution for internal communcation. That is what it has been designed for and it is not going anywhere without a redesign and splitting into components (which MSFT is not willing to do for political reasons) or external systems to assist it.
Based on experience in dealing with it, on its own it is not suitable for business use if you need full record of all of your email transactions with customers and other people who do not communicate with Exchange. If you are doing any business by email I would suggest to look into something else or use it in a combination with a good mail relay (sendmail, exim, postfix) which has proper logging and audit trail of what was sent, when, where and how. Exim 4 is possibly the best as it is the easiest one to implement copying all mails in transit to a suitable audit store (besides the exellent logging).
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:3, Interesting)
I like Tclhttpd because it's a webserver implemented as a TCL package. I can hack, override, or out-in-out reimplement any chunk of the system. (For instance, I rewrote a chunk of the mime handler to deal with cases where a file is being pulled from an index and has to be renamed for the client.)
We are also a postfix shop. (I'm in the middle of migrating our Email setup from Gen
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the lastest patch adds spell checking in the web email client.
It's lovely and intuitive software with a few odd bits here and there, mostly related to the fact that non-native English speakers designed the interface. I even heard a Novell exec refer to it as "Germanglish," which is about right.
Then again, with it open sourced, we can all get in and fix that little stuff, right?
I'm rolling two slox servers out right now, and most users have been very impressed.
GPL'ing it should accelerate
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:2)
Re:Real life reviews / experiences would be helpfu (Score:3, Informative)
1) Exchange is expensive per chair. In our situation, Medicare cuts have tightened our budget enough I'd rather spend the money somewhere else.
2) Exchange is hardware intensive. While that server is also a home directory server, I really wouldn't care to run many more users on a single server, while with alternatives (postfix for example), I'd feel comfort
ScreenShots...! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ScreenShots...! (Score:2, Informative)
http://open-xchange.org
And it plays nicely with Firefox
Experience/reviews? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:3, Informative)
Squirrel Mail [squirrelmail.org] is often overlooked, it's plugins [squirrelmail.org] give it shared calendars with (some) outlook compatability, todo lists, and tons of other stuff [squirrelmail.org]. The calendaring system is very simplistic ( no auto-repeat of an event, events are limited to 6 hour intervals ), but depending on what you use it for, it's very nice.
I use Kerio (Score:2)
That being said, I think the problems with Kerio include lack of good collaboration tools (but again, that's not the product they are selling), and the inability to
Re:I use Kerio (Score:2)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
In actuality exchange doesn't do much. OUtlook pretty much does all the heavy lifting. The problem is not to replace exhchance it's to replace outlook.
As long as you are sucking on the outlook crack pipe you remain a junkie. Kick the outlook habit first!
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
Re:Experience/reviews? (Score:2)
And I never get past those 2 points. (Joys of working for a non-profit.) It helps that I've been with the company 6 years, built the current data center from scratch, introduced email to the entire staff, and suggested we use Linux back before linux was cool.
Still a rollup (Score:2)
Those interested in a true ground-up implementation of an open source groupware server might want to check out the Citadel [citadel.org] project. It's got all the usual email stuff (IMAP, POP, ESMTP), a web front-end written specifically for it, shared calendaring/scheduling, instant messaging, and a database-
Re:Still a rollup (Score:2)
exchange (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, packages exist for every individual exchange+outlook does in the open source world. No, they don't work together.
Re:exchange (Score:3, Informative)
Is it the magic bullet for moving from Exchange? (Score:5, Informative)
Same problem as always, move along. Like the Bynari Insight connector [bynari.net], the magic bit is still closed. Interestingly SUSE [suse.com] have a connector called iSLOX for their OpenExchange product, which is a free download; perhaps these two added together will finally be the CAL-free-groupware-with-Outlook-as-the-client we've been looking for?
Re:Is it the magic bullet for moving from Exchange (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is it the magic bullet for moving from Exchange (Score:2)
Re:Is it the magic bullet for moving from Exchange (Score:2)
Besides, Microsoft have a complete reimplementation of Outlook in ASP; the OSS community doesn't. It would be nice if there was a replacement for Outlook on Windows for groupware (apparently Novell are doing it with an Evolution port), but there isn't one that does the same thing - yet.
Offline use (Score:2)
That's one of the main (valid) reasons why business people don't want to 'just run in a web browser'...
OpenExchange vs Opengroupware vs. Kolab (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with OpenGroupware, is that except for the web interface, there is no client. You can pay for an Outlook connector, yes, but it is rather expensive (no trial version available), and, more importantly, it did not prove very reliable in my testing. The web client, is not very impressive either. The community around OpenGroupware seems rather limited, I have the impression that all work is still done by one developer of Skyrix.
SuSE OpenExchange on the other hand, does have a very nice user interface. The Outlook connector works fine, and with KDE 3.3 coming out in a few weeks, we will have a free client under Linux. I have heard a connector for Evolution is currently in development. AFAIK Suse OpenExchange lacks ACL based folder sharing, hopefully this feature will be added soon.
And then there's Kolab, another competitor for this market. Currently, Kolab 2 is in development. It seems that it will offer a lot of features that people missed in Kolab 1, such as ACL based folder sharing, and server side generated free/busy. Problem with Kolab is currently also the lack of a native Linux client. Kontact 3.3 will finally have support for Kolab 1, but that's not very impressive, knowing that Kolab 2 will already be out at the end of this year.
Anyway, interesting times are coming!
Re:OpenExchange vs Opengroupware vs. Kolab (Score:2)
If so, then why is it so important to have an Outlook connector?
There are a number of clients which support open protocols.
Aren't we talking about open clients, open protocols and open groupware servers?
Re:OpenExchange vs Opengroupware vs. Kolab (Score:2)
> confused with OpenGroupware) servers support open
> groupware protocols like POP, IMAP, iCal, WebDAV?
SLOX (SuSE Openexchange Server) supports these.
The contacts, appointments and tasks can be im- and exported via Webdav (the Outlook-Connector works via webdav)
Simple document-management also via webdav.
> If so, then why is it so important to have an
> Outlook connector?
Because the whole world lives on Outlook like a junkie on dope !
Take Outloo
Re:OpenExchange vs Opengroupware vs. Kolab (Score:2)
Cool Screenshots (Score:5, Funny)
Very big deal (Score:2)
Exchange4Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.billworkgroup.org/billworkgroup/home [billworkgroup.org]
ThANK YOU! (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you!
outlook connector not open sourced (Score:3, Insightful)
How does DBMail compare to these? (Score:2)
Re:How does DBMail compare to these? (Score:2, Informative)
Experience, though, is that storing e-mails in PostgreSQL isn't a particularly wonderful idea. There's a high ratio of insert/delete operations to read operations and this causes rapid growth in both database and index sizes. It's a bit of a sl
Top selling? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry but SLOX is not anywhere near a decent groupware system. Nice try. My vote (and my money) has gone to Exchange4Linux [exchange4linux.org]. I've evaluated SLOX, Samsung Contact, OpenExchange or whatever the hell the humongous OO-branded thing is, the various web-based crap out there and probably half a dozen other's I've since forgotten. E4L's server-side is open source, actively developed and the Outlook client is reasonably priced. The backend runs entirely inside of PostgreSQL and is written in Python. MTA interface is agnostic but documented with Postfix. non-outlook people can access the entire system through IMAP, although that is still not quite there.
As I said everything is stored in a PG database -- I can access any part of the system through SQL and it's stored to make Outlook happy which means no weird-ass compatibility problems that I've seen in every other client. The weird-ass issues I encounter with E4L and Outlook revolve around parts that are still in development. :-)
SLOX is top-selling groupware? Forget it.
Re:Whoa (Score:2, Insightful)
Just wait a couple of years, until noone wants the Doom3 engine, due to one of "Quake4:Universe" or "Lets go back to Castle Wolfenstien Again, I Dont think we Killed Everything Yet" is released and ID can no longer make money off of the D3 engine.
Carmack has always been pretty good about throwing out his old technology to the hands of the public.
Re:Blackberry Enterprise Server for Exchange? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I'm still having trouble finding a solution that pulls in contact management.