Exchange Comes To Linux As OpenChange 249
joesmart writes to tell us that new work on OpenChange and KDE seeks to bridge the gap between groupware compatibility and open source. KDE developer Brad Hards spoke at the Linux.conf.au conference and said the goal of OpenChange is to implement the Microsoft Exchange protocols as they are used by Outlook. "OpenChange has client and server-side libraries for Exchange integration and relies heavily on code developed for Samba 4. It is open source software licensed under the GPL version 3. Hards said more work is being done on the client side and 'we have code for the server,' but estimates another 12 months of development is required to produce an OpenChange server ready for production."
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:0, Informative)
Exchange calendaring is used all over the place. I have the freedom to run Ubuntu on my laptop but have to maintain a windows VM solely for exchange calendaring. I've tried some of the alternatives for integration but the only way I can play nice with the conference room scheduling and such is to have the real thing.
I applaud whoever can get me a reasonable fully functional integration package for Exchange. Period. It will be the final nail in the the coffin on the client side for me. Then I can work on the server side :)
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, having used Evolution's exchange plugin, I'm hoping that the project being discussed isn't slow as you describe, and doesn't leak resources like a sieve and crash frequently like Evolution.
As far as I can tell Evo development is so close to dead as to be unable to be distinguished from it.
I'm happily working in a company that is not married to exchange at the moment, but what is described in this article is something that could have made my previous job a lot more pleasant.
Evolution sucks so bad that my solution in that job was to run windows and office under VMWare and use THAT for my email. running VMware and a whole other OS virtualized under a Linux host was faster and leaked less resources than Evolution.
Just use Zimbra!? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients. Shared calendar, great web gui, etc. Oh yeah and they are owned by Yahoo now so you can feel like you're supporting the newly crowned Internet underdog while you're at it.
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:1, Informative)
Doesn't evolution do that?
This seems to be aimed at developing a server anyway.
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:2, Informative)
It's absolutely god awful. No search function, (nice if you get 30 emails a day, none of which is relevant until three weeks later), only able to attach one file at a time, ugly, slow, lacking offline functionality.
Maybe some newer version has fixed all these things, we of of course will not be upgrading to it because the only thing keeping the Exchange server stable is the fact that we never so much as look at it wrong.
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:5, Informative)
Having Linux as a backend server for Windows workstations is a wonderful thing for a corporation.
It saves them a lot of money. Do you know what 1000 Windows 2008 Server client and Exchange Server client licenses cost? Well use Linux with SAMBA and OpenChange for less than the cost of a bottle of water. Beat that, Microsoft, and managers who always try to justify Microsoft software over Linux software.
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:3, Informative)
It also seems like it might connect to Kontact. If so, well, Kontact is much better than Evolution, last I checked.
Either way, Evolution's Exchange integration sucks, and this is well known and understood.
Zarafa already has a lot of exchange features. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:4, Informative)
You are, of course, aware that the support available when you license Exchange is very limited indeed and you have to pay a substantial amount of money for further support?
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:5, Informative)
Except Exchange costs a lot more than the $50 copy of Windows. I mean, you've got a valid point. But the example you give completely fails to make it.
And, by the way, a sufficiently large installation of Exchange is going to require quite a bit of work to get right as well.
Re:Here we go again..... (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh... I didn't want to grab the tar baby, but I guess I have to.
Sarbanes-Oxley applies to all publicly traded companies and the CPA's and attorneys associated with these companies. This makes everyone involved very paranoid about compliance; people generally go too far rather than risk not going far enough. The big section is #802. It presents a possible fine of up to $1,000,000 dollars or a prison sentence of up to 20 years for any person who destroys, alters, mutilates or conceals any electronic document in an official investigation. It also specifies minimum retention periods for all accounting records, work papers, communications, file attachments and documents whether transmitted via email, instant messaging or other message modes.
So, first you have to capture all emails, even those that are instantly deleted by the recipient, so just running nightly backups won't cut the mustard. Everything that gets captured has to be archived in a way that lets you prove that the copy hasn't been altered. This generally means writing everything to write-once media, such at DVD-R, or you can generate cryptographic hashes of the messages and write just those and the message headers to write-once media; you'd still need to save the message itself somewhere, but you could use r/w media. Data de-duplication is important, too, so that you don't wind up storing a few hundred copies of this week's hotest Internet meme. "Concealing" also covers not being able to find an email on request, so being able to search everything is important; storing a copy of everything on DVD will be too slow, so you need to use hard drives for this part.
Your auditor and attorneys have to certify that you're compliant, subject to the same penalties, so you need to prove to them that your solution works. This is where networking effects come into play: once your vendor proves to your auditor that their solution works, every other customer of that auditor can use that same package without doing all the legwork. Linus agrees that there are places where unalterable code can be a good thing, and this is one of those places.
John C Dvorak argues that SOX compliance is putting a huge drag on the economy, and I tend to agree, but until the laws are changed, I wouldn't call it FUD.
Re:NO CHANCE for this to work (Score:3, Informative)
MAPI, AD and such are PROPRIETARY protocols folks, and Microsoft knows they are the keys to the kingdom.
This is too broad a statement to be 100% true. MAPI is proprietary but the services which make up ADS use different protocols which are open in some cases. ADS isn't just a single protocol. Kerberos is an open protocol however MS has made some changes to it for use in ADS. LDAP is an open protocol and MS has made schema changes to make the protocol operate in a Windows environment (this isn't any different from Sun doing it to work better with Solaris though; LDAP is meant to be extensible by making schema changes) so don't fault them for that because it isn't proprietary. Replication in ADS occurs using LDAP over IP (it can also use SMTP though). There is also SMB used for distributing group policies.