Mozilla and Google — Exchange Killers At Last?

phase_9 writes "The latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird may still only be in beta but already the user community have started creating an extensive set of viable Exchange killers. One such example is the latest mashup between Thunderbird and Google Calendars, providing bi-directional syncing of calendar information from both the client and internet. How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current imposes?"

It's not going to happen

[cyberkahn (398201)]

"One such example is the latest mashup between Thunderbird and Google Calendars [CC], providing bi-directional syncing of calendar information from both the client and internet. How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current impose?"

When Google builds an appliance that can host the apps locally. I am not going to put my companies email on a Google server across the Internet. Google needs to wake up and build an appliance that can be hosted locally within the bounds of a company's perimeter.

Re:It's not going to happen

[k1e0x (1040314)]

Especially with Googles willingness to turn over e-mail records to The Department of Fatherland Security and the FBI.

Huh? Stop trolling.

[electrosoccertux (874415)]

Especially with Googles willingness to turn over e-mail records to The Department of Fatherland Security and the FBI.

You mean the same willingness that lead them to take the government to court [bbc.co.uk] over the order to hand over users' search data?

Re:

[k1e0x (1040314)]

I don't think we really know what they have given them. If they present a NSL to them, they are unable to even speak about the request.

Re:It's not going to happen

[rucs_hack (784150)]

What bothers me is that there seems to be a definite trend to try and move away from Microsoft controlled solutions to ones either controlled or assisted by Google.

Are we so sure that Google will always be nice? Do we want our online office and email to become dependant on yet another single vendor?

Ok, I don't know anyone but google who could help beat the Microsoft monopoly on office services, but if they do become the dominant player, who's to say that things won't change in the google camp? Anyone who gains power rarely likes to give it up, and is rarely happy for other people to threaten their position.

I'm short on alternatives here, but it's a concern I think a few more people should be pondering.

Re:It's not going to happen

[by Anonymous Coward]

This is a two step process, right. It's more than simply switching from one overlord to another; the idea is to encourage competition between the two. Having two options is clearly better than just the one - not to mention that Apple is also stepping up to the plate with their iCal Server thingy in Leopard.

Your concerns likely have merit, but fortunately, if the market gets broken open, we'll be able to do better than just to choose between giants...

Re:It's not going to happen

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

>if the market gets broken open, we'll be able to do better than just to choose between giants...

Well, we have open office, but no big migration to it. We have the entire linux os, yet windows still dominates on the server and client side. I have two concerns:

1. Even if you build it, they may not come. Someone could release an outlook/exchange replacement tomorrow and it may very well have zero-effect.

2. Why is it suddenly the goal of OSS is to defeat MS? Can't we just keep making OSS for the sake of making software? This shit is too agenda-driven for me.

3. Google is a close-source corporation that is an infamous data miner. They certainly are not open-source and have little to do with OSS other than token gestures and leveraging OSS to fight MS. Again, more agenda-driven stuff but this time its corporate agenda-driven shit.

When did everyone become a google employee? The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

Re:It's not going to happen

[rossz (67331)]

Why is it suddenly the goal of OSS is to defeat MS?

The goal is to to defeat monopolies. Microsoft just happens to be the biggest one in the computing world.

Re:Careful now. Think this over carefully.

[Creepy Crawler (680178)]

---Google has engendered nothing like this. For the love of God YES YES YES I would love for Google and Microsoft to trade places in the marketplace. All I ask is that you MIGHTILY resist the urge that all humans have to be suspicious of anything that grows big, such as Google has.

Anything big is slow to move and is an easy target. Big things usually subtract the human element due to bureaucracy. I would say that big things are generally corrupt, and that would indicate Google too.

---Yes they're a corporation. Yes they're in it for the money. But they manage to do it by embracing technology and providing it to a wider base of users for FREE. They can data mine every second of my life if thats all they ask in return.

I dont know where you live, or what you do for a living, but I'm a 25 year old. At our local mall, there's a door with a company plate on it. It idnt spiffy looking, nor are there windows or anything else. They are a marketing firm. They are the ones that Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and many other companies go to for aggregate and specialized data.

I have participated in a few of these studies (I cannot specify product names.. nda for company name I tested only). I usually am given 10$ worth of goods to test and then do a write up and phone interview for said products.

My average payout for these interviews is ~30$, along with free products, and getting a say on a new product. I KNOW that I'm in a database somewhere and I'm properly compensated for it. When companies come along and want "free information" for "free product", it tells me that what they offer isnt worth it, and my data is worthless.

Word to Google: Tell me how much my information is worth, and Ill pay for information if your product is worth what I deem it to be. Better yet, if they are willing to pay me, I'll list product names and prices and my personal writeups. Not all companies will like what I write.

Re:It's not going to happen

[NMerriam (15122)]

Exactly. The point is not to hand Microsoft's monopoly to Google, it's to have both Microsoft and Google fighting every day to be the most useful, most secure, easiest and lowest cost provider of any given service. Microsoft hasn't had any real reason other than pride or paranoia to make any of their office software any better than the bare minimum in over 15 years!

Remember how fierce the word processor market was in 1990? Good God, we had Wordperfect, Word, Wordstar, and AmiPro releasing competing new versions with fantastic new features every few months, selling them for ever-lower prices and offering all sorts of incentives to crossgrade and switch. Since MS gained a complete monopoly on the market, the only interesting thing that has been added was Clippy and the ribbon. That was a decade and a half of research?

Re:

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

>They let you get your data.

How generous! They also sift through it and host it. And if they decide to stop hosting it, guess what? I dont have data. Even the old exchange 5.5 server in the basement is owned by the company and we can pull data from it whenever we want. Even without an internet connection. And no one is data mining it for 'adsense' or whatever google is doing. And when I wipe it, it stays wiped.

Heck, when I delete from a hosted service (doesnt matter who) I have no idea if its actually

Re:It's not going to happen

[porkThreeWays (895269)]

This has been the attitude in IT for years, however, what advantage do you have by hosting it in house? Most advantages I hear these days are perceived advantages such as data integrity and security that aren't fully true. Most small and medium sized businesses security and data integrity are on a scale that could never compete with Google. Google probably has a given email stored at dozens of locations around the world and can be accessed at any time with any number of simultaneous disasters occurring. In an SMB environment the server can crash because someone tripped over the cord. It's much more fragile and to get to the level of redundancy Google can provide would cost you more than you could ever afford.

Re:It's not going to happen

[contrapunctus (907549)]

But if *your* connection to the world is not working you won't get access to you email on Google's servers.
I'm not advocating putting everything local, but it's difficult for one person to foresee the needs of many others.

Re:

[arivanov (12034)]

Since when is google calendar and the other google apps lot open source?

There is no open source exchange killer in the offering here. As far as Outlook killers are concerned, Mozilla has been an Outlook killer for a very long time. Even with something as lame as courier Mozilla can easily work over 12G+ IMAP mail folders. Outlook (prior to 2003) caused massive corruption crashes and loss on anything above 2G (after the local cache exceeded 1G).

As far as the usual argument about "want it local", nope I do no

Re:

[jalefkowit (101585)]

As far as Outlook killers are concerned, Mozilla has been an Outlook killer for a very long time. Even with something as lame as courier Mozilla can easily work over 12G+ IMAP mail folders. Outlook (prior to 2003) caused massive corruption crashes and loss on anything above 2G (after the local cache exceeded 1G).

When people talk about "Outlook killers" they're not thinking about e-mail -- Outlook is universally recognized to be a crappy e-mail client (even by Microsoft's own developers [msdn.com]). What they're thin

Re:

[arivanov (12034)]

Outlook as a standalone client is as crappy with calendar and groupware functions as Mozilla Sunbird. Both of them royally suck (just in a different way). In fact the KDE calendaring beats them in standalone mode flat.

What makes the difference is Exchange.

This is what makes Outlook the killer app as far as businesses are concerned. The fact that it is Outlook + Exchange as a combination is largely overlooked by most non-technical people. At best they mix them up to some extent.

In fact, if the EU commission

Re:It's not going to happen

[omeomi (675045)]

We'd LOVE to be able to provide an open calendar that can be used by staff and students alike but we won't be relying on a 3rd party to host everything. Much as I'd love to see Exchange finally gone from our campus it won't happen until we get either an appliance or software that we can host in our data center.

There's not really any particular reason that you'd have to use Google calendar to host your calendar. Sunbird and the Thunderbird/Lightning thing work with the iCal format, which you can host on any webDAV server...if you want a web-accessible component, just use a PHP Calendar that also reads iCal. That's what we do at work...Using Google just makes things a little easier.

Re:It's not going to happen

[Andy Dodd (701)]

Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.

These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT.

There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution. (Disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy there, but I completely agree with them in terms of keeping things centrally hosted.)

In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid. There's not just the issue of Google policy, there are all sorts of other issues such as the hundreds or thousands of miles of fiber, all suscptible to a good backhoeing.

Re:It's not going to happen

[Andy Dodd (701)]

"Proprietary information should be stored in whatever place is the best place for it. Criteria that need to be measured include security, accessability, and cost. Most corporations cannot do as well with any of these as a specialist company like Google. Most corporations should not be able to do as well with any of these as Google, since their IT departments are cost centers, not profit centers."
False. You assume that Google's IT department and a corporate IT department have the same goals.

They don't.

Google's business model depends on providing access to their services to people outside of their network, while making sure those people outside of their network only get access to what they are supposed to access.

Corporate network admins, on the other hand, typically give first priority to doing something that Google fundamentally can't without interfering with their business model - prevent outsiders from obtaing ANY access whatsoever to the internal network. This is pretty easy with a proxying firewall. Optionally, after that begin providing access to authorized external users in a controlled and secure manner, such as an IPSec VPN using RSA SecurID tokens for authentication. Google simply can't force all users of their services to go get a SecurID token and VPN in, especially since such VPN systems usually force the client machine into connecting ONLY to the network it is being connected to via VPN.

Their next priority is usually controlling what internal users get access to what, but this is an easier job than "you vs. rest of world". You can usually ensure by methods already in place (Interviews of potential employees, locked doors with badge access and/or combo locks, etc.) that the likelihood of internal users being a skilled cracker is low, although IT departments should still assume that they are. Google can't place men with guns and network monitoring devices (IDS and other sniffers) at every potential user's home to say, "You may be doing something malicious. Stop now."

Re:

[gutnor (872759)]

Company mail system is also, believe it or not, used to send mail within the same company/building.
Strangely the most confidential documents such as analysis, internal white papers, usecase for next product ... even rarely travel outside.

Also, there is a difference between having the risk of being intercepted by a third party than storing your mail directly on the third party servers. Especially when the third party tells you upfront that they do content analysis of your mail.

The fact that most people get i

Re:

[partenon (749418)]

The fact that most people get it backward is that they don't care if anybody else read the mail about their last vacations. However company don't like their trade secret being hosted by their competitor.

Trade secrets are serious thing. We are not in a lawless world. If someone takes your trade secret and sells it to your competitor, they get arrested [cnn.com]. If your competitor is as honest as PepsiCo, you have nothing to worry. And actually, most companies prefers to get the market leadership by competency, not by cheating ;-)

But let me ask you... Are you a Google competitor? If so, you don't really have reasons to host on their servers :-)

My issue

[C_Kode (102755)]

I used to hate webmail. Thunderbird (Netscape mail before this) was a staple on my desktop. Today, I hate mail apps. Why have a mail app using resources when your browser is open already and webmail (today) works great already?

I have Outlook/Exchange at work, but I use Firefox/OWA instead.

If my browser is open, I prefer to use it.

Re:My issue

[Frosty Piss (770223)]

The idea of replacing Exchange is not targeted at home users, it's targeted at companies.

why just aim for exchange?

[ushering05401 (1086795)]

next generation PIM suites should be the goal, which exchange falls far short of.

is anyone from the Chandler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(PIM)) team looking into integrating efforts here?

nope

[dAzED1 (33635)]

Until my boss can set appointments on my calendar for me, and until anyone in my company can view my calendar (but not anyone outside my company...), I'll still (unfortunately) be forced to have a PC running whose only purpose is to run outlook.

Re:nope

[Blahbooboo3 (874492)]

Doesn't google for domains (Google Apps) allow for exactly this type of thing....?

Re:

[spectrokid (660550)]

Until my colleague can send me an invite, and I can click on yes/no/maybe, and it goes into my calender, and it gets synched to my mobile phone, thanks but no thanks. There is going to be an opportunity to beat Exchange the day phones and PDA's are hardwareabstracted in the OS and a cross-brand, unified API for synching is available. Today, Outlook IS the API.

no bloody chance

[lambent (234167)]

Speaking as someone at a company who tried very hard for a very long time to 'replace' exchange with OSS, i'll tell you it can't be done. Any kind of mix&match of software and jerryrigging of protocols may, kinda, sorta come close to offering approximately the same sort of capabilities of exchange. However, there will be caveats and gotchas, and all sorts of limitations that joe-users won't put up with or understand having to put up with.

Remember, you have exchange for the company environment, not for just your dev team. And as hard as it may be to admit, exhange+outlook actually functions very well when it's set up and admin'd properly.

One other thing: i know the whole setup is expensive, in terms of hardware and software and licenses. One can argue, that if your company can't afford the outlay for a working exchange environment, your company doesn't need it, and it would probably be a waste of time trying to replicate its features. So call a spade a spade; say you want OSS shared calendars, tasks, e-mail, whatever. But that alone is certainly NOT an exchange replacement.

Re:no bloody chance

[rtechie (244489)]

One can argue, that if your company can't afford the outlay for a working exchange environment, your company doesn't need it, and it would probably be a waste of time trying to replicate its features.

Until he's proven wrong, this statement is true. There ARE NO free groupware solutions, there never have been, and I'm starting to think there never will be. The support costs are simply to brutal and impassible an issue for the open source community to deal with.

In the distant future there may be a commercial groupware solution based on open source, but it will almost certainly cost as much or more than Exchange.

Re:no bloody chance

[IGnatius T Foobar (4328)]

There ARE NO free groupware solutions, there never have been, and I'm starting to think there never will be. The support costs are simply to brutal and impassible an issue for the open source community to deal with.

Not true.

http://www.citadel.org [citadel.org]

Citadel is completely open source (not a weird hybrid like Scalix or Zimbra, it is TRUE open source). Choice of web access or fat-client access. There is an Outlook connector currently in beta, for supporting legacy Windows/Outlook desktops. And the whole thing is a single, easy, automatic installation -- you don't have to mix and match a dozen different programs and integrate them manually. All of Citadel's services work seamlessly together because they were designed together, which makes it unique among open source groupware solutions.

Don't believe me? Linux Journal reviewed Citadel in the February 2007 issue, and declared, Microsoft Exchange, Meet Your Replacement. [linuxjournal.com]

Please don't flame me ...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Once upon a time Lotus Notes was available for Unix. It did all the stuff tfa talks about. (I realize that lots of people don't like Lotus Notes and thereby I don my flameproof suit) What would it take to get IBM to open source Lotus Notes? I haven't used it in ten years but my rememberance of it was that it could do amazing things. Certainly if it were open sourced we wouldn't have to worry about whether Mozilla could produce something with the capabilities of Microsoft's products.

Notes

[acvh (120205)]

If my employer is any indication, Notes is still a big source of revenue for IBM, so I can't see them giving that up. My guess is that there is also a good deal of code in there with various copyright owners.

And of course, Lotus Notes is what software would be like if it was written by Satan.

Re:

[hey! (33014)]

The problem with Notes is one of those inexplicable corporate culture things where the same blind spot keeps hitting the company over and over and the company never seems to learn. In this cases it is Lotus' seeming inability to provide an attractive and consistent user interface.

On the other hand, at least the older versions of Notes did a number of things very well (I can't speak to newer ones), including security. However this required more skilled and educated administration. The MS pitch throughout

Google is open source?

[djlurch (781932)]

Although much beloved here at Slashdot, Google is not open source. They are a private, for-profit corporation that happens to have some free APIs. Putting Google and Mozilla in the same category is disingenuous.

Re:

[Paradigm_Complex (968558)]

Google is an advertising company. So long as it gets people to go to Google's sites and (theoretically) view the ads, its feasible for Google to do it. If open-sourcing their work will increase the people who use it (and see ads) - why the bloody hell not? There's more ways of making money then locking your customers out of the full use of the product they purchased.

Re:

[rtechie (244489)]

How would making their server code freely available for use on internal LANs get people to go to Google's sites and watch ads? Think about it.

Google is paranoid about internal security and leaks because what they really have is their own "special sauce", based on open source and commodity hardware, that they can't sell. Google is going to be "hosted only" for the forseeable future, and I for one would never consider an ASP or outside vendor for my groupware server. It's actually ILLEGAL in many US organizat

This is all very clever and wonderful

[goldcd (587052)]

but until stuff syncs with Outlook, it has no change of defeating it.
I'm not a huge fan of MS, but it's nice that external people can send you stuff (as they use Outlook) and it'll appear in your company outlook calendar.
Sooo if you want to defeat Outlook you've got to produce something that replicates outlook's functionality. I don't care what the other company is using, I just care it works with my outlook (or vica-versa).
Basically my point is we live in an Outlook eco-system. If you want to displace it, then you can't just ignore it and do your own thing (e.g. Mozilla+Google).

Re:This is all very clever and wonderful

[Blahbooboo3 (874492)]

but until stuff syncs with Outlook, it has no change of defeating it.

I think this is what you are looking for? http://remotecalendars.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] Provides a bi-directional sync from Outlook to Google Calendar.

Alternative open-source solution

[digitalderbs (718388)]

As a few have already stated, this is a good idea for a single user, but it may be tricky for collaborative scheduling.

Another opensource solution that has piqued my interest is zimbra [zimbra.com], which includes collaborative e-mail, scheduling and many other groupware functions. All the functions work through a web interface as well, but they're now developing zdesktop [zimbra.com] to allow on- and off-line sync/viewing of e-mail, scheduling as so on. It's in alpha, however. There are also programs to use on your mobile [zimbra.com] devices.

I haven't used this system myself, but I'd be interested in any thoughts from sys admins that have successfully (or unsuccessfully) implemented this.

Thuderbird's calendar has a way to go

[yppiz (574466)]

TFA is a bit premature. Thunderbird's calendar has quite a way to go before it'll become a serious threat to anything. This is nothing against Thunderbird (it's been my mail client for years) or the calendar project, just an observation that they are pretty early along with calendars and the UI still doesn't fit really well with the application.

--Pat

Did I miss something?

[uhlume (597871)]

How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current impose?

Since when is Google "open source"?

Open-source friendly, undoubtedly. Less secretive about (some of their) proprietary code than Microsoft? Sure, though that's not saying much. There's only so much secrecy obfuscated Javascript can buy you, so it's not as if they had much choice. Still, kudos to them for not only accepting that fact, but providing official APIs to some of their services.

But "open source"? Show me where I can go to submit patches to any of their core products, and maybe then I'll agree to that term. Until then, Thunderbird + Google Calendars is no more "open source" than Evolution + Exchange.

Plenty of solutions, not enough adopters

[guruevi (827432)]

There are great solutions out there for cheap or for free that replace a lot of functionality of Outlook/Exchange. The problem is, compatibility to migrate and user adoption.

The compatibility to migrate is: you can't just copy the data from one server to another because of it's proprietary layout. It was a bad choice in the past and it's now rearing it's ugly head.

The other, user adoption is simple: people don't like change. I've been fired before because I implemented changes in security according to SoX! That company still is not SoX compliant and won't be for a long time, just because the policy changes (disabling auto-login on workstations, locking up after the workday, separating and securing financially sensitive data) are not according to what users want. And it's not the end-user drones, they will accept ANY change, it's the middle-management, people that have been there for 30+ years, micromanaging 10 people, and don't want to change because that would imply that they will actually have to manage something.

I have my personal e-mail and calendar on IMAP, have done it for years. It works on my Mac, Windows, Linux and it works on any system I come. I just point my mailbox to the server and point my calendar to another IMAP folder. Most clients support iCal (Outlook, SharePoint etc. also use iCal, just the wrapper to store it and server-client communication is proprietary). I have implemented similar solutions and it all works, they have shared calendars, e-mail and all the works you can get from Exchange it's open so they can change systems whenever they want, it's cheaper than Exchange and requires less resources.

WebCalendar + Thunderbird/Lightning

[shaitand (626655)]

I wouldn't consider giving my data to a third party like Google. Sorry but all my business information is confidential and while Google might be able to have more guards, firewalls, and backups if I give Google information that information has already been compromised by Google.

I already run WebCalendar on my local server and it is an excellent program. But I would like to be able to tie it into lightning for calendar sharing. It doesn't work. First, the stable version of WebCalendar doesn't support publishing. The CVS version supposedly does, but while you can import a calendar into lighting, any changes you make there doesn't get published to WebCalendar. Lightning flashes a little bar, gives no errors but reloading the calendar or logging into webcalendar will show that the new changes were never uploaded.

I've never understood what is so difficult about combining email with a shared calendar. That solution alone would prevent the need to setup new exchange configurations. Most small and medium business only need integrated email and calendaring this leads them to Outlook, then they want to share calendars. That leads them to exchange.

As a developer I can't think of any great challenge involved in this (beyond not having time to write a solution myself). I have trouble believing that with (according to some EU state of FOSS paper) 2,000,000 OSS developers nobody has managed to come up with a solution for this basic fundamental and common need.

Re:Evolution???

[rekkanoryo (676146)]

Evolution replaces Outlook, not Exchange.

Re:Evolution???

[by Anonymous Coward]

We run Evolution at work, and it sucks. It is not stable and does not handle even simple calendaring properly. There are more bugs in it than at a cockroach farm.

I say that and I am sorry, because I love open source, but Evolution is something only a mother can love.

Re:Evolution???

[Columcille (88542)]

Ok.. It's buggy. Have you submitted bug reports? Doesn't do any good to gripe about the rain if you're not willing to do something about it.

There is such a thing as users wanting products that just work. Open Source does need participation from the community, but this is not just a strength - it is also a weakness. It isn't reasonable to expect that every user of a product should participate in the testing and development of that product. Products that are intended to be used by a broad user base should be stable products and should not require the end user to have to provide input for product development. Clicking "yes, submit error report" is one thing - having to go out of the way to file an error report is another. So long as the open source community continues to respond to complaints by saying, "You should file a bug report!" or "You should develop a patch!" - so long as this sort of thing takes place, Open Source products will lose. It's completely the wrong attitude for developers to have.

Re:Evolution???

[chooks (71012)]

Evolution replaces Outlook, not Exchange.

Only if it is intelligently designed.

Re:Evolution???

[mmxsaro (187943)]

For those who don't know what Evolution [wikipedia.org] is. Screenshots [gnome.org].

Re:

[Atlantis-Rising (857278)]

Um... really. I think an enormous percentage of those using the full Microsoft Office suite (with Exchange etc) would disagree with you.

There's nothing out there that can match the usability of Exchange/Office. It's a sad reality, because Exchange/Office is fucking expensive.

Re:

[partenon (749418)]

I wish I had my mod points :-) +1 Funny for you

(you aren't serious, right?)

I use the "2000" version of some Microsoft products (windows, office/outlook/exchange) at work and "usability" was OK when these products were first launched.

Nowadays, a powerful search feature is essential to me (and probably everyone). I have only 40Mb of mailbox space in my company (a financial institution). So, I have about 20 PST files, one for each "folder" in Inbox tree (you know, if you keep everything in one huge PST file, i