Novell To Release Ximian Connector Under GPL 497
ashmodai9 writes "According to this article on LinuxToday.com as well as this press release directly from their site, Novell announced that its "Connector for MS Exchange Server would be integrated into Evolution 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning today with the current Connector 1.4." Apparently, downloads will be available for the current version of Evolution starting May 14th."
Thanks to reader crafterm, a snippet from Novell's Connector website: "With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. Linux and Solaris users can access public folders, Global Address Lists, email, calendar, task lists, and group scheduling information." Update: 05/11 17:58 GMT by T :
In related news, ChiralSoftware writes "Codeweavers' long-awaited sequel to Crossover 2.1 is here. Just like the old version, the new version lets you install MS Office on Linux desktops. The new version adds support for Outlook XP, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Project."
Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another step forward (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonderful, wonderful - alll we need is a server... (Score:5, Insightful)
The promise of exchange - integrated email & calendaring, locks a lot of companies in to MS software.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side, with clients on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms...and no, webmail doesn't cut it...
Is there anyone working on this?
-Steve
Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, you have your connector for MS Exchange right there in the main app now. NOW what's stopping you from seriously considering OSS as a possibility? And, I'm not talking about the 1.2% of the population that needs some bizarre, esoteric feature in Outlook or Word or whatever that 98.8% of the rest of the population didn't even know exists.
Seriously, folks. Linux ain't ready for the home desktop market, but it's high time more people start considering its viability for the desktop in the workplace, especially as lightweight replacements for Wintops that don't do all that much more than word processing and scheduling.
Take most of that money you've been blowing on MCSEs and A/V software, and pay a few competent *nix admins to come in and properly set up the systems, and you just may well alleviate some, or most, of that downtime. How much TCO did YOUR company have to add to Windows from Sasser, anyway?
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a full-time desktop Linux user, and not just for coding, but for every aspect of business, so all this stuff matters to me. This week is going to be a great week in Desktop Linux: Suse 9.1 and Crossover 3 are both coming out at about the same time, and both are huge improvements over what came before.
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WAP news [chiralsoftware.net]
Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes me glad I don't have Novell stock. GroupWise earns them money. This does what?
Re:Novell is really serious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Motives? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder what MS will think of this (Score:2, Insightful)
Great news (Score:2, Insightful)
One more step, a Win32 port of Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful, wonderful - alll we need is a server (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't consider myself clueless and it's a Big Deal(tm) for me.
I don't get paid for managing my calendar and I don't want to waste my time managing my calendar. If someone or something will do it for me or make my life easier, then all the better.
Re:Motives? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Silliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to thank Novell? BUY from them! (Score:5, Insightful)
BUY something from SuSE, Ximian or Novell!
Re:Indeed: havoc in redmond (Score:3, Insightful)
However, Office is, from what I understand, MS's biggest source of revenue, so threatening that in any way likely isn't taken lightly or ignored in Redmond.
However, my personal bet is that they'll just quietly (at first) either:
1 - Prepare to pull some patent crud and hinder Connector and its derivatives (kmail, anyone?) as much as possible when the timing is right
2 - Change protocols a bit and periodically in an attempt to keep the OSS community behind just enough to hinder them and keep MS on top
There might be other things they'd try, but I sincerely hope that they aren't able to touch Connector or any groups working on OSS Exchange-compatible servers.
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's ridiculous, if you don't mind my saying so. If you're in the typical corporate structure, you'll either put up with whatever the company tells you to put up with, or you'll quit. If you quit over the operating system on your box, and you're the typical pencil-pusher type, then you're just an idiot.
It certainly does NOT have to hit both targets at once, and if it did, there'd have certainly been no Windows NT on corporate systems while Windows 95 was on the majority of home desktops. There were superficial usage differences between those two systems that were no worse and no better than the superficial usage differences between WinXP and Linux w/ X. The biggest hurdles to overcome would be getting people used to the fact that they can't just install whatever arbitrary crapware they want, and they should be putting everything in thier Home directory.
Besides, I'd like to know what "problems" exist in a properly administered Linux desktop box for work that don't exist in Windows?
Yast open sourced and now Ximian Connector? (Score:5, Insightful)
About time.
How long till they open source NetWare and eDirectory?
Thank you Ximian and Novell! (Score:1, Insightful)
And then Ximian goes on and consistently proves that!
I know there are strategic decisions, but that doesn't mean they are not doing any good. It's quite the opposite!
With all of my best wishes to those guys.
Rafael
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh. So fire the receptionist and hire a competent one? It's called internal training. You should have a budget for it. There's no reason your receptionist needs to "learn Linux". You give her the apps, you give her the introduction, and you give her some time to settle into it, and that's that.
I'm sick of hearing that people need to "learn Linux" to migrate in the workspace. Hello? I'm surrounded by 350 co-workers and I think maybe 2 of them, not counting our meager IT staff, actually "knows Windows" but they still manage to do their jobs. The nice thing about "knowing Linux", however, is that if you're a competent admin you can make sure that the people who don't "know Linux" can't shoot their own toes off, or, at least, can't shoot anyone else. See, with Windows, not only can you shoot your own toes off if you don't "know Windows", but you can shoot everyone else in the general vicinity, and, on occasion, it just arbitrarily decides to shoot you even if you didn't do anything wrong.
I don't want to hear any crap about migration costs. Proof. Give me proof. Give me case studies. I'm tired of excuses. Maybe they're true, but they're always just excuses. It's just people afraid of a new thing and nothing more.
Re:Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:4, Insightful)
exactly. ms has made itself powerful in part by adopting the "embrace and extend" method of squishing competitors. glad to see the evolution people doing a little table-turning. the advantages that evolution will offer over outlook will be:
- free
- less virus prone
and that ought to be enough to put a dent in the ms market share.Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open SUSE and the new Distro scenario (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you have missed some things. RedHat did not abandon the desktop, nor did they resign their mindshare. Their mindshare was reassigned to Fedora, and most of it stayed there. Fedora == RedHat. Yes, there's some differences, but Fedora is still what the old plain vanilla RedHat Linux was. The only difference is average joe user can no longer buy a support contract for it, which is no difference, because average joe user bought his RedHat CDs from LinuxCentral instead, without a support contract. (I know, because I did.)
So, RedHat didn't abandon the desktop. Meanwhile the RedHat Enterprise Linux product continues as before, and RedHat announces the new Desktop product for corporate users. Meanwhile Fedora continues to occupy the same niche as the old RedHat Linux.
I keep seeing these misconceptions repeated, so, one more time, everyone, all together: "Fedora == RedHat Linux."
Re:Indeed: havoc in redmond (Score:1, Insightful)
I cannot believe, there are not 10.000 alarm bells ringing in redmond right now.
Notice the tarball already avail in source?
Notice how SOON it will be officially? This looks like a planned hit and run to me.
You of course realize that this connector has been available for pay for awhile now? I believe it ran at $20-$30. Why would open sourcing something that has existed for awhile result in any new MS threats? Insightful my ass...
Re:Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
I can imagine that Novell want the parts of the FOSS/OSS community that uses the Evolution Connector to help in taking care of this code while Novell redirects its Ximian hackers to work on better integration of Evolution with GroupWise. The Connector was a big deal for Ximian but not a huge source of money for Novell, and they rather use the excellent hackers of Ximian to something that is better for the future of Novell.
Besides, the more corporation PC's that Evolution appears on, the more chance for the Novell sales-team to convince these corporations to switch to GroupWise.
Re:Indeed: havoc in redmond (Score:4, Insightful)
What grounds would MS have to threaten them? In this country, you still can't threaten someone simply for competing with your business, even if you're a monopoly. I don't read anywhere where they need MS's approval to keep this source available.
You should still purchase it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, remember you'll likely be buying some support which is cheaper than going it alone.
Re:Silliness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the problem with Linux is that your company is too cheap to hire a competent receptionist who can learn the basics of very similar software packages in-house in a reasonable amount of time? For your general word processing and spreadsheeting applications, Open Office isn't really that much different. If she can learn to blindly click buttons on Office, there's no reason she can't learn to do it on Open Office. If that were really true, we'd all still be using WordPerfect.
You can even train a mouse to do rudimentary, repetitive tasks. Just how much dumber are your receptionists?
On top of that, I can't imagine that the cost difference of hiring new receptionists, especially from a temp agency, are going to offset productivity gains and cost savings for the rest of the company if Linux is a viable consideration otherwise. If it does, maybe you need to consider firing your HR group and getting people who don't just knee-jerk hire every receptionist that walks in the door...
You're just making exuses. You must be a manager.
Re:Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:5, Insightful)
Great -- but not fantastic -- news (Score:4, Insightful)
Specifically, Connector only works if Outlook Web Access is enabled on Exchange. There are a few problems with this approach in the real world.
First, OWA isn't enabled by default in Exchange. That is because, secondly, OWA costs extra for each user. Third, as a result, all places I've worked that used Exchange either disallowed using OWA at all or severly limited its use.
For instance, at my current company, OWA is enabled but only has a few client licenses and is therefore blocked from all internal IPs. It's intended use is for people that are traveling that want to access their email via a web browser.
So, yeah, Connector is very slick and very useful... just not as slick and as useful as the euphoric posts here seem to indicate!
Re:Open SUSE and the new Distro scenario (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, this creates a OSS project that now directly challeges Outlook
Not directly.
It needs to run under win32 to complete a transition pathway. Viz.,
In many instances users can experiment with free alternatives on Windows and later, the underlying OS can be traded out for whatever works best as a "hardware manager and process handler" be it Win2K, WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc.
Re:Don't wait until the 14th. (Score:0, Insightful)
Like that's going to happen. Not.
Re:Indeed: havoc in redmond (Score:2, Insightful)
You just don't have to pay the outlook tax, or the windows desktop tax.
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If this really is your reasoning, and if you really do manage on that kind of an attitude, I'd like to speak for your employees for a moment. If you don't really believe this, or it's not really your attitude, then disregard the comment. However, if I was an employee under someone like this, I'd think you were a complete idiot, I'd think you were totally full of shit, and I'd react accordingly every time you told me to do something. Just something to think about if you really are under the impression that your excuse is your perogative and that's a good enough explanation.
Our 1900 workers were down for the entire workday one day last week because some idiot brought and infected Windows laptop in and plugged it into the network (against policy - this was an exec, of course) while the patch was undergoing regression tests. How much do you think that sudden, unscheduled downtime costs compared to controlled, scheduled downtime? We send people to train all the time. We survive. That's just a lame excuse for an inability to manage your people's time effectively.
Proper management of any OS is going to get less trouble.
Undoubtedly. A badly mismanaged *nix system is a timebomb waiting on the network. Of course, a well managed Windows box can ALSO still be a timebomb waiting on the network. On top of that, *nix systems, if properly setup in the first place, don't require you to constantly pick through them with a fine tooth comb all the time. They don't require nonstop patching (don't give me shit about the number of patches that come out for "Linux" [since so many people seem to think every app that runs on Linux is a part of it] - if you're putting sendmail on desktop boxes, you deserve to get toasted). There's no forced upgrades. If you stick a box in running kernel 2.0, and it still does its job just fine, good for you! Too bad Microsoft is going to come around and start choking you off so you "upgrade" (upgrade means: introduce a whole new slew of bugs and security issues) when they release their next product.
There are legitimate reasons not to move to Linux. You don't seem to have given me any. You're just making excuses.
Re:Excellent news for the FOSS community! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope that they are pursuing a true Exchange connector., this is one big messed up protocol, I really do hope no wants to do that, it's scary (probably a waste of time).
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, the person making excuses here is you. You can't wish these problems away.
Re:That's great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually don't expect Microsoft to get too bitchy about this. It seems to me like they're putting their money on virtual office integration. While Novell has a product in this space too, Microsoft's product will probably end up being more polished, easier for the average end-user to use, less secure, but effectively less expensive for clients with enterprise license agreements.
Re:No excuses for IT now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Well there you go. OpenOffice still can't import all MS Office doc and xls files 100% perfectly and Adobe, Intuit, and Macromedia along with a million other Desktop ISV's don't do linux. You see its not the dual booting/mostly doesn't even use Linux as a desktop Slashdot crowd you need to convince, its the real world. For new startups you absolutely have a fighting chance IF they can make do with OSS apps and/or are willing to code what they need from scratch. For the average 25 user office running Win2000 and a mix of Win2k/XP clients with MS Office switching to Linux just doesn't make much sense. They have already paid for the software and it works. If they had an even somewhat decent admin setup their systems they autoupdate and the network is reasonably secure.
Again your TCO arguement really only makes sense from the ground up. Switching over to OSS on the Desktop takes a lot of time and money that you don't regain overnight. I know this because its what I do. I admin for the Small business market and have setup networks for hundreds of companies. I also when possible switch to OSS where applicable. It is still very rare to find 100% OSS businesses. It is even rarer for me to convert them over lock stock and barrell to OSS. For a situation like I mentioned above ie 2k server, exchange, 2k/XP clients running Office, OSS just isn't the easiest sell. You do have situations where you'll find an office running MS Office 95 and some other simple apps and then you have a decent shot at switching them. But the bottom line is many offices still run apps that simply don't do OSS and don't have exact replacements in the OSS world.
When it comes to FOSS groupware they are all lacking in some way or another and certainly lack in the UI and documention departments. I expect that will change but we are still not at the point where I am willing to bet my life on the severs reliability like I can with other OSS server software. Regarding the Linux desktop the problems are well known. Sorry but FOSS just isn't a 100% dropin yet for most companies.
You don't need to sell me on Linux as a server. I've setup a ton of them and they "just work". But when it comes to the desktop, Linux still has a ways to go. For some situations its an easy fit. But for most situations its not. Someday the Top desktop software vendors will start supporting Linux and then you'll start seeing the Linux desktop market reach above 2-3% but until then there are excuses not to run Linux on the desktop.
Re:Don't wait until the 14th. (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest thing that MS won't like about this, however, isn't the loss of a few seat licenses but that it opens up an avenue for migrating to Linux. You can convert piecemeal rather than having to switch everything at once.
Re:Paging Steve Jobs! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't wait until the 14th. (Score:4, Insightful)
I stand by my original statement - I have a real hard time believing that the Linux crew is going line up to fill out Purchase Orders to send Microsoft a hundred bucks a seat for each of the Linux installs they have across organization running Ximian email clients. Good luck convincing me otherwise. For the record, I really like Microsoft - this isn't about what I like / dislike, it is totally about envisioning the Linux users (the kind of Linux users that would be eager early adopters of this Exchange adapter) getting this to work and remembering 'oh yea, maybe I need to send MS a nice Benjamin Franklin plus change because
Re:Cue Irrelevant Feature Complaints In.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Silliness (Score:1, Insightful)
But wait - Evolution also talks to Novell's server. So the people who have switched to Evolution can now replace Exchange with Groupwise and the end users may not even notice anything changed.