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?"

Re:Evolution???

[rekkanoryo]

Evolution replaces Outlook, not Exchange.

Re:Evolution???

[mmxsaro]

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

no bloody chance

[lambent]

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:My issue

[Frosty Piss]

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

Re:This is all very clever and wonderful

[Blahbooboo3]

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.

Re:It's not going to happen

[omeomi]

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:nope

[dhammond]

Yes, it does, in fact. Calendars are shared be default within the domain and hidden by default outside the domain, and there is full control over these sharing options. You can give edit capabilities to anyone, and the administrator of the domain has edit capabilities for everyone -- a feature I haven't actually found a way to turn off.

Huh? Stop trolling.

[electrosoccertux]

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:It's not going to happen

[sp3d2orbit]

I think by Google you mean Microsoft and Yahoo. If you remember, Google was the only large search provider that fought the Department of Justice on handing over customer data.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/judge-tells -doj-no-on-search-queries.html [blogspot.com]

And they won! But not before Yahoo and Microsoft eagerly capitulated.

Re:It's not going to happen

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Alternative open-source solution

[Samhain]

Some comments on running Zimbra.

The Zimbra server seems to work well and is very nice to setup and admin. Much nicer then Exchange if you know linux at least. The mail admin, is extremely easy and mostly done via a web interface, although a few things require some command line LDAP settings. Not sure how the server scales to large numbers of users yet as I have not used it with a large installed base.

It works very well if you are using it with Outlook and the Outlook connector (only available with the commercial version of Zimbra). It is almost exactly as if you are connected to an Exchange server except with a few features missing. The functionality of the web based interface is very good, but the perfomance can be a bit lacking at times. This will apparently be improved when the next generation of browsers add in better Web2.0 support. zdesktop also seems to help the performance of the web interface, but it really is very alpha right now and crashes.

They are adding in quite good support for Mac via Mac Mail, iSync and iCalendar, although some of this is still new and being worked on.

The mail functionality works very well on any linux client via IMAP, but for Linux Calendar use you pretty much have to use the web client. At least i know of no way to integrate it with any linux calendar client.

The mobile support is excellent if you are using a windows mobile device. Seemlessly acts just like Exchange. This also only works with the commercial version of zimbra.

The mobile support for a blackberry devices is done via tacking on extra software to the blackberry and quite frankly it integrates in a very unacceptable manner. They claim to be working on this. This one is a bit of a show stopper for some enterprise class customers. I suspect this is more RIMs fault then Zimbra's, they would love to fix this, I gather from talking to them.

Very good and works now for many environments. Shows promise for the future in the areas it is lacking.

Another one to look at is http://postpath.com/ [postpath.com]

Re:no bloody chance

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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]

Re:Please don't flame me ...

[Koda]

I recently upgraded our company from R5 (very irritating) to Lotus Domino 7.0.2, and I'm amazed at how far Notes/Domino has come along. Here are a few things that have really impressed me:
- The Domino server actually runs very nicely on older hardware.
- While we're currently running our Domino servers on Windows 2000, I'm planning to move them to either Linux or Solaris 10 once it comes time to buy new hardware. Domino offers that flexibility.
- The Notes mail and calendaring in 7 is actually quite good.
- The web client is very nice, and works perfectly with Firefox.
- I've configured our Domino mail server to also work with POP3 and IMAP, and I have users reliably accessing their Domino mail with:
1) Notes clients on PCs and Macs
2) Various browsers on various OSs.
3) Palm and Windows Mobile Devices.
4) Microsoft Outlook clients.

I'm just really impressed with how flexible it is. I'm also currently configuring a Blackberry Enterprise Server to integrate with our Domino mail infrastructure. That will apparently allow push e-mail and calendaring to Blackberry devices, as well as Palm, Symbian, and select Samsung devices running the Blackberry connect client.

If you were ever put off by older versions of Notes, it's worth another look IMHO. And the public Beta of Notes 8 is very impressive, indeed.