Mozilla and Google — Exchange Killers At Last? 336
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My issue (Score:4, Insightful)
I have Outlook/Exchange at work, but I use Firefox/OWA instead.
If my browser is open, I prefer to use it.
why just aim for exchange? (Score:3, Insightful)
is anyone from the Chandler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(PIM)) team looking into integrating efforts here?
Re:Real Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing out there that can match the usability of Exchange/Office. It's a sad reality, because Exchange/Office is fucking expensive.
Agreed, Google needs an in-house version (Score:1, Insightful)
I need to know that my businesses information is confidential. And, by having it sit at Google just it isn't.
Plus, even with businesses where confidentially is desired but optional, you have plenty of businesses where it is not optional but legal required (lawyer, doctor, etc.). Legally they don't even have the option of using Google's tools.
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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:nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not advocating putting everything local, but it's difficult for one person to foresee the needs of many others.
Re:Google is open source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Thuderbird's calendar has a way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
--Pat
Make a clone instead (Score:2, Insightful)
Did I miss something? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google is open source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:your business E-mail is an open book anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Strangely the most confidential documents such as analysis, internal white papers, usecase for next product
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 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.
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 deleted or who has access to this data. Or if they will defend me or do anything if someone complains or if law-enforcement gets involved.
This wholesale giving of power and data to google just to get away from MS, its something of an ill-informed fantasy. No surprise companies arent running to have google control all their data. Better interfaces and geek hate of MS aren't exactly the answer either.
Re:Evolution??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I say that and I am sorry, because I love open source, but Evolution is something only a mother can love.
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It's not going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
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 thinking of instead is the groupware component -- shared calendars, meeting scheduling, task tracking, and so on.
As you note, there are tons of FOSS projects out there that convincingly work better as e-mail clients, but there has never been anything that comes close to it as a groupware client, and that functionality is what ties lots of businesses to Exchange/Outlook.
Plenty of solutions, not enough adopters (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
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 really wants to do something about Microsoft monopoly it should stop fiddling around with file server and multimedia specs. The real killer will be forcing Microsoft to provide an open API to exchange and maintain it open, unencumbured and working (no MAPI style breakages) as a punishment for let's say 10 years. I suspect they will happily agree to pay 200+ million a month instead as this will remove one of the main "server+desktop" lock-ins they hold on the enterprise.
Re:nope (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
The goal is to to defeat monopolies. Microsoft just happens to be the biggest one in the computing world.
Re:Real Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
(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, it will corrupt sooner or later). Did you know Outlook can't do a search in all of these PST's at once? You have to execute the search 20 times, one per PST file... Is this what you call usability (this was the first thing that came to my mind, but I can list others if you want) ?
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:1, Insightful)
Now that that's out of the way...
I don't care about 'destroying' Microsoft. There's a place for MS software and engineering in the world. Sure, some people might actively want to destroy Microsoft, but I don't see them as being representative of OSS as a whole.
Yeah, it's true that Google's closed source. But, so what? The point is to encourage a more vital economic ecosystem. So long as there's competition, that's good for the consumer. If you call that an agenda, then fine, I am guilty as charged.
It would be -nice- if everything was OSS and information and free, but one thing at a time. As long as there's more than one choice in the marketplace, I'm happy.
To summarize:
I don't trust Google any more than you do. But I sure as hell don't trust a monopoly.
If Google can break open the market, good. If Apple does it too, so much the better.
Re:Huh? Stop trolling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? Do you really think you can out do Google on the uptime front?
Do you assume that keeping the data locally will protect it from government subpoena?
Are you thinking that you can somehow do a better job keeping your systems patched and hacker safe than Google?
Do you think that people who work for your University are somehow more trustworthy than those who work for Google?
Sounds to me like you're denying your users the best solution because you're a control freak.
Must be Blackberry enabled (Score:2, Insightful)
Senior managers, CEOs don't care about the cost saving, they care about their Blackberry.
Re:Make a clone instead (Score:2, Insightful)
Our dev boxes are all FreeBSD. In fact, all of our server infrastructure is nix-based, with one exception: we have an Exchange server.
Why?
While I wasn't here when it was chosen, I'm pretty sure "It's the best groupeware technology out there" wasn't the reason. Lotus may be no better, but at least IMO Groupwise is, and some Free solutions probably are, too. However, we are a company that sells products into the Global 2000 and makes a lot of money doing it. We conduct frequent customer training sessions at our site and our account managers, products managers, SEs, etc., frequently meet with customers either at our site or theirs. Guess what groupware server is used at most of the global 2000? Uh-huh. Exchange. So my theory is that whether we like Exchange or not, it's the thing that gives us maximum compatibility with our customers.
You are absolutely right that an Exchange replacement is needed, but even then it'll be tough. The replacement will need to be perfect. So perfect it can be used in a cluster with other Exchange boxes. Deal with all Outlook versions, etc. Since Exchange is a proprietary product, this will require some reverse engineering, and making reverse-engineered products perfect is really hard. Microsoft will fight it with every fiber of their being, and I'm confident (as only a former Microsoft employee who worked in the Exchange team can be) that they will in no way welcome it. They will use FUD, lock-in, and if necessary, law suits.
An Exchange killer/clone/replacement has been a grail of the free software movement (or at least some parts of it) for the entire 10 years I've been a Linux user. We're not much closer to that than we were in 1997 (yes, I know about Kolab and use Kontact myself, but how often do you actually see a Kolab server at a company; I never have. I've never even met anyone who claimed to have see one, or even claimed to know someone who had). If free software overtakes Microsoft and other proprietary vendors in every category and becomes the market leader across the board, I believe that even then, Exchange will be Microsoft's last great holdout product. Exchange is very hard to clone and very hard to replace in an environment that uses it.
In conclusion, then, a warning to anyone who does not now have Exchange and is thinking of it: don't. You'll be using it forever, or if not, it will be hard, painful, and expensive to get rid of it. Look at other open source and closed source products first. You'll probably find one that meets your needs and be able to run it on Linux or BSD, thus making it cheaper and more reliable than Windows Server, too.
Re:Evolution??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's not going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely. If you're not in the US it absolutely is the issue. Any online gambling company will want that. As well as any company that doesn't want the Patriot Act or any other bullshit civil rights infringing law invading their privacy.
Re:It's not going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
And who isn't out to maximize revenues? Can hardly blame Microsoft. Exchange is their server using their protocols, and Outlook is their product. Why the hell should they be expected to open up access to Exchange? Because a few developers are grumpy and don't like Outlook?
If inter-operability was an issue, companies wouldn't use Exchange/Outlook... The fact is they use it because it just works.
Don't copy - innovate!! (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, so there is a lot of talk about creating an Exchange clone, an alternative, and most solutions offering a Linux backend that still allows users to use Outlook and synchronize with MS products.
Isn't this just copying and not creating and real value to innovate? Directly creating a Linux Exchange clone that can talk with Outlook, doesn't that just further strengthen the cause to use MS products for the end-user?
The Linux community should embrace a standard compliant Group Calendar, Addressbook, and Mail - This can be provided completely Web-based without the need for a fat client, especially end users with Outlook. Users can access the product using Firefox, Safari of IE, cross-platform.
Food for thought, embrace a new protocol/product that can offer the features Exchange does, but in a radically new way, without the need to support 'Outlook'
One product that has this vision is @Mail [atmail.com] - Keep an eye on the project