Can We Finally Ditch Exchange?

bhsx asks: "With all the innovations going into open source software these days, why do I still need to run Exchange to meet my clients' needs? Even when demonstrating technology like LTSP mixed with any combination of OpenOffice, Star Office, even Codeweaver's Crossover Office running the latest Microsoft suite, the clincher is always over Exchange functionality. I'm aware of Bynari's InsightServer(Coincidentally, I noticed on that page, that their code is for sale) and have started using that as a possible closer, and the cost is much less prohibitive than eXchange+w2k server+CALs; but why isn't there an open source solution to this problem yet?"

"With new releases on the way, like Mandrake 9.0 and the new Lycoris can we who try to use Free Software in business environments hope for any change? Do the commercial Linux distros have any plans to implement a free replacement for Exchange, including a Win32 client-side bridge? If not, why not? Do you feel it is too cost prohibitive to imitate Bynari in this case, or is it a decision more along the lines of 'we'd rather you used Evolution and Mandrake/Lycoris/Whatever, rather than OutLook and Win32'? If it's the latter I'd be severely disappointed, and I don't think I'm alone. Any discussion on this topic would be appreciated; but what I'd really love is a community push to get this done. Perhaps a running Web-A-Thon to raise the money to simply purchase the technology from Bynari? I personally think it would be a great move towards grabbing market share from some of the other distributions, some of which have the technology but choose to keep it closed, as well as from the Great Dragon. What do you think?"

no

Untill there is a standard calendar protocol, and that protocol is supported by exchange, you won't be able to get rid of it.

Re:no

At first I thought if there was an open source system that was compatible with Outlook that would do the trick, however HP offered a system that did just that, and even it didn't make a dent in Exchange's market.

Two things...

First, HP's product (now owned aparently by Samsung) wasn't really open source, although it did run on some open source platforms. It was certainly not free software.

Second, HP never really made much of an effort to try to sell their product. It sure looked like they were afraid of reprisals from Microsoft if it was too successful.

So I don't think we really know for sure what would happen if there were a free/open source calendar/messaging/groupware server that was compatible with Outlook clients... I personally think it would become quite popular, especially with small to mid sized businesses that would like to save some money in today's trying financial climate.

Re:no

Why is it when the open source people make changes that break application software, it's automatically the fault of the closed-source software writers? Jesus Christ, just don't make changes that break software!

This is why it takes MS a month to release security patches. The patch itself could be out in a few hours (they have a 24-hour security team), but they spend the rest of that time testing it on every configuration possible to make sure it doesn't break other software.

Just more pro-Open Source FUD.

Re:no

The GCC programmers didn't break ABI compatibility to anger you or to encourage Sun to make Java a real standard or open-source it; they did so because there were some bugs in the GCC C++ ABI that made it incompatible with *the standard*, so the choices were:

Fix it now and piss a few people off, fix it later and piss a ton of people off, or never fix it and be a nonstandard compiler.
GCC: A nonstandard compiler. Um, no.
Compilers, particularly C++ compilers (GCC broke ONLY the C++ ABI) are ENORMOUSLY complex pieces of software and that the things even work are miracles in and of themselves. This one had bug. It happens. Try to tell me that Microsoft's compiler doesn't have bugs, or that ANY other compiler does not.

You see, if you would have done a little homework rather than labelling that which you know little about as FUD, you would have known this. (Not that I am not guilty of the same thing every so often :)

Re:no

First of all, if you have ever migrated a corporate messaging system (email, calendar, shared documents, etc), you wouldn't make light of such a task.

Second, I should be more specific; it needs to work with Outlook. The reason for this is that given a choice, users will work with software that is already installed vs. installing something new; and this includes the users in the IT department. If you don't beleive me, look at browser usage statistics; why install Netscape when you already have IE installed? Why install AIM when you have MSN right there on your new XP box?

Make it work with outlook and you immediately have a client base. Make a tool to ease the migration and you're golden.

Re:no

Sysadmins have no power if the boss says "We are an Outlook shop and nothing else". My boss actually said that to me. He could care less about the black magic behind the scenes, but he wanted a unified client interface.

I am sure this applies to many sysadmins, and in reality, the only people with the power to swith over users software are sysadmins of one ;-)

This is a decision for IT heads or even presidents of companies to make depending on the size. If it makes economic sense to swith over they will, but not because it "isn't microsoft". If we actually want to create a viable alternative, we need to entice corporate decision makers with dollar signs, not with rhetoric.

Re:no

Aside from the managerial politics mentioned by the others, as well as the technical issue of moving between e-mail servers, there's also the Dick Factor. Specifically, the users will see the IT department as a bunch of dicks for forcing them to change from something they like. If they know specifically who ordered the change, and don't get an extraordinarily good reason for it (virtually impossible), they will see that SysAdmin as the biggest dick of the group, and some of those people have political power, which can result in a SysAdmin being a dick to the unemployment people.

Re:no

Once upon a time I wrote a MAPI Message Store Provider for Outlook. Never finished it, but was getting damn close. At one point I could present messages from our proprietary T&E management app via CORBA to Outlook, and read my task lists in Outlook.

So it's not impossible. Perhaps a simple SOAP/XML-RPC protocol for an open source server to make it easy to build web-apps on top of, coupled with a MAPI Store Provider, and the problem is solved.

Hell, I'll volunteer the VOLUMES of knowledge and time I spent on this (3 years ago, so my NDA's no longer apply ;-) ) to build the MSP...

[e-mail] for those who might like to take on such a project. Or how about this, anyone got a good calendaring system that I can just interface with?

Or a calendaring system coupled with an IMAP mail server would make it relatively easy to build mail functionality into the system without having to go to the integration levels that MS did with Exchange.

-Chris

RFC 2447

What about RFC 2447 [faqs.org]? The iCalendar protocol looks to have been developed jointly by Netscape, MS and Lotus. Exchange may support this, and even if it doesn't, this would be a good place to start.

As for the client-side, I think that I fully-featured web mail system can easily replace Outlook on the corporate desktop. They may all have Office, but they've got browsers too!

Re:Going the wrong way?

Evolution is a great Outlook replacement for Unix desktops, but it's not good enough. To really compete with Outlook/Exchange we need:

1. An OSS backend that replaces Exchange for calendaring at least. We can use IMAP and LDAP and such for the other functionality because at least there exist standard protocols, but there is no competetive backend for calendaring applications. It would be really nice to have an OSS all-in-one that does IMAP/LDAP/calendaring, but first things first.
2. An OSS front-end like Evolution, but one that works on Windows as well as Unixes.

At our organization (a small university), we are desperately looking for a comprehensive calendaring solution -- one that supports teams, conflict resolutions, notifications, palm synching, and can be used either at home or at the office. I am the OSS advocate in our IT department, but I just can't find a suitable OSS solution. In fact, the only solution I can think of that even remotely fits the bill is Outlook and Exchange.

The unfortunate part is that we're using Netscape 4.x here, mainly because of its mail client. (We're using IMAP and LDAP on our backend and NS 4.x Messenger is still pretty good, even though the browser sucks.) Netscape 7.x / Mozilla 1.x is nearly there, but not quite. If there was a calendar solution that worked with Mozilla/NS7 that had those features and had a OSS server, it would be like a dream come true. As it stands, I may have to roll out a small deployment of Outlook and Exchange just to solve this problem (which has come down from the president BTW, so it can't just be ignored until a suitable OSS solution comes along). Now suddenly we're mix-mashing between NS 4.x over IMAP with Outlook and Exchange. You can see what is going to happen with that nice IMAP/LDAP solution in a year.

I think what we really need is a standard protocol, de facto or otherwise, for network calendaring. There is iCal, but from what little I know about it, it's just not comprehensive enough. (Does it deal with network transport?)

Jason.

2 reasons

1.) Companies are having difficulty implementing the calendar system that Exchange uses properly. 2.) Microsoft professional support, big business likes the idea of having someone to blame when things don't work. They sign contacts that make people have it fixed within a specific time period or they recieve massive compensation.

Re:2 reasons

Give me a product, open source or not, that provides my clients (on whose interests I act) with the functionality of Exchange, and I'll get the Purchase Order ready by close of business today.

How about Centrinty FirstClass [centrinity.com]? Cross platform unified messaging and groupware. I can access my email, voicemail, calendar, contacts from any computer anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of Exchange. Don't laugh, it works!

I feel your pain.

At the place I work at, we have both an exchange server and a POP3/IMAP server. We catch so much flak from our users over the exchange server than the POP3 server, Then again 90% of our users use OutLook even though we have a site license for Eudora,and offer Netscape and an IMAP web client. They get lost even though we have an excellent web-directory and one of the best calendar projects around. Everyone has a public folder that they can put stuff into to share with the rest of the network byt they still insist on using Exchange. Personally I can't find any feature that justifies all of the garbage we have to put up with to get it running. Outlook sucks!(there goes my karma) Outlook crashes more often then IE, Outlook is targeted my more virii then ever. If these people would change their mail client, they wouldn't have this problem. The exchange server is jacked up as well. We have to call and have it re-set every three days and I'd bet that the network "gurus"(/sarcasm) don't know how to admin it either!!!... argh!

Re:I (don't) feel your pain.

Exchange has it's plusses and minuses. I like how easy it is to set up, I like how easy it is to maintain, and it's pretty easy to make the features it has useful.

However, there are two issues with it that bother the hell out of me: (Note: This is Exchange 5.5, not the latest one. Nobody where I work is interested in paying gobs more when there's free stuff out there.)

1.) The copy we have is limited to 25 licenses. This means that 25 connections are allowed at one time. More than that and Exchange punts you. "Sorry, you have to wait until a connection is open."

The IMAP protocol is particularly attractive, so it's used a lot. But it counts as 2 connections because it makes one for inbound and one for outbound. So you can have 12.5 simultaneous connections before Exchange says "Sorry, give me more money."

What makes it worse is that IMAP is rather persistent, as opposed to POP3 that just hops in and hops out. My company of 19 had to tighten control over who uses what and when over it. This alone is enough to make us move away from MS.

2.) You cannot uninstall Exchange 5.5. I boogered up the install once and had to reinstall WinNT because it wouldn't give me the option to remove Exchange and start over. Maybe a little more poking and prodding could have solved it without a rebuild, but I was in emergency 'We need it yesterday!!' mode and didn't have the keys to the company Tardis.

Exchange gets points for being very easy to use and run, but it is a huge moneypit. If I were running on less than 15 people, I'd be fine with it. However, for more than that I'm ready to learn how Linux works and build a server with that.

Alot of us are waiting

Alot of companies/admins are waiting for an Exchange replacement. I for one have considered dropping exchange for a flat out mail server that runs in a *nix environment but it always comes back to the scheduling of exchange. With all of the people out there writing code, it still amazes me that nothing has surfaced. Why not take time off f the useless mp3 player/id3 reader/all of the other crap and contribute to a worthwhile project?

It's the administration costs

First, most non-tech corporate types have heard of Exchange. Next, they like to have someone to sue. Even those projects with companies behind them don't have much to go after. Even though Microsoft has a EULA that supposedly frees them from any liability if the software screws up, it makes the corporate types feel better. Also, they can hire any MCSE off the streets to run the Exchange server. There aren't many standard certs that they can rely on when they need to hire your replacement after you've bundled together all this unfamiliar software on their servers. When you consider the hiring difficulties, lack of certifications, and lack of accountability of the authors of the software, the open source projects may, in fact, cost a good bit more than the $10,000 worth of Microsoft software. The entry costs of this software look enormous to individuals, but to corporations, it often doesn't appear to be much money. Corporations care much less about software politics than most of us do. The open source solution has the benefit of getting out of proprietary formats, but I don't think that's very high up on the list of priorities of the people making the decisions.

Re:It's the administration costs

You mean they can hire MCSE's to rebuild their server after every e-mail virus attack.

You know Notes/Domino runs on many different not Windows OSes, including Linux.

Note to IBM: make a native Linux client for Notes, so we can stop having to use the Domino webmail interface.

Clincher?

This is not trying to be a troll, but it seems there is always one more "clincher" in the movement away from MS products. IE / Office / Outlook / Photoshop you name it, but now it is Exchange. OSS always makes a replacement, but it is only 98% there in terms of functionality in most cases. As soon as we get Exchange out of the way, there will still be something else left to take its place to prevent adoption.

Re:Clincher?

This is not trying to be a troll, but it seems there is always one more "clincher" in the movement away from MS products. IE / Office / Outlook / Photoshop you name it, but now it is Exchange.

This goes both ways, and it is a matter of what people are used to. Whenever I use Windows I think:

Where's Bourne shell???
Where's vi, sed, and egrep???
Where's UFS and NFS???
What happened to root's ability to do anything worthwhile???
How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???
How do I read a PostScript file???

I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually, but there is always one more thing I can't do on Windows that I'm used to doing in UNIX.

Samsung's OpenMail

Formerly HP's Openmail is another Exchange replacement, but exactly like Bynari's product it still requires some licensing.

I've been surprised that there hasn't been more effort on the Linux side of things to create a replacement. I would have thought that Redhat would have come up with something. Since as the poster notes, Exchange functionality tends to be a big killer whenever you flirt with replacing in house systems. If you can't provide the integrated and shared calendaring it usually won't fly.

Samsung Contact

Check out Samsung Contact [samsungcontact.com]. It used to be HP OpenMail. HP discontinued it, and Samsung bought it, because they were using it heavily internally. I think it does everything that Exchange does. There are a few nits with Outlook that make it look a little different than an Exchange server, but even those seem to be getting worked out. They're also fully standards-based.

Re:Samsung Contact

It isn't free or open source...

Ah, that's true, but a lot of people (like me) turn to it when the PHB's demand things like painless group calendaring. HP Openmail (Samsung Contact) is a product that does what the execs need for the company, yet runs on my *nix boxen, so I don't have to drop an Exchange server onto my network.

I've run HP Openmail for the last two years or so, and it's been as flawless as I can expect. Very flexible, configurable (all by CLI and .conf files, I might add, no GUI necessary). My users can run Outlook (with full Public Folders and shared calendar support), or any old IMAP client.

HP will support the product until 2006, so I have lots of time to wait for Samsung to get their act together with Contact. They're still sort of fumbling about, last time I stopped by their website. They've had a support rep contact me a few times about the switchover process, but he's not a tech guy, and just keeps telling me to be patient, which is fine with me. Detailed migration help is on the way.

So the short answer is that Openmail/Contact fills a niche that no free software does yet. People that need a mature and complex messaging backend (more than just an MTA), but don't care much for Exchange will love it.

Belloc

Exchange is very useful

At work, we've been trying to switch over from using exchange but a lot of people have implemented some very neat features, like for instance. If I have an appointment to do a stress test on a patient, the nurses send an email so that it is loaded onto my palm pilot when i sync and a letter is automatically printed out letting the patient know when the test is scheduled.

The IT guys think they may have found an exchange server replacemetn with SUSE but for now exhcnage is very useful and would be very hard to replace.

Thanks for reading

Good question.

There has been plenty of call for an open source groupware application like Exchange and as yet there are still none. My appologies to the folks at PHP-Groupware but, even though this is often cited as a solution, it simply isn't an adequate solution especially for a medium or large enterprise.

Frankly, I had always thought that the Sendmail folks would be the one to deliver. They have certainly nailed down the mail side and I feel that they could do a great job integrating calendaring and other groupware features, most importantly a programming interface to make it an extensible solution like Exchange or Notes. Unfortunately, as of yet, they have not indicated that they are pursuing this.

OSS is still out in the cold when it comes to an OSS Groupware application that scales.

People are starting to get fired for buying MSFT

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

I know of three people who did get fired for buying Microsoft.

A friend of mine is now providing consulting to the companies in question. Two are running Twig on Linux servers, the other has their old non-ms, non-unix server back up and working (again) while they slowly transition to Linux.

Despite all the "I'll sound wise and neutral if I make out to be 'admitting' free software's flaws and giving Microsoft its due" commentary one sees here on slashdot as either an effort at karma whoring, or an effort at pro-Microsoft propoganda and astroturfing, the fact remains that there are really very few shops that cannot do without Microsoft, and many that actually benefit from running other platforms.

What is very interesting is the number of non-technical people who are coming to realize that, and while they don't necessarilly embrace free software in general, or GNU/Linux in particular, they are beginning to recognize just what a financial, technical, and time drain Microsoft and their products have become to their enterprises, and they are looking for ways out.

Even to the point where, now, people are starting to get fired for blindly purchasing Microsoft, and treating MS propoganda as a substitute for technical research and savvy.

Its a rather refreshing change, actually.

the concept of exchange

The whole concept of Exchange, in my opinion, is flawed. Each Exchange server recreates a mini-internet within a lan, that connects to other mini-internets within other lans, tied together by wans (or mans--as the case may be) and also tied together by the real internet [a nebulous definition goes here].

Here, we have one Exchange server for 150 people. But then there are 9 locations, from San Francisco to san Diego. They all hit the same server through the wan.

Remote users (15+) also use outlook web access (i't really Exchange web access if you think about it) to access their mail. We have to allow that traffic through the firewall.

And every single one of our people have one or more other email addresses (AOL, Earthlink, RR, whatever).

I would say: have better addressing handling.

Email was first created by geeks for geeks (at univs. and gov.) and served its purpose well. When the move was made to the company, the whole transition was just done wrong.

I say the Exchange servers should be totally eliminiated in favor of a non-lan/wan centric solution (watch your step, marketing words all around), namely a true internet application, shared, replicable, and reliable.

As far as calendaring is concerned, we don't use it much. Our corporate values promote face-time and intelligent conversation more than lines on a spreadsheet, so meetings are more dynamic, more fluid, and less apt tp be "scheduled". Usually it's a phone call.

Anyway, I digress.

But this may be the reason no open-sourcer wants to tackle that issue. It may subconsciously feel flawed to recreate the Exchange architecture.

How to defeat Exchange

If we truely want to provide an alterative to Exchange as someone who works in an entirely exchange based environment, here is my analysis of what my PHB's would have to see.

Server Side:
1. The replacement must support Outlook as a client, people actually like Outlook as an integrated client.
2. The Replacement must work with the Sendto functions of Microsoft Office
3. The Replacement must be able to scale to 10's of thousands of users, in geographically diverse locations.
4. Must Support Multipule languages
5. Must be easily scannable for Virus protection, and must be able to deny delivery of messages that fit certain criteria
6. Easy rules based scripting of mail events stored on the server as part of the user's mail box.
7. Must support enterprise calendaring/scheduling.
8. Must inter-operate with Exchange during migration
9. Must support server and OS of choice at the company(You know what that means)
10. Must offer web mail capabilities equal too or better than OWA(this includes the ability to secure the web mail client via SecureID)
11. Must support massive data stores, on the order of 500GB-1TB(yes exchange can do this)
12. Must Integrate with our directory services, like exchange 2000 integrates with AD.
13 In short it has to do all the things that exchange can do, and more, and better.
Client Side:
1. Must have a client which supports all the functions of the server side. In short its gotta work like Outlook.
2. Must Support OS, and hardware of choice.
3. Easy Rules based scripting interface to server and client side rules(Think Outlook rules wizard)
4. Must be dead simple for users to use, users don't learn they want everything to work just like it always has, even if you give them a new application to do it. When we moved from Banyan Beyond Mail to Outlook when we went from a banyan network to an NT one it was a nightmare for all of the administrative assistants as their workflow was massively changed.

So there you have it....rebuild exchange as an OSS roject and get back to us...this is not meant as Troll, this is a real world example of how a corporation is going to look at such a thing.

open source in business land

I was approached by Bruce Perens at LWE and he stated that Debian needed better support for Open Office. I looked at him and told him as soon as one of us had a reason to care we would.

This is the fundamental problem with Open Source in business land -- you need a coder who has the time to code and actually cares about making it work. I see lots of sysadmin types complain about Exchange but no one seems to hate it enough to sit down and work on something better. Most of the businesses approaching Mandrake, RH, etc are looking to dump the Microsoft solutions entirely so Exchange is not a big deal there. Or they are only looking for server -> server solutions and not desktops.

Last but not least you have the problem that Exchange is 100% proprietary. Look at all of the "fun" Samba has had trying to get smb interoperability right. I also bet Microsoft would be VERY apt to sue a company that did this into the ground. Might as well paint a target on your head.

As with every other itch you just need to find someone to scratch it. You mentioned "clients", why not funnel some of that contracting cash to coders willing to work on the project.

Re:Other Groupware

- They dont have STABLE standards support (IMAP, POP3, iCal, etc...)

I use IMAP and POP3 through GWIA for 700+ users, off one box. It's been up 60 days, and that's because we moved offices two months ago.

- They still havent integrated GW's user/password database into Novell's famed eDirectory/NDS database.

Maybe not, but I manage them using the same utility. Nobody has anything better, really. And because of the way the post office works, you have to communicate with a specific server agent, not just any server in the tree, so intergrating passwords wouldn't really help any, unless you have no tape backups. ;p

- Very little administrative control over the mailboxes.

What complete bullshit. In NWAdmin, I can control every option of the GroupWise client, I can set it remotely, and I can grey out the option so the user can't change it. What the can't you do? You want to add rules or specific proxy access, just go in to their box with the client, and do it.

- Poor backup solution (you MUST shutdown the email system to get a reliable backup). No, the GWTSA's dont cut it (based on my personal experiences, and statements from senior techs at Novell)...

Not based on my experience with Backup Exec 9.0. Even if you don't use the GWTSA's, you just make everyone access the post office over IP, instead of file access, and backup the directory. The files locked by the agent can be rebuilt from the files that will never be locked.

- Novell has POOR support for automated administration and report generation out of GroupWise - GWCheck just does not cut it...

Hmmmm... I've never cared about getting a report, really. Besides, GWCheck is for repairing the system, not reporting. But since I don't know what kind of reports you'd like, I'll leave this one alone.

Groupwise is *great*. No, I don't work for Novell. Yes, I do administer a 2000 user enterprise system that runs Groupwise 5.5. We don't even need a dedicated e-mail guy, even for all 2000 users. And it doesn't even take up a big chunk of my time. I have 15 domains, 22 post offices, two internet gateway agents, and WebAccess set up. No issues, anywhere.

*ever*

I think you're doing something wrong.

Mozilla Calendar is on the way!

Well i don't know about ditching today... (finally!)

However, as of today,

Mozilla Calendar [mozilla.org] "now makes it possible to store your events on a remote server (either a web server or an FTP server). Not only does this make it easier to keep track of your schedule if you use several computers, but you can also easily share your calendar data with friends. Read the full article for more details and instructions." (stolen from Mozillazine [mozillazine.org])

So there are programmers working on the problem, and this can be used as the defacto protocol, since one the stated goals of the project is "to create an open source, standards based calendar solution."

Mozilla/OEone is working on it...

OEone [oeone.com] and Mozilla [mozilla.org] are working on an Open Source calendar server [mozilla.org]. Support it!

Because groupware is a hard problem

The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who think groupware is useful, and those who don't.

I know that mentioning Lotus Notes violates the Code of Slashdot Posting, but take a look at Notes sometime. The people who designed that system spent a long time thinking very hard about how to build a mobile, distributed, secure groupware system (note: you do not need to agree with the solution they built to acknowledge that they thought very deeply about the problem). Then - they spent a lot of time and money building what they had designed.

(Exchange is basically an imitation of the 45% of Notes' features that are most commonly used, without the thought, design, or security).

Who in the Free Software/Open Source world is going to spend that kind of time and effort? Particularly given that most Linuxians fall into the "don't like groupware" camp?

sPh

Ahem.

If Lotus spent so much time thinking about Notes' design, why did they get it so horribly, horribly wrong? [iarchitect.com]

Re:Ahem.

Again, I am not trying to sell you Lotus Notes, or convince you that its design is a good one. I am just pointing out some issues surrounding groupware.

But to address your question, and the brilliant observations of the iarchitect.com web site: please do keep in mind that Notes was developed before Windows 95, and long before Microsoft released the Common Interface guidelines, at a time when there was no agreement on how GUI interfaces should look or work. Every application at that time (including the various Microsoft apps) had its own look and feel. The designers of Notes built a platform-independent GUI from scratch without any guidelines to use and before most of what passes for "UI research" today was published (I am no big fan of the Microsoft CUI standards myself).

As for iarchitect.com, the first thing they rip on are the fat double-click buttons and tabbed desktop. Whereas when I was supporting Notes, the first thing that non-geekaziod users would ask me after they had used Notes for a while was how they could add the fat buttons and tabs to their other applications! So I am not quite so convinced that was a bad choice...

I also find it funny that the denizens of this site post violent diatribes concerning Microsoft's stifling monoculture and lack of innovation, but when faced with something a little different rip on how it "doesn't follow standards"!

sPh

Wild Guess

...because the problem isn't interesting enough.

Open source shows a strong prediliction for solving interesting problems well ahead of boring ones. For instance, we had useful, powerful distributed databases, cryptography, new languages and C compilers long before we had a functional word processor and spreadsheet combo. Quite simply, we have already solved mail distribution and address-book sharing on their own, and have relatively little interest in peeling apart a proprietary MS standard for same which is liable to change next week. This is also the reason why OpenOffice is great for everything except reading and writing Word documents.

This flows into my new theory about how Microsoft intends to go about attacking Linux: A deluge of boring, repetitious, pointless APIs and interfaces for problems that were long ago solved but now must be addressed using these new, uselessly variant interfaces simply because that's what everyone else has to do. (Think dotnet.) A hacker's familiarity with extant interfaces is his or her number-one resource, and is therefore that which he or she will part with least readily --- even at the expense of the compatibility or useability of the code they're writing.

Microsoft's strategy is reminiscent, in some ways, of an ancient Incan technique for pacifying politically difficult villages and towns. By forcibly migrating the entire settlement to some distant part of the empire, the usefulness of the skill-sets of these hunter-gatherers was greatly reduced, making them dependent on the (massively centralized) government for handouts, and therefore suddenly rather polite in their relations with the regime.

In the same way that a hunter-gatherer depends on his knowledge of the land, a geek depends on knowledge of the problem and solution spaces. Furthermore, most OSS projects are extremely long-term endeavours; think GCC, think Emacs, think the Linux kernel(*). OSS developers work by building things slowly and correctly with a minimal expenditure of precious manpower; Microsoft works by using more coders, more money, insane work hours and a blase attitude toward standards (even difficult, complicated, important standards) so that they may get to market early , recoup such expenditures, and get to work on the next total (and totally incompatible) revision of their product, which people will use simply because of the upgrade path that MS will kludge together with exactly the same bloodyminded application of superior capital.

Simply put, we need stability more than they do, because they have more time and money. We write things right the first time, whereas they have the luxury of making as many mistakes as they need to in order to grab market share. But more importantly, we need the projects of the past to have been written right the first time; we need a working libc, kernel, and so forth, otherwise OSS simply doesn't happen. Microsoft has no such prerequisites to its growth, as, in a pinch, *it can simply replace its foundations by fiat*. Their hunter-gatherers can, metaphorically speaking, simply create (with a certain expenditure of time and effort) the landscape best suited to their requirements. Thus they can march along beside us, setting the pace, forcing a speedup, replacing good APIs with new because every step into new territory costs them less than it costs us, dissociates us from our well-known and powerful (if somewhat lacking) APIs and encourages our work to depend on their own work, which will then be changed, etc, rendering ours much less useful.

Ultimately, the strategy is designed to encourage hackers to go take up billiards or chess or something with a potential of being useful to remember or think about or use five minutes hence. The ultimate goal of cycling APIs is to induce *indifference*, as we face a choice between working harder on minutia or walking away, hands in the air.

(*)Note that, of these projects, two are sufficiently low-level to be immune to all but the most radical shifts in design; this is again indicative of what OSS excels at.

Replacing Exchange is not a trivial task

I've implemented several Exchange servers in a few large organizations in my day and to replicate what it does would be not be easy.

I think this is part of the problem with any existing attempts or lack thereof to replicate it...Exchange very elegantly handles messaging, calendaring and basic groupware with elegance.

For instance Exchange uses databases with transactional capability to provide extreme scaleability and reliability on the back-end. It has backup APIs that support amazing throughput for on-line hot backups. The database reclaims pages and defragments itself essentially in real time. Exchange supports every protocol in the book...but most customers implement it with their proprieatary MAPI protocol because it actually works a lot better than things like POP3, & IMAP.

Single instance storage allows Sally from marketing to send out her corporate spam to all internal unsuspecting users and the message will only be stored once in the database, there are semaphore links that track who has read the message or deleted it from their mailbox, disk consumption and server I/O load is dramatically reduced, especially when the message is 5 megabytes across 15,000 users!

I could easily come with a design document for a system that would essentially clone Exchange, the problem is around actually programming the system.

You would need a robust database back-end with excellent management support for things like hot backup and real-time database page reclamation, powerful & scaleable MTAs, an arm's length list of supported protocols and APIs, a user friendly cross platform client...

The ability to get all the developpers to agree on how to solve all of the above would be the biggest challenge.

integration

I run Exchange server. Hell, I run ALOT of Exchange servers!! To be safer, I shield them from the Internet by an SMTP gateway and filter for content (attachments). While I am not thrilled with using Exchange - it IS an administrative nightmare sometimes - at least it works.

If I thought there was a serious contender to market as a replacement of Exchange, Open Source or not, I would certainly look into it. But, I really don't see that happening anytime in the near future.

Enterprises who ALREADY use Exchange (and are upgrading to Windows2000) will continue to use Exchange. Exchange2000 integrates into the Active Directory and allows for one place to manage both your users AND their mailboxes. You don't have to jump through hoops to synchronize usersnames or passwords or servers. One place. That sounds like an administrative PLUS to me.

Any serious contender would have to have: tight integration into Windows2000 or *NIX, collaborative calendaring, task delegation/tracking, Enterprise-wide addressing, Public Folders, integrated management, and a client that ROCKS.

The typical end-user wants to click on their Outlook icon and everything work. As much as I hate to give Microsoft kudos for ANYthing, they've got the messaging/groupware thing locked DOWN. My end-users can send emails to one another just by finding their names in the GAL...even if they don't know that's what they are doing. Distribution Lists are (relatively) easy to maintain. Publishing content to other Exchange users is pretty brain-dead. I have no compelling reason to even LOOK for a change right now.

GroupWise? Hah, if I had a nickel everytime that friggin' GW client blew up on a workstation of mine, I'd've lost my ass with a majority share of Enron...

-PONA-

Just a few thoughts...

I've been trying to do this for a couple of years. I wrote the Exchange Server Replacement HOWTO [arrayservices.com] back in '99 when it looked like this might be possible very soon.

Essentially I talked about how to get IMAP/POP3/SMTP with a global Address Book and authentication and user accounts via LDAP. I've been watching this space with a lot of interest since then. The lack of updates to the HOWTO should give you some idea of what's changed, not much.

As far as calendaring goes, here's the skinny: CAP is the current IETF draft, and has been for some time, although when it will be finalized is anybody's guess. Why aren't there any shared calendaring servers? Cause there's no shared calendaring standard. You can get asynchronous calendaring in IMAP by having a decent IMAP client and using a Calendar folder, but that's hardly as feature rich as Outlook/Exchange. libical [softwarestudio.org] has kept up with the draft but has no server process. It's used in Evolution and the Mozilla Calendar client. So we have calendaring on the client side, but nothing on the server side. From what I've been able to discern, nobody wants to write a CAP based server till CAP is finalized, since it's gone through too many changes during the drafting process already.

The other problem is the outlook clients. The way Bynari and OpenMail (Contact) have gotten around the proprietary Exchange RPC call stuff, is to write a MAPI driver for Outlook that intercepts the client calls and sends them to the server in whatever proprietary method they might have. Integrating Outlook clients will either require a server side project on the level of Samba or a client side MAPI replacement that uses CAP, unless M$ has a change of heart and decides to support it.

In order to replace the functionality of Exchange you would need, a Calendar Server (none exists in the Open Source world), a searchable document share (WebDav on Apache can't index M$Office documents AFAIK), searchable email w/ public folders and mailing lists (Cyrus + majordomo or Sympa could feasibly work), a global address book (OpenLDAP).

Now,the real kicker, it has to all be integrated, single point of management and have a web interface for users to boot. There are a million and one PHP/Perl based web interfaces to one piece of this or another. However, trying to integrate all of this is impossible. Why?

For starters, everyone seems to want to do LAMP, as if these apps all live alone and users want to log into a seperate web interface for each function then cut and paste data between web pages and not be able to search everything as one data repository, if they can search at all.

LDAP has been available for years, and the guys at OpenLDAP have been there to solve a lot of these problems for years. Quit using an RDBMS for everything, for data that applications should share, use LDAP, stuff like authentication and application user information. LDAP has seemingly been ignored by a lot of open source programmers. Evolution's LDAP support has flat out been broken, everytime I've tried it. Mozilla's works but lacks some functionality. Granted LDAP takes about as much knowledge as learning an RDBMS to understand, but ther are currently about 3 decent LDAP management tools (lape, Directory Administrator and GQ). With LDAP you can essentially have a database schema that all apps can program to, cause it's standardized (inetOrgPerson, etc.)

Other apps seem to be developed without a thought to integrating with other apps. I tried to integrate Sympa, OpenCA, cyrus, sendmail and OpenLDAP with a custom web front end about a year ago. I paid the salaries of myself and 2 other developers for about 8 months, trying to do this. It was a failure, especially in the cases of the Perl pieces. The CPAN Perl libraries didn't do LDAPv3 extensions, isolating code in most of these projects to use a different front end was hopeless and providing an interface to manage the configuration files for the servers was a lot of work. We got about 80% done before I sold the company (and codebase). We had originally planned to GPL our work then sell support and customization, with a calendaring solution and MAPI driver for outlook in the 2.0 feature set.

Most of the frustration we had and was due to using other people's code that was not extensible or modularized. If I had to do it over again, I'd do it in Java on JBoss (esp considering the BEEP servlets JSR for CAP and the great LDAP support via JNDI).

I don't think that developer's of various open source projects need to have some overreaching design group (a la GNOME or KDE) to implement these projects with integration in mind. There are plenty of standards already out there. It just takes some good design and up front research (something I've done a lot of) and thinking about how other developers and users might want to use this stuff for their projects.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm whining about my own failures, I should have made sure we had enough capital to do it all from scratch. I'm more concerned about our ability to compete with the Exchange servers and Lotus Notes of the world and have a stable, customizable platform that we own. Quit rewriting the same stuff over and over and build new stuff... innovate, be creative, push the industry forward.

There is a glimmer of hope, the Open Source Java community is doing fantastic stuff. I've never seen more modularization, code reuse, integration and faster development in any environment or community. JBoss really takes the lead, the feature list is amazing and I've used it in several corporate environments where it beat out commercial J2EE app servers. JBoss pulls from Ant, XDoclet, Jetty, Tomcat, JacORB, Axis, HyperSonic SQL and a bunch of other projects. Struts and the Java commons and taglib projects at Jakarta are another example of really cool work.

The point is, it all works together. End users don't care if you wrote it in Perl, PHP, Python, C or Java... Just that it makes their lives easier, if we want Open Source to get more places we have to make sure we can deliver on this. Considering most of us make a living programming, supporting or administering networked systems, which would you rather have, propietary crap or really good open source stuff? So next time your designing that project, or writing some more code think about how you can make integration easier. Documentation helps too... we shouldn't have to know fifteen languages and countless codebases to get stuff working together. Most of us specialize in a couple of things.

Well, that's been my experience and is currently my struggle, so hope you get something out of this... BTW, I'd loved to be proved wrong on any pessimism I may currently have.

There's a thought for IBM

I see many people here aren't real fond of Lotus, but what would happen if IBM really decided to shoot the whole works on Linux and release Lotus as open source on Linux/Unix platforms? Here are some points for and against it - I suppose only IBM really knows how they would balance out.

For:

1) Would be a huge boost to their Linux effort, and might convince a lot of companies to get a Linux solution from IBM.

2) As open source, people could finally start to address all the things they don't care for in Lotus. Perhaps a license could be arrived at which retained for IBM exclusive rights to distribute binaries for non-open platforms, and include on those platforms innovations submitted by the open developers. For open platforms such as Linux and BSD, full availability.

3) As a free and open solution, Lotus might begin to do some serious damage to that end of Microsoft's business, and at the same time focus more IT departments interest on IBM.

4) Support contracts could still be offered, and in large scale operations would probably still be bought. Even with an open Lotus, IBM is still the logical supporter for the programs.

Against:

1) IBM wouldn't get any direct license fee income from Lotus on Linux.

2) Legal issues with releasing the code could be considerable.

Surprised noone feels insulted

This AskSlashdot is trying to demand code from the Open Source community. That is rude in my opinion. If he wants a copy of Exchange and Outlook, I expect him to put the effort into it. Learn to code and then start a project. Demanding that people who code on things for enjoyment start working on something else just because you need a free alternative to a costly product, that is arrogant as well as rude. From the sounds of it, he wouldn't even like to contribute to the project only use it.

We are working on an Exchange replacement!

Check out the Citadel [citadel.org] project. This started as a BBS server, but it's gradually being built up into a groupware system. We've spent the last couple of years building up a solid messaging architecture and a fast, efficient server architecture. Right now it does IMAP, POP3, and SMTP natively (no tedious mucking about with Sendmail or Cyrus), and it's got a web interface, too. It has a single-instance, transactional data store. It has a pluggable, extensible architecture. And one of our design tenets is that it must be easy to install.

No calendaring yet, I'm afraid. We're still finishing up the server foundation. As soon as there are some decent calendar clients out there to test CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) with, we'll start building the calendar server.

I am absolutely serious about this project. This is not vaporware.

BillGroupwork

Some time ago I came accros this link, I havn't read the details, but it seems to be a free exchange server implementation... Maybe there's a catch somewhere... ;) Have phun, Thomas.

The link:
http://www.billworkgroup.org/billworkgroup/ home

Its being done...

Well, take vpopmail/vmailmgr+phpgroupware+axisgroupware+mozil la+ldap+mailman, install it and you have an almost ready, PalmSync enabled, collaboration featured web groupware suite.

They are all projects in very active development, i know of medium to large enterprises installing this kind of setup and working very fine with it, thank you. I cannot disclose right now who those enterprises are, but they will come forth as soon as the deployments are stable.

The projects ive mentioned even have some methods/scripts and knowledge to migrate from Exchange to this setup.

Give it time, by the end of the year, this combined suite of Free Software projects will have a fully enabled intranet collaboration suite.

Is it as easy to install, configure and administrate as exchange?? NO, its not. But it saves a bundle of dough (pays well too).

So, sit tight, contribute to this projects, and you will see.

Now, on the other hand. If you dont need windows on the desktop, evolution is a GREAT groupware suite supporting icalendar and other open protocols which include the sending/receiving of calendar data, tasks and contacts from one evo to the other. Of course the damned thing is b0rken in debian for which some people should be shot or...err... helped or whatever....

Exchange Replacement == Teamware for Linux

There is actually a really, really nice Exchange replacement called Teamware.

It's made by Fujitsu, and runs on Linux, Solaris and NT. It has a really good web client, and fat (desktop resident) clients for WinX.

It does calendering, email, forums, file sharing and syncs across multiple sites. Directory services use X400/LDAP.

It's really cheap compared to Exchange and you can talk to it via IMAP, NNTP and, in version 6.0, webdav.

Check it out at www.teamware.com [teamware.com].

Chris.

Re:I'm working on one

Translation: "Me and a bunch of people got drunk, thought we could code, submitted the idea and produced a fancy web page. It's now two years later and the project has no files to download and is STILL on Stage 1, Planning."

Re:I'm working on one

Eww, sourceforge! Actually, there's not even a webpage- waste of time until there's something I'm willing to put up. ;)

But there are about seventy-five pages of analysis of Domino and Notes in real-world settings, some design documents and a few prototypes of critical components (probably about 200-300h of work so far). I like doing things the right way, which takes time.

Things like Domino and Exchange can be pretty effective if used well, but frankley they're not very smart. My personal research interest is managing the complexity of business and research processes, and I've found that Domino and Exchange don't really help the problems much: they don't help manage the complexities, they simply space-shift them. There's a lot of really interesting and hard problems when you start trying to solve the failings of these two systems. :)