Replacing Microsoft Exchange

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 10:40 -0500, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> >
> > I didn't see the entire post so my apologies if I'm off-track here. Have
> > you
> > looked at Kolab ?
> >
> > http://www.kolab.org/
> 
> I hadn't seen that, thanks.  It looks good but again you're required to
> use a pay plugin for Outlook.  :-(
> 
> I wonder how much work there would be in creating a client similar to
> Outlook which would use regular old IMAP and LDAP for the same features
> that Outlook + Exchange have?  Maybe porting Evolution to Win32?
----
perhaps you need to adjust the thought pattern a bit here.

Maybe it's justifiable to have to pay for the right to integrate a
proprietary product (Outlook) into an open system. After all, Outlook
really exists to sell their Exchange server and it is a really poorly
behaved beast on IMAP. The thing that seems to be the seducer is that it
integrates a PIM and exhanges with handhelds as opposed to separately
endowed applications which are often better and more flexible solutions.

The Toltec connector (as recommended by Kolab) is cheaper than the
OXLook connector on openXchange.

IMAP and LDAP aren't really the big issues - the issues seem to more
like the interconnects for various handheld devices and variety of
protocols for the various daemons such as WebDAV as you have not only
the IMAP & LDAP server but you have data storage for tasks/calendar/memo
objects.

One of the more interesting aspects of openXchange is that it supports
open standards and thus allows you to use various calendar programs,
etc.

Craig