Showing posts with label exchange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exchange. Show all posts

21 November 2007

Interoperability: The New Battlefield

One word is starting to crop up again and again when it comes to Microsoft: interoperability - or rather the lack of it. It was all over the recent agreement with the EU, and it also lies at the heart of the OpenDocument Foundation's moves discussed below.

And now here we have some details of the next interoperability battles:

the EU Competition Commissioner’s office, with the first case decided by the EU Court of First Instance, now has started working intensively on the second case.

The new case involves three main aspects. First, Microsoft allegedly barred providers of other text document formats access to information that would them allow to make their products fully compatible with computers running on Microsoft’s operating systems. “You may have experienced that sometimes open office documents can be received by Microsoft users, sometimes not.”

Second, for email and collaboration software Microsoft also may have privileged their own products like Outlook with regard to interfacing with Microsoft’s Exchange servers. The third, and according to Vinje, most relevant to the Internet and work done at the IGF, was the problem of growing .NET-dependency for web applications. .NET is Microsoft’s platform for web applications software development. “It is a sort of an effort to ‘proprietise’ the Internet,” said Vinje.

That's a good summary of the problems, and suggests that the Commission is learning fast; let's hope that it doesn't get duped when it comes to remedies as it did the last time, apparently fooled by Microsoft's sleights of hand over patents and licences.

13 October 2007

Exchanging Exchange for OpenChange

Because of its hooks into the rest of the stack, Exchange is one of the key programs for turning companies into Microsoft shops, so this could be quite important if it comes to fruition:


OpenChange aims to provide a portable Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols. Exchange is a groupware server designed to work with Microsoft Outlook, and providing features such as a messaging server, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks.

We are working on two different aspects:

* Provide interoperability with Exchange protocols. This is the MAPI library development purpose (libmapi). MAPI stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface and is used within Microsoft Exchange. The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients and offer native compatibility first with Exchange server; and in a near future with OpenChange server. As a proof of concept and in order to keep the implementation close to what developers shall expect, we are developing a gnome-evolution plugin which relies on libmapi.

* Provide a transparent replacement to Microsoft Exchange Server with native Exchange protocols support and direct communication with Microsoft Outlook. This basically means that OpenChange server won't need any plugin installation in Outlook. The server is tighly linked to Samba4 since it is developed as an endpoint module for smbd (the samba server daemon). One of the main objective with the server development is the abstraction layer architecture we are working on; it would not be sane for long term development either to rewrite a messaging server or to work with a single existing product. As a matter of fact, openchange should be able to run with any messaging server. For the first technical preview, we will surely orient the development towards a sqlite backend for testing purposes and a postfix one for production one.

(Via tecosystems.)