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Netline Introduces the First Fully Modular, Platform-Agnostic Commercial Open-Source Collaboration Server

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 April 2005, 09:00 CDT

OLPE, Germany, April 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Netline Internet Service announced today the release of Open-Xchange Server 5, the industry's first fully supported, modular, platform agnostic open-source collaboration platform.

Open-Xchange enables easy migration and integration to an open source environment -- allowing IT administrators to create and implement killer-apps without changing existing infrastructure components, i.e. databases, directory services, message transfer agents, e-mail servers or web-servers. End users can keep their favorite mail and groupware client -- most often Outlook, but also open source clients such as Kontact.

"Companies are looking for a better, more cost effective way to manage their information," said Frank Hoberg, chief executive officer, Netline Internet Service. "Open-Xchange 5 combines the advantages of commercial software - support, maintenance and predictability -- with the rapid innovation and cost savings found only in the open source world. And best of all, Open-Xchange allows business to take advantage of all these benefits without disrupting the end-user experience."

"IT departments are looking for ways to reduce both solution acquisition and management costs without forcing users to change the way they collaborate," said Mark Levitt, vice president for Collaborative Computing at IDC. "Open source products like Open-Xchange 5 expand the choices available to customers looking to replace or extend existing collaboration infrastructures."

The functionality offered by Open-Xchange Server 5 will include all that is available in the open-source Open-Xchange Server 0.8, with the addition of:

* Significantly enhanced Microsoft Outlook and Palm connectors (compared

to SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server predecessor connectors to SLOX):

-- Shared folders

-- Distribution lists

-- Documents attached to specific objects

-- Microsoft Outlook categories compatibility

-- Synchronization with .pst files

-- On-line and off-line functionality

* A web interface for administrators

* Enhanced web interfaces to set up user preferences

* Web-based contextual on-line help for users

* Administrator and user manuals

* Five years of guaranteed maintenance

* Maintenance with update and upgrade protection for server modules and

connectors

* Standard service and support offerings for installation on Novell's

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9

"The new Open-Xchange Server 5 is just what our customers have been waiting for -- a feature rich, affordable, mature collaboration product," said Gregg Rosenberg, chief technology officer, RICIS, Inc. "RICIS has installed more than 1,600 Openexchange servers and performed more than 460 Microsoft Exchange to SUSE LINUX Openexchange migrations. And now Open-Xchange is more flexible and easy to deploy than ever."

"Hospices - CHUV (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois) is a large teaching hospital and needs to provide a full, web-based collaboration solution for up to 8,000 users," said Rene Patthey, chief information officer, CHUV, a University Hospital Center in the Vaudois region of Switzerland. "We chose Open-Xchange from more than 24 products (8 commercial and 16 open source) because we believe that its performance, scalability and configurability are unmatched. Open-Xchange has the maturity, rich functionality and technical architecture unavailable anywhere at its price point."

Thriving Open Source Project

Within three months of first releasing Open-Xchange under the General Public License (GPL) in August, 2004, http://www.open-xchange.org/ received more than 300,000 unique visitors -- including 50,000 downloads of the code. Since launch in February of the first Open-Xchange Server 5 beta, traffic tripled to 4,000+ weekly downloads. From March 1 to March 16 more than 20,000 users visited the Open-Xchange on-line demo.

Of the thousands of contributions from the community, included are installation manuals for 14 different distributions (including Debian Sarge, Red Hat 9, Fedora Core, Novell's SUSE LINUX Professional 9.x, Slackware 10, FreeBSD, and Mandrake 9.2) and 12 new language packs (ex. Norwegian, Italian and Spanish).

A free copy of the open source version of Open-Xchange is available for download at (http://www.open-xchange.org/ and http://www.openexchange.com/) running on the major Linux operating systems (Novell's SUSE LINUX, Red Hat, Red Flag, Debian).

About Open-Xchange

Open-Xchange Server, the engine behind Novell's award-winning SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server, maintains the same architecture, but with added and enhanced features in a more flexibly designed, platform-agnostic package.

Open-Xchange enables users to store appointments, contacts, tasks, emails, bookmarks, documents -- and many more elements -- and share them with other users. This environment can be accessed via any web browser -- as well as multiple fat clients like Outlook, Palm, KDE Kontact, Apple's iCAL, Konqueror, Mozilla Calendar, and more.

Third party products -- open source or proprietary -- can access Open-Xchange through various interfaces such as WebDAV (XML), LDAP, iCal, and HTTP/S. Open-Xchange is based on open source daemons and services: a web (HTTP/S) server (like Apache), a servlet engine (like Tomcat), a database (like PostgreSQL), a directory server (like OpenLDAP), and a mail (both SMTP and IMAP) server (like Postfix using Cyrus); just to list a few.

The administration framework is implemented using XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Calls). Additional XML-based APIs, and support for common open standards such as ICAL, VCARD and VTODO will help developers access the core modules.

Pricing and Availability

Open-Xchange Server 5 for Novell's SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server is available immediately at http://www.openexchange.com/ and through a list of select partners. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Server 4 will be available at the end of May.

Open-Xchange Server 5 Small Business Server Edition (5-25 users) -- including one-year maintenance, administration interfaces, initial installation support, Outlook and Palm connectors and a five-year guarantee, is $295 for the first five users. An annual maintenance subscription fee for additional users is $25 per user.

Open-Xchange Server 5 Advanced Server Edition (25+ users) for both Red Hat and Novell's SUSE LINUX -- including one-year maintenance, administration interfaces, initial installation support, Outlook and Palm connectors and a five-year guarantee is $850. An annual maintenance subscription fee for additional users is $25 per user.

About the Open-Xchange Community Project

With years of Open-Xchange experience, Netline's core team members are responsible for one or more specific Open-Xchange modules and to integrate community developers outside of Netline in the development process. Enhanced and feature rich XML interfaces will enable developers to create new modules with new functionality -- OXtensions (TM) enabling them to access methods via simple XML. New 3rd party products from ISVs or open source projects can be plugged into Open-Xchange easily without touching the core groupware engine. The result: faster innovation and excellent quality of the source code, How To's, documentation and intense testing on several hardware and operating systems.

About Netline

Netline Internet Service GmbH is a market leader in Linux-based groupware, collaboration, and messaging in the SMB segment. Netline's Groupware, which is based on the Netline Java Application Server, is the core engine of Novell's award-winning SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server. Since 1996 Netline -- based in Olpe, Germany -- has been developing java- based, three-tier web applications for the small business market. Netline is a licensed reseller of Openexchange Inc.

Netline Internet Service

CONTACT: Bill Baker of Baker Communications, +1-860-350-9100,wbaker@bakercg.com, for Netline Internet Service

Web site: http://www.open-xchange.org/http://www.openexchange.com/

Source: PRNewswire

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