Luca Bortot wrote:
Charles N Wyble wrote:
Any idea how much time you will be spending on it? Do you have deliverables? Are you full time at this company or contract basis?
I am full time, and it looks like this project will be my #1 project... until it's reasonably working.
Of course, it is not my one and only occupation: I'm not far from truth if I say 4 hours/day.
Excellent. This is very cool. Some major time and money getting thrown at this project is vital to its success. I look forward to working with you.
Under what license if I may ask? Have you (or your company) considered a dual license scheme? This may help you recoup development costs.
our goal is to grab customers from Exchange world, not to sell the connector alone.
A worthwile goal. The more people we can get off Exchange and onto open standards/source solutions the better.
What are those needs exactly?
we are an italian ISP: besides raw connectivity, we sell some value added services.
Some of these are mail and calendaring for workgroup.
We already have our self-developed mail and calendaring servers. The mail system talks imap, pop3 and smtp
Is this new/custom software or postfix/exim/(insert your favorite mta here) and courier/cyrus/uw imap?
while the calendar system is brand new and right now it only has its own web client and palm support.
I see. Did you develop this from scratch or is it based on existing software? Have you looked at sync4j (www.sync4j.com)? It is an open source java server supporting syncML (www.syncml.org). It provides calendar/addressbook services. It also has an exchange connector (server based webdav exchange2k and later only).
There is no standard calendaring protocol yet: afaik webdav is the nearest-to-standard interface, and we have planned support for it.
I would look at caldav. It is the up and coming darling in calendaring. It is developed by Lisa Dusseault
(http://nih.blogspot.com/) and seems to be the missing link as far as webdav calendaring goes.
Our customers are mainly medium to large companies, which are used to have Outlook/Exchange or LotusNotes as workgroup tools: we would like to interface Outlook to our servers with 100% features support.
And here comes the need for a connector.
Indeed. I fully agree. I commend you for doing your homework and finding this project and not simply starting coding from scratch.
As you can see, we really have no interest in selling the connector alone.
Very true. I misunderstood your goals/intentions.
On the other side, an open source project can bring wide testing - which is kindly welcome.
I will be more then happy to test it. I am in the process of setting up a lab environment which will allow me to test all this. Sadly Outlook 2003 doesn't work under WINE. I have a copy of VmWare and will install Windows/Outlook if I have to but I would rather not. I will be working with the WINE team on getting Outlook/Office 2003 running under wine.
Our needs could be resumed as "an Outlook plugin that lets you exploit every feature of Outlook client with a server talking imap, smtp and webdav (or whatever calendaring protocol should arise)"
I like it. I love it!!
I am the lead developer of the oser project (http://www.oserproject.org) which is developing an open source exchange replacement. I am working with the openchange (http://www.openchange.org) project that is developing an exchange compatible layer that my project will use.
This was my first attempt: an "Exchange emulator" that lets our system appear just like an exchange server. No distributed software, single application environment... it would be the cleanest solution.
But I read that the reverse-engineering of the exchange rpcs is a tough problem and could take years.
Am I wrong?
Well. 6 months ago I would have concurred with you. However recent developments have greatly increased the pace and understanding of the magic black box that is Exchange. I will be doing quite a bit of work with Ethereal
and developing tools/code to find out what goes on under the hood. This link: http://www.richardsharpe.com/ethereal-stuff.html is an excellent resource if you want to have some fun with protocol hacking.
devel
--
Charles N Wyble
Homepage: http://www.thewybles.com/~charles
Blog: http://jackshck.livejournal.com
Developer/Consultant. 30.00 an hour is my fee.
begin:vcard fn:Charles Wyble n:Wyble;Charles org:OSER Consulting adr:;;10106 Kester Ave;Mission Hills;CA;91345;USA email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] title:Devloper x-mozilla-html:FALSE url:http://www.oserproject.org version:2.1 end:vcard
