[Evolution] Developers wanted : Evo + Open Xchange as a real alternative to Outlook + MS Exchange

[Walid Moghrabi <walid moghrabi lezard-visuel com>]

Hi,

My name is Walid Moghrabi and I'm the CEO of a young french IT service company called "Lezard Visuel".
I was a System Architect for several years before and the will of my new company is to provide Open Source solutions to my customers.
And especially regarding mail solutions, this is for years now that I'm trying to find a suitable MS Outlook + Exchange replacement and I must say that this is near to be a reality ... with some help.

I've tried dozens of combinations using different groupwares and mail client but nothing really efficient.

Finally, regarding groupwares, I think I found the "good one" to me and this is Open Xchange (http://www.open-xchange.org)
This is a very good solution, robust, complete and well supported.
There are plenty of other solutions like Zimbra, eGroupware, OpenGroupware, ... but Open Xchange seemed to me as one of the most complete and with the best support (anyway, Zimbra is also a very good competitor and what I'm proposing here is certainly interesting to develop for Zimbra too ...)

Evolution is a great product and I must say that I certainly prefers it compared to other products such as Thunderbird.
This is a "true" MS Outlook competitor and it has many great features, anyway, it is far from perfect and has some annoying bugs.

So, what is the point ?

Well, we'd like to lauch a new project in the Evolution tree : the Open Xchange Connector !

Here is the point :

• Evolution is great, full featured and could be a wonderfull native client for Open Xchange
• Open Xchange has many features that could help any mail client to become a groupware client
• For that, it needs some modifications and addons to Evolution and also some corrections.

To sum up what would need to be done, here are the major points :

• Better IMAP support : IMAP is the bad part of Evolution compared to Thunderbird for example which has a very good IMAP support.

>     This means mainly the ability to wrap EVERY special folders (such as Trash and Spams) to the server tree, correct some bugs with folders cleanup with some servers and speed mail listing since it is quite slow with Evo.

• Better Ical integration : OX uses webdav to serve calendars events and tasks through an ical interface.

>     This works not that bad with Evolution Ical plugin but read only, even with the ?enabledelete=true  parameter for OX, Evo persists in working read only so this is quite useless.

• Vcard connector : OX uses webdav to serve contacts through a vcard interface. This could be very usefull for native clients since it enables them to access contact elements without having to connect directly to the LDAP server which is nice when your server has only HTTP ports opened.

• Better HTML rendering : this has nothing to do with Open Xchange (well, not OX itself but nowadays, users definitely wants to have their HTML emails rendered correctly and this is barely the case with Evo) but I just wanted to say that HTML rendering in Evo is horrible ... please, use a better engine like gecko or webkit !

• Finally, an OX account setup tool so that users only have to setup his server hostname and user id to setup the whole thing instead of having to setup the imap account, then the ical connector, then the vcard connector, ...

To be honest, I really think that with something like that, Evo + OX could be a real competitor to Outlook + Exchange and this won't be a problem to propose this solution to my customers.

Which help can we offer ?

Well, first of all, we'd like to help any coder interrested in this project by modelling, testing and helping in the code as muich as we can.
We have one coder here, a very good one but we have quite few times currently but we can provide as much help as we can.
Getting this new features would really give Linux and Open source solutions a big strike in the groupware market... probably not enough to make Exchange fall down but anyway, this would definitely give users more choice.

I really hope this project will interrest some of you so, do not hesitate to reply or contact me !

Best regards,

--
LEZARD VISUEL

Walid Moghrabi - CEO and System Architect
e-mail : walid moghrabi lezard-visuel com