Aron Sogor, cofounder of BuniSoft, gave a talk at Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) tonite on the Meldware Linux Multi-Platform Groupware Package. He is the core developer of the Calendaring feature in Meldware.
This is a suite of servers written in Java that uses a database backend as a store. They use Hibernate for Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) and support Postgres, MySQL and most JDBC3-compliant databases.
The project provides a multi-platform set of servers for MTA, IMAP, webmail (with Adobe Flex) and calendaring. You can either continue to use your existing servers or move to theirs for the various components.
So far Aron has tackled iCal and wCal, but not yet the Exchange Calendaring protocol.
It was fun to hear about the intricacies of calendaring from an experienced calendaring server engineer. Apparently calendaring vendors work on the server, protocol and client at the same time, and when they converge just ship it, standard or not. Much like IMAP and its incompatibilities.
Overall quite an ambitious project.
Thanks to Symantec for hosting the meeting. SVLUG is looking for a new corporate sponsor for expenses like shows and pizza.
Note that while we haven’t nailed the exchange protocol yet (shhhh, we’re working on it).. There IS a plugin for outlook. Thus with our IMAP and the outlook plugin you can replace exchange, it just isn’t seamless yet. Ideally by 2.0 an admin comes in overnight and replaces exchange and the only reason the users notice is the server doesn’t crash or have to be taken down for maintenance.