Replace Outlook/Exchange with Open Source tools

Thunderbird is a powerful Open Source project that stemmed initially from the Mozilla Project. This email/news client also (with add-ons) supports powerful calendaring and task management.

Thunderbird is available cross platform and is easy to download for most platforms. If you’re using Linux its pretty much guaranteed you’ll find it in the package manager of your distribution.

Lets break the replacement of Outlook/Exchange into a few sections:

Email

In an Outlook/Exchange situation you’d need a Windows based server ($$) and the expensive Microsoft Office suite. So often we see offices with pirated copies of Office because they need the functionality of the program but cannot find it elsewhere. This is very bad news and totally illegal. We in NO WAY endorse software piracy or ignore it.

Thunderbird is a powerful email client. Supporting IMAP, POP, SMTP, mbox just to name a few protocols. Very friendly and familiar interface, easy access to folders, virtual folders, viewing methods. All functionality is able to be changed either by menu options or Thunderbird Extensions (simple files downloaded and installed using Thunderbird’s add-on manager).

But how do we recreate the useful instantaneous nature of Outlook connected to Exchange? IMAP! It’s been around since 1986 and is a well proven protocol. There are many servers that support it (with our favourite being Dovecot). This combined with a mail transport agent (MTA) like postfix and sendmail means that the moment email is received it shows up in the Inbox allowing workplaces to utilise it for interoffice instant communication. And the bonus is that since this is an industry standard protocol you can use whichever server OS you wish including Linux (especially Linux in this case).

Calendars

Outlook offers shared calendars when connected to an Exchange server. This has been quite a tough nut to crack as not many projects have provided a solid base for this functionality in the Open Source world.

The good news is that there is an open set of extensions to HTTP called WebDAV which allows something called CalDAV. This is what DAViCal (an open source project) is based on and works very well.

The confusing part is that Thunderbird at first doesn’t appear to have a Calendar function. For this you’ll have to install the Thunderbird extension called Lightning. Very stable and I don’t think I could live without it now. After installation you’ll have a button to see the calendar which will present you with a default “Home” calendar. By right-clicking in the side-pane you can add a network based calendar.

On the server side DAViCal requires PHP, Apache and Postgresql. Installation isn’t totally a snap but with careful reading of installation instructions you’ll have it installed on your Linux server in no time. Create users, and you’re done!

Contacts

Outlook provides functionality to connect to an Exchange server to share contacts and view company contact directories. This however is not so simple at this point in time.

Thunderbird has the capability to connect to an LDAP server to read contact lists and make them available to use, but does not currently have the ability to add to the LDAP server’s directory.

We hear on the grapevine that Thunderbird with provide this ability in the near future but right now we’re stuck. The closest we can get to this is connecting Thunderbird to an LDAP server with the correct schemas loaded and add the contact information via other means.

These other means are;
- Exporting current contacts from the Thunderbird address book in LDIF format (native export/import format for LDAP) and running a script to convert the files to a format compatible with the LDAP server’s Thunderbird schema
- Creating a web front-end to the LDAP Thunderbird contacts schema so that contacts can be added one by one as required to the directory which then in turn is made available to the Thunderbird clients.

This currently is the hardest section to replace as the mechanisms are there, but are not being utilised. We hope that in the next couple of months we’ll see a new version with this functionality onboard.

So there you have it - we’ve done this ourselves and for other people - its efficient, and causes the client machines to really fly without the weight of Outlook on their shoulders. It also means that it no longer matters which operating system each client uses as they all have a unified interface to their communication/organisation interface.

http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldav
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV
http://rscds.sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP
http://www.postfix.org/
http://www.dovecot.org/

Tags: Caldav, calendars, dovecot, IMAP, LDAP, mozilla, postfix, thunderbird, WebDAV