Wow. Novell have built Hula , a calendar and mail server. Web-front end (decent JS/DOM scripting GMail-style thing), plugins for Thunderbird, Sunbird, Evo, the works. Bloody good job Novell. This is a critical project for Linux corporate acceptance (and the discussion we had on LugRadio nearly a year ago underlines the point; we said then that there was nothing that could replace Exchange, except Chandler which didn’t work, and when we recently picked that discussion up again we said that there still was nothing). The Kolab people might say that they’ve been doing this for ages, but there doesn’t seem to be much Kolab acceptance. Hula looks fantastic. I’ll be looking at this in more detail.
A little misleading, Stuart… Hula looks fantastic until you discover that very little of what you say they’ve “built” is actually implemented at all. The “Aurora” screenshots look nice though.
Posted by Pete on February 15th, 2005.
Pete: hm. I’m just about to download it, so I haven’t got that far yet…
Posted by sil on February 15th, 2005.
My comment isn’t to say Novell’s gesture isn’t appreciated, by the way: I agree it’s something that’s needed and am glad to see that they’ve got such big plans. I’m not sure why they’re building a total Exchange replacement instead of focusing on the piece that’s really missing—the calendar server—but I hope it’s a start on what could be a great complement to the excellent OSS client software that’s already out there.
Posted by Pete on February 16th, 2005.
Pete: I agree with you. I don’t think that they’re “building a total Exchange replacement” so much as they already had something approaching that and have made that code Free, ad the calendar server comes along with it. Building now…
Posted by sil on February 16th, 2005.
Kolab didn’t have much takeup because it was somewhat difficult to build and get working, and then they changed all their data formats between releases.
What you might want to check out instead is Citadel, which is actually a completed, working version of what the Hula people are talking about doing. Hula is a combination of abandonware and vaporware. Citadel exists today; you can use it today, instead of a year from now.
As for client access, the up and coming standard is GroupDAV, which allows calendars, address books, tasks, etc. to be done client/server in a standardized way. The next versions of Evolution and Kontact will support GroupDAV, as will current versions of Citadel and OpenGroupware. This is the path to follow.
Posted by Art Cancro on February 18th, 2005.
wow. I just searched for “hula calendar, and this blog entry was the second hit. way above the hula project site!
Posted by Tom on June 22nd, 2005.
We just posted some screenshots of our calendar, which may interest some of you.
http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2005/10/calendar_candy.html
Posted by Kevin on October 28th, 2005.
The problem with Zimbra is that it is not open source. Sure, they offer a crippleware version that just *barely* covers the licenses for the open source components they helped themselves to (Cyrus, MySQL, etc.) but if you want to do anything useful in Zimbra you have to buy the “enterprise” version at great expense.
Citadel, on the other hand, matches Zimbra in functionality and good looks, beats it in ease of installation, completely obliterates it in resource utilization, and is 100% GPL code — there is no “enterprise” version; the project’s very best work is made available to everyone on the same terms.
Posted by ig on December 3rd, 2007.
ig: ah, I didn’t realise that! Citadel does work, when I played with it, but it’s weird; its BBS heritage made it such that you had to think like a BBS person to understand how it worked (everything was a “room”, that sort of thing). Maybe it’s changed a lot since I looked at it last, a couple of years ago.
Posted by sil on December 3rd, 2007.