Open Source or Microsoft?

The question is meanwhile complex and deciding is not easy, because there are many pros and contras involved. SYSLAB´s monthly article goes “behind the curtain” of the e-mail world examining the pros and contras of Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice.

Microsoft Outlook/Exchange

In 1992 Microsoft adopted the Common Messaging Calls (CMC) X.400 standard, better known as one of the competitors to the RFC 822 standard. Microsoft added the concepts of folders to it, and re-named the result Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI). And, ever since, the e-mail world can broadly be divided into two camps: the RFC 822 Internet compliant e-mail group and the MAPI-compliant Microsoft Outlook/Exchange pack.

MAPI takes a quite different approach to the otherwise common assumption that all e-mail works by using RFC-822isms as e-mail addresses that look like "name@SomePlaceOrTheOther.com.". In addition to simply handling e-mail, extended MAPI and Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), which became Microsoft's default protocol set in Exchange 2003, added the power to manage calendars and addresses. Besides the primary use for e-mail, Exchange and Outlook is thus also a groupware package.

A recent survey by Ferris Research revealed that Exchange has about 65% market share across all organizations in the USA, where as open-source groupware servers that try to directly compete with Exchange, such as Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, are being dismissed as mere 'noise' in the business e-mail market says Ferris Research analyst Richi Jennings.

If you look outside the U.S., it's a somewhat different story. Sarah Radicati, CEO of The Radicati Group, estimates that in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) open-source e-mail servers, lead by Germany-based Tobit and Axigen Bucharest, Romania have about 10% of the business e-mail market. Still, Radicati also estimates that Exchange is the dominant e-mail/groupware server with 37% of the world e-mail business market.

In other server areas, open source has made great gains against Microsoft's and the Unix vendors' proprietary programs. You only need mention Apache, Linux and MySQL to see this. While open-source e-mail servers are very popular with Internet service providers, they've been unable to make any substantial gains against Exchange in business e-mail. Why is it that?

One of the reasons is that Microsoft Outlook has been, continues to be, and looks to remain the e-mail client of choice for businesses. While open-source end-user applications in other categories, such as Firefox for the Web browser and OpenOffice for the office suite, have made impressive inroads on Windows desktops, open-source e-mail and groupware clients are still niche products.

Open Source Exchange

One reason for this is that none of the open-source programs are really ready to serve as drop-in Exchange replacements. There's also some additional work that needs to be done, and it's not work that Windows administrators are used to doing. Even a veteran Linux administrator, though, might find setting up a full-powered Exchange replacement for a good-sized company a challenge.

While many people are aware that the European Commission's decision opened up Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Active Directory protocols to Samba, few have picked up that MAPI was also opened up. There is an open-source project, OpenChange, working in conjunction with Samba to build open-source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols from this information. But, curiously, no commercial company is following up on this work, according to Radicati.

It can only be a matter of time, though, before an existing Exchange-replacement company, or perhaps a new one, starts working with OpenChange. As it is, several Linux distributions, including Fedora and Debian incorporate OpenChange in future editions. OpenChange, while already usable, won't be ready for prime-time though until Samba 4, which will include Active Directory and Heimdal Kerberos network user authentication is released. Unfortunately, Samba 4 is still in alpha. Even with the opening of Microsoft's protocols, Samba 4 isn't expected to see the light of day in 2008.

The big question is, if the open-source Exchange replacement programs are good enough to replace Microsoft Exchange? Yes, they are, but it's not just being good enough, or even cheap enough. It's about making it easy to give Outlook users a 99.9999% Exchange-like experience while making it easy for experienced Exchange administrators to deliver that experience to them. Only when these can be delivered will programs like Open-Xchange, Scalix, and Zimbra become important to business IT.

In the meantime, both Jennings and Radicati believe that Google's Gmail and the hosted Zimbra Collaboration Suite are more likely to replace Exchange. That's because they're not actually replacing Exchange, instead they're replacing Outlook with a Web-based e-mail interface. It may not be open-source, but software as a service (Saas) that actually ends up replacing Outlook/Exchange.

Of course, Microsoft is aware of this and they have their own SaaS Exchange plans. With that being the case, open-source groupware servers may yet have their chance to make the kind of impact in business e-mail that open-source programs already have in operating systems, Web servers and databases. Trite as it may be, this really is a case where only time will tell.

Cross platforms – sharing software

Meanwhile several recent developments have brought open-source software to the forefront and a shift toward software that works on cross-platform computers and provides a free or low-cost alternative to the long-standing monopoly held by Seattle-based Microsoft is taking place.

Microsoft has thereby just come out with its Office Open XML cross-platform format—a format that was supposed to open up Microsoft’s Office suite to accept outside document styles. While Olson indicated initial workability issues with Office Open XML, there's been recent progress, says Doug Mahugh, senior program manager on Microsoft's Office Interoperability team: "Hundreds of independent software vendors, such as Apple and Novell, are working across a variety of platforms including Linux, Windows, the Mac OS and the Palm OS, to offer solutions that support Open XML today."

Meanwhile, Google rolled out its own open-source Office-style suite, Google Docs, now in its beta phase. Sun Microsystems also is now bundling prompts to download OpenOffice, the most-popular open-source Office alternative, with its Java updates for Window-based PCs. This could be viewed as a blatant move to push Microsoft alternatives. Additionally, Sun Microsystems partnered with 520 other software providers and private/government agencies in what’s known as the Open-Document-Format Alliance to roll out the first cross-platform reader of open-source files. Called the ODF Plugin, it’s downloaded for free and enables any Microsoft Office user to open, edit and save any of the “off brand” files without having those programs downloaded to a given desktop.

“It provides an easy transition for small business owners,” says Marino Marcich, managing director of the international Washington, D.C.-based ODF Alliance. “This means that small business owners that continue to use Microsoft Office can enjoy compatibility with the rapidly growing community of Open Document Format users and applications. And Microsoft has promised to implement support for ODF in Office by the middle of 2009. With that, is there any reason for consumers and government offices not to switch to the open document format? Until now, people have been locked into a single Office suite. With this, it increases choice and cost savings—that’s the bottom line.”

Are shared cross platform the future answer for users choosing between Microsoft Office and other Open Source based product?

What do you think?

Read more on the subject here:

Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Office

Can Open Source replace Microsoft Exchange