Open-Xchange Unveils Community Project To Build Collaboration Suite

Open-Xchange Inc., the leading provider of open source collaboration software, today announced the opening of the Open-Xchange Community project and the availability of source code and development documentation for its latest AJAX-based email and groupware technology.

Open-Xchange and the world's leading web-hosting company, 1&1 Internet, recently announced the availability of MailXchange, 1&1's hosted email and collaboration solution based upon Open-Xchange Inc.’s award winning Smart Collaboration™ technology. Open-Xchange today is releasing the source code of 1&1 MailXchange server components under General Public License (GPL) and the AJAX-based user interface (UI) under Creative Commons License “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5”.

”We are thrilled to unveil our community project and to make available as open source our industry leading email and collaboration technologies,” said Frank Hoberg, CEO of Open-Xchange. “We developed our new AJAX-based products to support our recent customer win with 1&1 Internet, which delivered the largest open source software win in history. We are now making those industry tested AJAX solutions available to everyone through our community web site.”

Open-Xchange is releasing source code and documentation for developers of next generation Open-Xchange Server. The open source components include a new Open-Xchange servlet engine using Apache Jserv Protocol (AJP) to communicate with a webserver like Apache. Open-Xchange supports MySQL database and all mail servers using SMTP or IMAP protocol.

Additionally, based on work with 1&1 Internet, Open-Xchange includes a new easy-to-use web user interface that is built on AJAX technology. The new user interface enables tool tips, draggable items, and right-click menus in the user interface. The open and standard compliant software architecture enables partners and developers to integrate third party information systems and content of popular web applications from companies like Google, eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo into Open-Xchange.

Open-Xchange is also releasing an administration framework using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and a series of command line tools to help open source developers administer the Open-Xchange core modules. Customers will benefit from extensions for mobile communication, CRM, ERP and Content Management Solutions as well as for fax servers, backup and archiving.

Open-Xchange is publishing an installation tool that enables smooth installation of Open-Xchange Server on Debian-based Ubuntu Linux.

Today, Open-Xchange Server provides native language support for English, French, and German. The community is kindly invited to spread the adoption of Open-Xchange Server by providing additional language support and contributing support for other operating systems, e.g.: openSUSE, fedora, Gentoo, Mac OS X.

For further information and participation, please visit www.open-xchange.org