OpenChange, KDE bring Exchange compatibility to Linux

The OpenChange vision of a Microsoft Exchange-compatible, open source messaging system for Linux clients and servers.

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Exchange client coming to KDE with Akonadi

The OpenChange client already has some tools, but, by Hards' own admission, are not very user-friendly and are being integrated into the GUI desktop applications of Evolution in GNOME and Akonadi which is a core part of KDE's PIM suite.

“Evolution does mail, address book, calendar, to-do lists, and memos from an Exchange 2007 server,” Hards said. “The KDE one is not that good yet and has a little way to go. My experience is with Exchange 2003. The Public folders work and one user reported 40,000 e-mails working.”

Akonadi is the framework, or “broker” for personal information management in KDE 4, but it is not KDE specific.

“A proposal to host Akonadi on FreeDesktop.org was refused [but] I would love to see GNOME API in Akonadi,” Hards said.

KDE 3.5 had a PIM framework but the components ran as separate processes looking like a single groupware program.

“KMail is a fairly big maintainability problem for KDE [and] the changes from KDE 3.x to KDE 4.x are huge,” Hards said. “In the KDE 4 series we want to separate the networking part from the UI and solve some technical problems like address book accessibility.”

The Akonadi “server” is a client-only application that acts as an information broker to the “client” applications like Kmail.

Akonadi uses MySQL as the database and not all KDE applications have been ported to it so Hards expects production-ready integration with an Exchange server with the KDE 4.3 release due in mid-2009.

“I would not recommend Akonadi in production use,” he said. “Akonadi can see the Exchange calendar and mail, and there is a hack to make Akonadi show data in the KOrganiser calendar.”

To progress the development of OpenChange on the desktop, Hards needs testing infrastructure as “the only test server I have is on my laptop”.

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