Inverse president and CEO, Ludovic Marcotte
Use of open source e-mail groupware systems in the enterprise has been lacklustre with most organisations opting for products from Microsoft, IBM or cloud providers like Google. The market is ripe for competition and Canadian company Inverse is set to provide another option by integrating the OpenChange project’s Microsoft Outlook compatibility software into the SOGo open source groupware suite.
With a complete Exchange server replacement scheduled for release early next year, we spoke with Inverse president and CEO Ludovic Marcotte about open source groupware development, native Microsoft Exchange interoperability and data integration standards.
Tell us about SOGo’s history. How long has SOGo been in development, who started it and who are the main contributors?
The SOGo project was started in 2004 by Skyrix/Linagora as a fork of OpenGroupware.org (OGo). The initial goal of the project was to support more than 60,000 users so parts were changed and others dropped to handle such a large user base. At Inverse, we got interested in the project because of our numerous large-scale email deployments we started doing in 2003. Our clients were looking for more - calendars and address books sharing, and synchronization with mobile devices.
Back in 2005, we evaluated pretty much all free and open source groupware solutions only to conclude that no available solution was filling all our clients’ requirements. However, we identified SOGo as a very promising platform and decided to improve SOGo to provide the community with the best open source groupware server. In 2006, Inverse started contributing to the project, which at that time, was quite abandoned. Today, Inverse is the leader behind the solution and the main contributor with over 20 releases in less than four years.
How extensively is SOGo deployed in business? Who’s using it and how scalable is it?
Inverse has performed numerous deployments of the solution - ranging from 25 to 100,000 users. We are also aware of many engineering companies, educational institutions, government agencies, all around the world, that have deployed SOGo themselves. SOGo is packaged for Debian, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu Linux so deploying the solution can be done very quickly. There is also the Zero Effort Groupware (ZEG) offering. SOGo ZEG is intended to provide a complete out-of-the-box testing environment of SOGo. It includes pre-installed and pre-configured software on which SOGo relies (like an IMAP and SMTP server) so that people with little technical background can deploy it.
SOGo's architecture is very horizontal so if your user base increases, you can easily add another SOGo server in the pool. It's important to note that SOGo relies on sub-components such as the IMAP server, the SMTP server and SQL server. Those must be fast and reliable to get the best from SOGo.
There are quite a few open source groupware systems available, what sets SOGo apart from the others?
As SOGo makes use of sub-components, it can easily be dropped on top of an existing infrastructure. When not available, best breed ones can be used from the open source community. This a nice advantage of SOGo from other popular solutions like Zimbra or Zarafa. SOGo also shares it look and feel, functionality, but more importantly its data with the popular Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning applications. Combined together, those can be seen as the official desktop client for SOGo. Such combination of a web and native interface is quite rare among open source groupware solutions.
What sets SOGo apart from any other solution comes from its native Microsoft Outlook compatibility. Contrary to all solutions that provide Outlook compatibility, the SOGo project does not use or provide a MAPI connector for Outlook. Rather, we bring native compatibility by using the OpenChange server project – which provides an implementation of the Exchange protocol. This allows Outlook clients to talk with SOGo through OpenChange, just like if they were talking to an Exchange server – avoiding costly and hard to deploy and manage MAPI connectors. SOGo is the only “libre” solution to do this.
Does SOGo generally work with all types of clients (e.g. Kmail, Korganiser, Symbian, Android, etc)?
SOGo works perfectly with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning. Moreover, SOGo implements some Apple extensions which make it fully compatible with Apple iCal, Apple AddressBook or iPhone OS based devices. Through the Funambol SOGo Connector, virtually any SyncML devices out there can synchronize contacts, events and tasks with SOGo. Funambol clients are available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android devices. As for other clients such as KDE Kontact or Novell Evolution, they should work well through standard protocols like CalDAV and CardDAV.
SOGo is developed in an Objective-C framework. What are the pros and cons of this and how does it compare to PHP [many groupware systems are developed in PHP]?
SOGo is compiled software so the required hardware footprint is very low compared to PHP-based solutions. Objective-C is an object-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It's very easy to learn and very efficient. Furthermore, the Objective-C language is now very popular and the developer base is quite large as it is the preferred language for Apple to develop Mac OS X or iPhone OS based applications. Nevertheless, Objective-C is not a very popular language among GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows developers but hopefully, that will change!
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