Microsoft Exchange is a powerful mail and groupware solution, but for some users, finding an alternative may be necessary. Fortunately, there are several open source software offering reliable and feature-rich alternatives. These open source software can not only meet the mail and collaboration needs of organizations and individuals, but also have flexibility and scalability. In this article, we will share several noteworthy open source software that can serve as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and bring us new options and possibilities.
grommunio
grommunio (formerly grammm) is an open source software licensed under the AGPLv3, developed and supported by the Austrian company of the same name. Unlike Exchange, grommunio offers a standards-compliant mail server and a full-featured groupware solution including email, contacts, calendar, tasks, file sharing and more. It is suitable for various open source and proprietary mail clients, such as Windows Mail, Outlook, Android, Apple Mail/iOS, Thunderbird, etc., and supports the old RPC over HTTP protocol and Outlook standard protocol MAPI over HTTP. In addition, it supports Exchange ActiveSync and many standard protocols, such as CalDAV (calendar), CardDAV (address book), IMAP, POP3, SMTP and LDAP, as well as Active Directory (for synchronizing our accounts).
In addition to the above functions, grommunio also integrates some open source applications that are not supported by Microsoft APIs or protocols. For example, developers integrated Jitsi (video and audio telephony software), Mattermost (chat software), and file sharing and syncing (ownCloud) into grommunio. In addition, grommunio comes with basic mobile device management software (MDM).
Grommunio is designed for all types of us, and similar to Exchange, it supports database sharding, which means distributing the database horizontally across multiple hosts. A flexible storage backend allows administrators to expand their setup by adding additional servers or cloud accounts. grommunio only uses the MySQL database for metadata, while all "content" (such as mail and groupware objects) is stored in a per-consumer SQLite database.
Meeting
Kopano is an open source software developed by Kopano, a German and Dutch software manufacturer, also licensed under AGPLv3 and based on the Zarafa software stack. Unlike its predecessor, Kopano aims not just to be an Exchange replacement, but to provide a complete groupware solution. In addition to standard features like email, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, and document editing, Kopano includes real-time communication. Kopano can interact with many other platforms, applications and services, some of which can be easily achieved through plugins. For video conferencing, the Kopano team has developed its own open source solution based on WebRTC - Kopano Meet, which provides end-to-end encryption and is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS clients.
Kopano synchronizes mobile data with Outlook client through ActiveSync (Z-Push library) or Kopano OL Extension (KOE), where KOE is an enhanced version of ActiveSync. Kopano offers a native web client (WebApp), a mobile device client (Mobility), and a desktop version (DeskApp) that supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can connect with other clients via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV. All applications that connect directly to Kopano servers use MAPI in Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Kopano Groupware and Kopano ONE (a special edition of Kopano Groupware) both offer free community editions. In addition, Kopano Meet is also available as an application or container download. This allows us to choose the version that suits them according to their needs and take advantage of Kopano's powerful features.
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