Million-seat open-source email rollout

by Stephen Withers

Tuesday, 27 February 2007

In what they claim is the largest-ever open source deal, collaboration developer Open-Xchange and web hosting company 1&1 Internet have announced a partnership to deliver over one million hosted business email and collaboration accounts using Open-Xchange's Smart Collaboration technology.

While 1&1 will eventually take the offering worldwide, it will initially be offered to customers in Germany, followed by the US, UK and France.

"Open source software has played an integral role in the rise of the Internet but to date most of that software has been hidden in the plumbing of the Web," said Sara Radicati, president and CEO of market research firm Radicati Group.

"The Open-Xchange partnership with 1&1 shows how open source can now also emerge as a mature application that can scale to meet the needs of consumers and businesses."

In addition to email, Open-Xchange provides personal information management, calendaring, contacts and task management, as well as groupware features such as document sharing.

While the Open-Xchange Community Edition is available under the GPL, the Advanced Server Edition costs $US1095, including maintenance. Advanced Server Edition is available on a 30-day trial basis, while the Community Edition can be downloaded ready-installed in a virtual machine file for use with VMware Player. The software runs on Linux.

Open-Xchange works with Microsoft Outlook (2000, XP or 2003), various IMAP/POP3 clients (including Outlook Express, Kmail, Pegasus and Eudora), and browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 5/6, Konqueror 3.x and Opera 6.x.

According to reports, 1&1 will charge $US5 per month for individual mailboxes, falling to $US2 per month when 100 or more mailboxes are on one contract. This compares very favourably with its rates for hosted Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, which start at $US15 per month.

Open-Xchange officials said the deal was part of the company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy to provide ISPs and web-hosting companies with email and collaboration for the SME market.{moscomment}

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